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The Great Raiderdamus
Now onto the main event. As I do each and every week for you fine people, I contacted the Great Beyond to ask him his thoughts about the Falcons @ Raiders on Sunday afternoon. Hearken your ears and your hearts to his words.
"You're back! I know you got nervous about that Saints game, didn't you? It looked a bit dicey there for a while, but after all this time you just gotta have faith. So who you got this week? The Falcons? Oh, sit down son.
Atlanta is of course named after the ancient and mythical land of Atlantis, and much like Atlantis, Atlanta was destroyed by a calamity. While Atlantis, if it ever existed, was likely sunk by a volcanic event and subsequent flooding, Atlanta's calamity was known as William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman has the look of a man for whom leveling Atlanta carried no more depth of emotion than taking his morning piss, and if he were alive today he would probably be a high school football coach running the single wing because the forward pass is for pussies.
Unfortunately, Atlanta was rebuilt after the Civil War, much like Carthage was rebuilt after the Second Punic War. Today one of these cities is a vibrant center of art and culture with a thriving and diverse population that has much to offer the world. The other city is Atlanta.
Today Atlanta has turned its overt racism into something far more sinister and systemic. It has dubbed itself "The City Too Busy to Hate", which is true unless you're gay or want to take public transportation, or a gay light rail enthusiast. Atlanta is aware of the existence of buses no more than it is aware of snowplows.
In the Falcons' defense, while the Braves and Hawks are doing everything in their power to make sure their fanbase is as white as possible, the Falcons are at the very least building their Robotic Butthole Stadium in Atlanta itself.
The new stadium design is certainly evocative, and brings to mind all the backfield penetration the Falcons have allowed over the years.
However, in classic Georgia fashion, for every step towards equality the Falcons take they also take two steps back. You see, in order to build the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, two historic churches will be bulldozed to the ground including the oldest black church in the entire country, Friendship Baptist. Grape job, Falcons. Of course, this will have no bearing on the spiritual state of the city because God abandoned Atlanta for good on December 21, 1864.
As far as the Falcons themselves, they are as nondescript and generic a team as you could possibly imagine, and have had exactly three great players in their history: Deion Sanders, who is the second greatest athlete to ever live; Julio Jones, who will give Sean Smith indigestion all week, and
IN THE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMS OF AN AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANGEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLL
Mr. Ron Mexico himself, who did for human-canine relations what the Rape of Nanking did for Sino-Japanese relations. One of the reasons Michael Vick was so exciting is that he had to be- the Falcons didn't have a defense before him, didn't have one with him, and still don't have one.
Luckily, the Great Beyond is able to reveal to you all today the very reason for the Falcons' defensive deficiencies: namely, that the defenders are unable to get good footing in the Georgia Dome turf. Why, you ask? Let us remember the words of noted poet, artist and Atlanta citizen Ludacris.
I wanna get you in the Georgia Dome on the fifty yard line
While the Dirty Birds kick for t'ree
And if you like in the club we can do it
In the DJ booth or in the back of the V.I.P.
It's very simple, folks. The reason the Falcons slip and slide on the Georgia Dome turf is that Ludacris has been there. I am led to understand he has hoes in numerous area codes.
Upon the incarceration of Michael Vick, the Falcons drafted a new quarterback, Matt Ryan from Boston College. Ryan used to be known as "Matty Ice", but that was when he was good. Now he's just known as "Natty Light". When I think of Matt Ryan, this is the image that comes to mind.
This guy is a lot like how I imagine Matt Ryan. He looks tough and imposing, but you know he's probably really ticklish and has some severe performance issues. I'm certain he owns a truck with exceptionally large tires.
That's all I can say about Matt Ryan, because I know nothing about him and I don't even think he has a personality. He's like Emmet from the Lego Movie prior to going on an adventure. He won't screw up, but he's just kinda... there.
Now let me turn my attention to Falcons owner Arthur Blank. He is the founder of The Home Depot and is heavily involved in philanthropy, and by all accounts is a good man. So let me put on my blue collar and just tell some jokes at his expense.
"If your team's owner looks like Rhett Butler on quaaludes, you might be a Falcons fan."
"If your team's owner looks like he would have owned all his own team's fans 200 years ago, you might be a Falcons fan."
"If your team's owner still hasn't fired Kyle Shanahan and Thomas Dimitroff because he can't find the aisle they work in, you might be a Falcons fan."
The Raiders will be playing the Falcons in beautiful Oakland, California. They will be able to look upon the sea, and with each drive they will march right to it and set the Falcons' defense ablaze.
I would much prefer the Raiders played the Falcons in a CAGE MATCH AT THE OMNI so we could put hard times on the Falcons and their fans, daddeh.
Lemme tellyoo somepin Enneffayull, you put hard times on da Raidahs and dat Raidah Nation daddeh. Whenna da Raidahs doan make da playoffs for foteen yeahs, dass hahd times! When Rich Gannon works fo a decaid to reach da pinnacal of his profeshun, and dennee giss squashed by a fat guy inna bird costume, dass hahd times! When the man himself mista Al Davis finally gives up the ghost God ressis so, they say Hue Jackson done took yo job. Dass hahd times! And so da Raidahs gone take der revenge, daddeh, anna it starss dis week witda Lanna Falkins. Anna in da enn, da Oakland Raidahs gon take dere playce at da top of da mountin, as da Soopah Bo Champyins daddeh. Ah love you all!
Raiders win, 30-23.The Planet Smashers (doing "Life of the Party” + Smash Hits) - (Set time: 11:30 PM)
If you've been wondering where exactly the Planet Smashers have been for the past six years since their last album "Unstoppable", there's a very simple explanation….A late-night audio experiment in the recording studio resulted in a randomly generated interdimensional time-space vortex that teleported the Smashers 65 million years into the past. Undaunted by this unexpected turn of events, The Planet Smashers began hunting, gathering and writing their finest album to date. Luckily the band was cryogenically frozen throughout the iceage and recently discovered trapped inside an iceberg floating down the Saint Lawrence river.
Inspired by volcanic eruptions and constant dinosaur attacks, "Descent Into The Valley Of…" is 15 tracks of pure unadulaturated party ska awesomeness served up hot with an extra large order of radical sauce on the side just for good measure. From the hilariously addictive tom-foolery of "The Hippopotamus" to the darkly brooding "Die Tomorrow" to the punkrock insanity of "Food Fight" to the touching love song "My Obsession", this album delivers something for everyone while maintaining the Smashers' signature badassitude that has made them an international sensation for over 17 years…Grab your club and put on your best wooly mammoth pelt, cuz this time they're making pre-history.
Formed in 1994 in Montreal, Quebec, the Smashers's infectious pop infused melodies, rippin' horn licks and killer live shows, quickly established them as the city's "Kings of Ska". They released their first album ("Self-Titled") on Planet Smasher's founder Matt Collyer's own label STOMP Records and hit the road. By 1997 they were no longer a local band, but a national phenomenon, headlining shows across Canada and pushing their second record, "Atttack of The Planet Smashers" which reached #2 on the national college radio charts for 2 months straight. Their third album "Life of The Party" took the continent by storm, aided no doubt by the commercialization of ska by such bands as Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt. "Life of the Party", The Planet Smashers won the Montreal Independent Music Award for best ska band and drew attention from labels, bands, publishers and booking agents all over the world.
Although the band received much commercial attention during the ska wave, they decided to continue down the independent road with STOMP Records. Their fourth release, "No Self Control" was produced by Steven Drake (Tragically Hip, Barenaked Ladies, The Odds etc.) and was also well received by national college radio and spawned hit videos such as the animated "Blind" and the tongue in cheek "Wish I Were American". "No Self Control" was also the band's first internationally released record and reached #14 on the Tower retail sales charts in Japan!
"Mighty", the Planet Smashers' fifth full length for STOMP Records is chock full of summertime party songs that'll get your ass into party gear. "Mighty" was produced/engineered by Rod Shearer (Bran Van 3000, Bionic, Corey Hart) and co-produced by The Planet Smashers (not to mention mixed on the same board as Madonna's "Like a Virgin"!) Having moved past the dark and critical themes of "No Self Control", "Mighty" is a fun and positive record that provides the perfect soundtrack to any summer BBQ.
In 2004, STOMP Records produced a commemorative DVD entitled "Ten" featuring the last 10 years of the band. The DVD includes live footage from various shows from as early as 1994 and as recent as 2003 as well as 12 videos, 24 episodes of the Japanese animated series "Catman" (soundtrack by the Smashers), and a slew of stunts and shenanigans. Also in 2004, the Planet Smashers coincidentally did a month on the 10th year anniversary of the Vans Warped Tour.
The band returned to the studio in 2005 to record their 6th album "Unstoppable", and marked the return of long time producer-friend Chris Murray ("Attack of the..." and "Life of the Party"). "Unstoppable" features guest appearances from Jay Malinowski of Bedouin Soundclash and Liam O'Neil of the Stills. After the album's release in May 2005, the Smashers hit the road for over a year of non-stop touring throughout North America and Europe, including yet another appearance on the Vans Warped Tour, two runs on the Ska Is Dead Tour, and even an attempt to branch out opening up for Simple Plan's Canadian arena tour.
In terms of touring, not many indie Canadian bands come close. They have headlined countless tours in North America, 8 European tours, been included on 5 Vans Warped Tour as well as a Japanese tour in 2002. They have toured with such acts as AFI, GOB, Satanic Surfers, Sick of it All, Death By Stereo, Mustard Plug, Samiam, The Aquabats, Rancid, Guttermouth, Catch 22, and countless others. Now in their 16th year and having sold over 250,000 copies worldwide they plan to records a new album for spring release in 2011!When Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and a group of colleagues called for a probe into “security concerns” over the employment of several Muslims in top government positions, Democrats and Republicans joined in condemning the call and in accusing those behind it of Islamophobia.
Yet, shining the spotlight on the issue of Muslim Americans in senior federal government positions also revealed a little-noticed truth: There aren’t many of them. In fact, less than a handful of Muslims hold top posts, and in general, activists believe, Muslim Americans are underrepresented in the civil service.
“Most Muslims in government are at the more junior levels,” said Haris Tarin, Washington office director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “There is no one in Cabinet level, no one at the deputy secretary level.”’
Muslims in America have been growing in numbers over the past decade. According to a recent study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, 2.6 million Muslims were living in America in 2010. This is roughly in line with a study produced by the Pew Research Center last year that also found that 63% of American Muslims were first-generation immigrants.
Yet, Muslims in senior federal positions are still a rarity. Currently, the most noted ones in the Obama administration include Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (and wife of former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner); Rashad Hussain, who is America’s special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and Farah Pandith, the State Department’s special representative to Muslim communities. Two out of 535 members of Congress are also Muslim, both Democrats: Keith Ellison of Minnesota, and Indiana’s André Carson. Several other Muslims serve on federal advisory boards, including Dalia Mogahed, who advised the White House office of faith-based and neighborhood initiatives, and Mohamed Elibiary, who has consulted for the Department of Homeland Security.
On the state level, high-level Muslim appointments can also be a controversial issue. Last year, New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, appointed Sohail Mohammed to be the state’s first Muslim Superior Court judge, but only after facing down a hail of charges from conservatives in his own base that Mohammed would bring Sharia, or Islamic religious law, into American courts.
“Sharia law has nothing to do with this at all. It’s crazy!” Christie declared at an August 2011 press conference.
Bachmann’s call for a probe of several federal officials of Muslim faith was delivered via a series of letters she and fellow Republicans Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney and Lynn Westmoreland sent on June 13 to the inspectors general of the departments of State, Homeland Security, Defense and Justice, and to the director of National Intelligence. The letters asked the inspectors to investigate the appointees’ alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. These accusations were based on a report compiled by Frank Gaffney, who was a top Pentagon official during the Reagan administration. Bachmann and her colleagues focused especially on Abedin, who, according to the letter sent to State Department’s inspector general, has three family members “connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives.” The letter also claimed that the State Department has adopted a policy favorable toward the Muslim Brotherhood, indirectly suggesting that this policy could be a result of Abedin’s alleged family ties to the organization.
No official response from the inspectors general has been made public. But CNN reported that IG’s at the Departments of State and of Homeland Security had rejected Bachmann’s request as being outside their mandate, which is to examine the effectiveness of government programs and to prevent fraud and waste.
Shail Khan, a former political appointee in the George W. Bush White House, had a similar experience while working in government. Khan served in the Office of Public Liaison from Bush’s first day in office and until the end of his term. During this time, he was attacked by Frank J. Gaffney, who heads the conservative Center for Security Policy, for his “family’s Islamist connections.”
“They tried to question my loyalty,” Khan said in an interview, “but people like Huma Abedin and like me, who passed serious security clearance, are not a threat.”
Khan now tries to encourage young Muslim Americans, in the administration and on Capitol Hill, not to give up on public service. “These things discourage patriotic Americans from serving in government,” Khan said, adding that in recent years he succeeded in convincing several Muslim staffers to remain in government.
After the most recent episode, the Congress members who signed the letters to the inspectors general — particularly Bachmann, a former presidential candidate — were widely condemned by faith groups and politicians, including some leading Republicans. Arizona Senator John McCain called the accusations directed at Muslim American administration officials “sinister” and said they “need to stop now.” But other Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, refused to criticize Bachmann and her colleagues.
Activists in the Muslim-American community said that the letters and the public questioning of Muslim federal employees’ loyalty could further discourage young members of the community who are considering a government career. “If this kind of McCarthyism continues, there is a real fear that people who are very smart and can make a lot of money elsewhere will stay outside of public service,” Tarin said.
Still, Muslim community leaders broadly agreed that anti-Muslim sentiments are not the sole factor driving Muslims away from senior government positions. Another obstacle facing Muslim Americans, as well as Arab Americans who are Christians, is climbing the ranks in government offices dealing with Middle East policy.
“The one area that remains problematic for Arab Americans is anything that has to do with Middle East policy,” said James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute. “It is easier for a Dennis Ross to get a job than it is for an Arab American,” he added, referring to President Obama’s former top aide on Middle East issues, who is Jewish and has served as chairman of a Jerusalem-based think tank sponsored by the Jewish Agency. Zogby’s son, Joseph Zogby, was among the few Arab Americans who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. During his time there, the young Zogby constantly came under attack from some pro-Israel activists.
But the main reason so few Muslims are represented in top government positions stems from internal forces. Muslim Americans are mostly newcomers to America. Up until the 1970s, most Muslims leaving their countries went to the Persian Gulf states, which were rich in employment opportunities. Immigration to America picked up only later on, and has increased significantly in the past decade.
“Muslim Americans are still in the infancy stages when it comes to civic and political engagement,” Tarin said. First-generation Muslim immigrants, Arabs and non-Arabs, encouraged their children to study medicine, law and engineering, he explained. Public service is only now beginning to be considered as a suitable option for young Muslims.
The most visible sign of this shift can be seen in recent years on Capitol Hill, which is emerging as a valuable first stop for young Muslim Americans wishing to enter public service. In the mid 1990s, Muslim congressional staffers were hardly heard of and a weekly Friday prayer service, organized in a Capitol Hill meeting room, drew only a few Muslims from the Hill and from adjacent government offices. Now, participants say, some 150 Muslim staff members and other government employees show up each Friday, proving that change may well be on its way.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
This story "The Truth? Few Muslims in Government" was written by Nathan Guttman.Most surgeons-in-training dislike new rules that limit how many hours they can work, according to a new study that also found the majority said they skirt the restrictions.
Researchers surveyed 1,013 surgical residents—who train for years alongside more senior surgeons—and found that about two of every three said they disapproved of the 2011 regulations, which aimed to improve patient care as well as the residents' education and quality of life.
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"I don't think anybody wants to work 120 hours a week, but I don't think we really want medicine to necessarily have bankers' hours," said Dr. Brian Drolet, the study's lead author and a fourth-year surgical resident at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.
Under pressure from the public and government officials, in July 2011 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) restricted the shifts of the most junior trainee surgeons, first-year surgical interns, to 16 hours and capped the shifts of the remaining residents at 28 hours. The regulations built on similar restrictions the organization put in place in 2003, but the policy has raised questions about whether simply restricting the hours doctors-in-training are permitted to work improves their lives or the health of their patients.
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About half of the residents said their work schedules were worse after the change and about 22 percent said they were getting less rest despite the limits on work hours.
Some recent studies have suggested, for example, that the new rules create more hand-offs of patient care, and possibly more errors, while shortchanging the doctors' education.
For the new study, Drolet and his colleagues surveyed residents from graduate programs across the U.S. at the end of 2011, six months after the regulations went into effect. Of the 4,140 residents sent the survey, about a quarter answered the 20 questions about patient care and residents' education and quality of life. More than half said that patient safety was unchanged six months after the regulations were put in place. About 40 percent said patient care got worse, however, and about 10 percent said it improved.
As for their own education, about 40 percent of residents said there was no decrease in quality, but another 55 percent said it had gotten worse. About 70 percent also said there was less focus on preparing them to take on a more senior role. The same proportion also felt senior residents had to take on tasks more suited for a less-experienced resident.
About half of the residents said their work schedules were worse after the change and about 22 percent said they were getting less rest despite the limits on work hours.
Overall, there was some improvement in the quality of life of first-year interns, but a much smaller improvement among more senior residents, according to the researchers who published their findings in JAMA Surgery.
The most striking of the results, according to Drolet, is that almost 70 percent of the residents said they were not following the new requirement in some way. About half of the residents said they were underreporting or working between one and five hours more than they should each week, and more than 60 percent said they were falsifying their duty hours "to appear in compliance with regulations."
In a critique accompanying the new study, Dr. Orlando Kirton said the findings on underreporting and falsifying duty hours represent "extremely troubling behavior." "The ACGME rules are the law of the land. It is no longer about adoption but about adaptation and demonstrating resolve. Non-compliance is not an option and must not be encouraged," Kirton writes.
He points out, however, that the study had some limitations, including that only a fraction of the hospitals asked to participate in the survey did so.
But Dr. Sanjay Desai, director of the residency program at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, told Reuters Health he believes the researchers would find similar results if they did the study today. "It takes time for programs to adapt to the new rules," said Desai, who was not involved in the new study. "This just adds to the body of data that I think creates this need to look at this very carefully, partner with everybody concerned to get to the table and look at this more rigorously," he added.Dictators Everywhere Are Stumping for Trump
With endorsements like these, one might ask, who needs enemies? Last week, as an enervating U.S. election race reached its final stretch, Republican nominee Donald Trump secured the support of another of the world’s leading authoritarians. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a pugnacious former soldier who has dominated his country’s politics for over three decades, threw his support behind the real estate mogul and former reality TV host. He did it, he said, for the sake of world peace. “To be frank, I do want to see Trump win,” Hun Sen told an audience of police cadets on Nov. 3. “If Trump wins, the world can change.… Trump does business, so Trump would not want to have war.”
It’s tempting to put Hun Sen’s endorsement down to shared authoritarian traits — an expression of strongman respect. For more than half his life, the 64-year-old Hun Sen has ruled his country through a blend of force, guile, and The Apprentice-style theatrics. Like Trump, he is thin-skinned; he is also partial to rambling speeches. Neither figure has any tolerance for opposition, which both see as a sign of treason or shadowy conspiracies (“the whole system is rigged”). While Trump has threatened to arrest his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he wins on Nov. 8, Hun Sen has effectively done it in advance. Since mid-2015, he has jailed more than 25 government critics, including two opposition lawmakers, while the main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, has been forced into exile in France. To top it off, Hun Sen has repeatedly warned that the country will descend into civil war if his Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, is not re-elected at the next national poll in 2018.
There’s also the magnetic attraction of Trump’s wealth. The Donald’s vulgar flaunting of the gilded and the marble not only reflects the rococo tastes of Cambodia’s own ruling elite. It also appeals to an aspect of Cambodia’s Buddhist-inflected political culture in which those with money are seen as persons of merit: rich because virtuous, virtuous because rich. Hun Sen might expect that an able and meritorious businessman like Trump would be liable to treat a wealthy counterpart with respect and “do deals” with Cambodia of the sort Washington now does with allies like Saudi Arabia or Vietnam — deals that would spare him lectures on civil rights or the treatment of workers.
Hun Sen’s endorsement of Trump, however, goes beyond superficial affinities of character or style. Indeed, an administration headed by Trump stands to produce something concrete for Hun Sen: a slackening of Washington’s position on the state of human rights and democracy in Cambodia. The Cambodian leader isn’t the only autocrat to see the upsides of a Trump presidency. In recent months, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe have all expressed support for the Republican nominee. (So has Ashin Wirathu, a rabidly nationalist monk in Myanmar who has fanned the flames of hate against his country’s Muslim minority.) For these leaders, Trump’s appeal goes beyond issues of style to touch on something more troubling: the possibility of a sudden and dramatic reshaping of U.S. power.
One of the few consistent themes to emerge from the bag of tricks of emotional appeals and knee-jerk nativism that comprises the Trump foreign-policy platform is the prospect of a broad American retreat from the world. Throughout the campaign, Trump has railed against free trade and slammed U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. Trump has made virtually no reference to democracy promotion, another sacred cow of U.S. foreign policy. His campaign has even adopted the slogan “America First,” annexed from the isolationist movement of the early 1940s whose spokesman, the noted aviator and racist Charles Lindbergh, praised the “organized vitality” of Nazi Germany and argued against U.S. involvement in World War II. “America first,” Trump said during his first major foreign-policy address in April, “will be the overriding theme of my administration.”
For a dictator like Hun Sen, this approach to foreign policy has obvious appeal. Since the early 1990s, as he has slowly bent Cambodia’s threadbare democratic system to his will, U.S. criticism has been a constant thorn in his side. When the Cambodian leader ousted his coalition partner Prince Norodom Ranariddh in an armed coup in July 1997, the United States immediately cut off aid, restoring it only after fresh elections the following year. (Hun Sen’s CCP won.) Even then, a vocal bipartisan congressional lobby, representing the large Cambodian diaspora in the United States, has kept up a steady drumbeat against a leader who some have referred to as “Saddam Hun Sen.” In 2013, facing another call from the U.S. Congress to cut off aid, Hun Sen said, “People can say what they want, but the right to decide the country’s destiny is in the hands of the people of Cambodia.”
International pressure has grown especially strong over the past year as the CPP, reacting to an unexpected loss of support at the last election in 2013, has tightened the vise on its opponents. In July, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution condemning this latest crackdown, which Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said laid bare the “thuggish nature of the Hun Sen regime.” Similar condemnations have been issued by the European Parliament and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Although the U.S. Congress would operate independently of a possible Trump White House, an executive who stays out of Cambodia’s domestic affairs, and maybe even offers a measure of legitimacy, would be something of a dream come true for Hun Sen.
In line with Trump’s “America First” philosophy, the former Apprentice host has also made repeated threats to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe and East Asia, depicting the United States as a colossus that is being leeched by a host of ungrateful allies and suggesting he would abandon long-standing obligations to protect NATO members and other allies. Threats to reconsider U.S. military deployments in South Korea until Seoul “pays its way” have led North Korean state media to offer their own endorsement of Trump, writing that he is “not the rough-talking, screwy, ignorant candidate they say he is, but is actually a wise politician and a prescient presidential candidate.”
For similar reasons, Trump also appears to have won some limited support within the political establishment in China. Although Trump’s very pronunciation of the country’s name drips with insinuation and disdain, and much of the country’s ruling elite appears to support Hillary, a weakened U.S. presence in East Asia would be a clear strategic win for Beijing. Trump “could in fact be the best president for China,” a commentator on Phoenix Television, a private station in Hong Kong that skews nationalist and pro-Beijing, said in April. Another commentator on Phoenix Television, recently declared, “It looks like Trump is God’s tool to end American imperialism.”
For the first time in living memory, a presidential candidate is offering a break from what has long been a firm bipartisan foreign-policy consensus: that the United States can, and should, do what it can to make the world safe for democracy. And although solid arguments can, and should, be made for the scaling back of American adventures abroad, Trump’s apparent willingness to toss out long-standing alliances in a vague bid to “start winning again” threatens a sudden realignment of the global security environment that carries serious and unpredictable risks. Hun Sen might be right: A President Trump is unlikely to go abroad in search of monsters to slay. But the Donald’s policies, such as they are, herald a world of dangerous uncertainty. Dictators of the world, rejoice.
Photo credit: The Asahi Shimbun / Getty ImagesSen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulThe Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times The 10 GOP senators who may break with Trump on emergency MORE (R-Ky.) has filed a bill seeking to repeal President Obama's executive order that delays deportation of five million immigrants, the Courier Journal reported Saturday.
Paul's bill, “Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act,” is companion legislation to a House bill passed last week from Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.)
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The Kentucky Republican's proposal, posted on his website Friday, prohibits the president from using discretion when determining who to deport.
"I believe that the Constitution is clear that the legislative power resides in Congress," Paul said in a statement. "The President is not a king and he does not have the power to enact laws then execute his own laws. Our Constitution is being violated by this executive order and other actions by the Obama Administration to govern by executive fiat.”
Yoho's bill passed last week in a 219-197 vote, the House's first direct action against Obama’s executive actions on immigration.Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) team Ruby Trichy Warriors have appointed legendary South African Jonty Rhodes as their team mentor. The franchise tweeted from their official account, making the appointment public. Trichy Warriors tweeted,”It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s @JontyRhodes8!???? Welcoming our mentor & brand ambassador for @TNPremierLeague 2.0! #DoubleTheGethu.”
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On Rhodes’ appointment, the head coach of Trichy Warriors, Tinu Yohannan said, “the mere presence of a legendary player like Rhodes can motivate the players. I am excited to welcome him to the team. It will be a privilege to have him in our midst. His presence in the dressing room and during the practice sessions can be invaluable. He can pass on a lot of knowledge to the young players.”
Yohannan also said that Rhodes will be linking up with the squad on August 7. “He (Rhodes) will be with the team for two days. Though he will be with the team only for one match, it will be good to have him with us. With his experience, he can pass on valuable tips to the Warriors players,” Trichy Warriors coach concluded.
Meanwhile, another former South African cricketer, Lance Klusener, will join Lyca Kovai Kings for training in Dindigul on Monday. Klusener has also coached Kings in the first edition of TNPL last year. Sri Lankan legend Muttiah Muralitharan is also playing his part in the TNPL as a mentor of VB Thiruvallur Veerans.California land officials dropped their longstanding environmental objections to the state's last nuclear power plant and signed off Tuesday on a deal to close the Central Coast facility nearly 20 years ahead of its previously planned termination.
The State Lands Commission approved a lease allowing Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to continue operating the Diablo Canyon twin-reactor plant through August 2025, a date the company and environmental groups agreed to last week. Members turned down a proposed environmental impact assessment, which can take years, in part to meet the earlier termination date.
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said keeping the plant open for nine years allows PG&E to avoid the mistakes of Edison International, which quickly terminated a nuclear generator and hundreds of workers in San Onofre in 2012 and 2013.
"Let's not fail the plant," Newsom said. "Let's have the conversation now about what that means to the workforce, what that means to the community, what that means to our efforts to provide alternative energy sources at a competitive price."
Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica, whose organization helped negotiate the termination date, said the agreement is fair to workers while eliminating two decades of seismic risks.
"This is the way you do it," Pica said. "You have time, you can bring on the right resources and you can treat people right."
Not all conservationists back the plan, though. Dozens of activists, including some who have been fighting nuclear energy for 40 years, argued Tuesday against the plant's continued operation near major earthquake-causing fault lines.
John Geesman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility said the state should have conducted one of its strict environmental reviews before approving the lease, however short.
The commission's vote is the first of multiple regulatory hurdles facing the agreement to shut down the 31-year-old plant.
Diablo Canyon's twin reactors hug a Pacific Ocean bluff midway on the coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in San Luis Obispo County.
Fears about the seismic faults running through the area have dogged the project since its conception in the 1960s, and fostered opposition nationally to nuclear power within the country's then-fledgling environmental movement.
PG&E maintains the plant could withstand the strongest likely earthquakes, but growing scientific knowledge about the seismology has heightened worries.
The state's largest utility and environmental groups agree that California no longer needs the electricity from Diablo Canyon, given increased energy efficiency in the state and the growing availability and affordability of solar and wind power and other renewable energy.
Nationally, the nuclear-power industry is caught in a debate between those who call nuclear power an essential alternative to climate changing fossil fuels, and those who question the growing costs of maintaining the country's decades-old nuclear plants.Off the top of my head, these small scale knife attacks have happened twice in Belgium, twice in Germany, once in the UK, twice in France, and once in Russia over the span of about a month. This is the third time police officers have been targeted in Europe this month by terrorists who have approached police stations:
“The woman, who has not been named, was attacked at lunchtime on Tuesday in the Rempart Saint-Etienne area of Toulouse.
A man, reported to be of Algerian origin, tried to grab the officer’s gun and it is understood that when he failed, he pulled out a knife, repeatedly stabbing her in the throat.
The woman is in a serious condition and the area around the polcie station is in lockdown.
French media are reporting that a 31-year-old man of Algerian origin has been arrested.
It is claimed the man entered the station under the pretence of making a complaint.
The motive behind the attack is unclear. …”CASA GRANDE, Ariz. – Real Salt Lake played to a draw in its first preseason game of 2014 on Wednesday, tying the Real Salt Lake-Arizona U-18’s 1-1 at Grande Sports World in Casa Grande, Ariz.
MF Javier Morales had the goal for the Claret-and-Cobalt, slotting home a penalty kick in the 52nd minute. RSL-AZ Academy MF Josh Doughty scored the equalizer in the 80th, pouncing on a loose ball in the box to knot the game at 1-1.
The RSL-AZ U-18’s started the match brightly, nearly going ahead in the second and seventh minutes. MF Jose Hernandez had the first look, hitting a wicked shot from distance on the right side that knuckled just wide of the far post. MF Jack Gayton came even closer in the seventh, collecting a ball at the top of the box and rifling a low shot off the |
Tongue in Cheek
[rabbit_ddmog vol=”7″ chap=”Chapter 27(c) from “beta” Volume VII”]
After we discussed some trivial and not-so-trivial aspects of DBMS execution plans in two previous posts (1,2) – we can summarize some of generic (and actually very basic) things to be kept in mind when optimizing your DB. NB: DON’T expect anything novel here, it is just a list of things which every DBA should know by heart; still – it is easy to forget about one of these things very easily. In addition, it is VERY desirable for database developers to remember at least about half of these things – but from what I’ve seen, even in 2017 such dbdevs-who-know-this-stuff, are extremely rare <very-sad-face />.
Another NB: we’re still speaking about OLTP; that is – a database with LOTS of updates (a typical OLTP DB can be anywhere between 20-80 and 80-20 split between reads and writes, while analytical ones can easily have 100x more reads than writes).
General DB Cheat Sheet for dbdevs and DBAs
Before even starting to discuss optimizations, we MUST ensure that a few very basic things are complied with:
1NF A relation is in first normal form if and only if the domain of each attribute contains only atomic (indivisible) values, and the value of each attribute contains only a single value from that domain. — Wikipedia —
You DO write your SQL by hand (not allowing a “magical” 3 rd -party tool such as ORM to generate it for you 1 ).
-party tool such as ORM to generate it for you ). You DO have your SQL transactions aligned with business transactions (and consistency requirements). For example – for a bank we MUST NOT have separate transactions “take money from user account” and “add money to user account”; instead – we should have transactions such as “transfer money from user A to user B” (or “transfer money from user A to our own account” <wink />).
You DO use prepared statements (it is necessary both to avoid injections, and to improve performance).
OLTP Optimization Cheat Sheet for dbdevs and DBAs
As it was already noted above – in spite of practice-which-is-common-for-certain-companies where database developers just write SQL, and then it comes to DBAs to make it work fast – I insist that
Database developers and DBAs have joint responsibility for the database performance.
Otherwise, it leads to developers-who-don’t-care-about-performance writing outright atrocious SQL statements – which cannot possibly be optimized. Or, looking at the same thing from a bit different angle – we can think about the “joint responsibility” statement above as of incarnation of DevOps (~=”collaboration between development and operations”).
With this in mind, here goes a short list of the points which IMNSHO both database developers and DBAs should keep in mind:
DO think in terms of execution plans DO make 100% sure that you DO understand execution plans “ Have I already mentioned that you DO need to understand execution plans? More seriously – for any query is executed frequently enough, we have to be sure that an “Ideal Execution Plan” for such a query doesn’t have any O(N) with N being in millions of rows; in fact, as a rule of thumb for OLTP database O(N) with N>=1000 spells as “trouble” (though if it happens rarely, it may fly), and O(N) for N>=100’000 qualifies as a “disaster”. For more discussion on “Ideal Execution Plans” and big-O asymptotic – see [[TODO]] section above.
If we can optimize big-O asymptotic – as a Very Big Fat Rule of Thumb™, such an optimization will trump any other optimization, so optimizing big-O behaviors is the very first thing we should try Indexes are the most important thing to enable “Ideal Execution Plans”. However: DO understand which indexes are necessary to execute your queries, yourself Sure, it is not possible to be right 100% of the time – but with practice, you can reach 80-90% accuracy, and it already tends to help a Damn Lot™ DO keep in mind that two indexes by (A) and by (B) are not the same as index by (A,B) (it might be crazy, but I’ve heard a claim that “we have (A) and (B) so we don’t need (A,B)” from a real-world dbdev). OTOH, see also below about b-tree index (A,B) acting as an index on (A)
DON’T rely on advice from magical “index advisors” (“wizards”, etc.). While they often list that-index-you-need among those recommended, I have yet to see a single “index wizard” which wouldn’t advise to create a dozen of indexes (most of them with non-key columns) where one will suffice. 2 With regards to “why one index is better” – see the next item.
With regards to “why one index is better” – see the next item. “ DO keep in mind that maintaining indexes has its own cost As a rule of thumb – that one additional index which you MAY really need to optimize big-O asymptotic of your query, is not too bad. There are dozens of not-exactly-necessary indexes – in particular, those one falling under “the law of diminishing returns” which needs to be avoided. DO keep in mind that in most cases, b-tree index by (A,B) can be used pretty much as the index by (A). As a result: If you have both index by (A) and another index by (A,B) – consider dropping the one by (A) if you already have an index by (A), converting it to another index by (A,B) 3 is often a very viable option. At this level (while we’re thinking in terms of big-O optimizations) – DON’T think about stuff such as clustered indexes or non-key columns in indexes (leave this stuff to later stages and to DBAs).
DO avoid functions-which-can-be-replaced-with-range-restrictions, in your queries. For example – DON’T use something like WHERE YEAR(some_field) == 2017 (unless SQL compiler is unusually smart, it is very likely to cause full index scan instead of range index scan – and the difference can be like 1000x easily); use something like WHERE some_field >= ‘2017-01-01 00:00:00’ AND some_field < ‘2018-01-01 00:00:00’4 If you still happen to need a function in your index (not in an example such as above, where it can be avoided) – DO consider index on function. Keep in mind though, that even if supported by your RDBMS, such indexes usually cannot be reused for other queries, so use them even more sparingly than usual ones. DO avoid indexes on columns which have different-selectivity-for-different-values-in-the-index. While quite a few modern RDBMS try to handle it (by using value-level stats for such columns) – it is cumbersome and tends to be rather fragile. Symptoms of such indexes are having some kind of ‘type’ column, with number of rows being vastly different for different ‘types’. Overall, very often such tables and indexes exhibit database design problems.5 DO avoid foreign keys. Yes, I know it is a kind of fallacy in theoretical world – but still all the seriously-loaded-DBs-I’ve-seen – avoided them for performance reasons. It means that enforcing constraints (these and many others) belong to app-level. TBH, I do NOT see it as a serious practical problem (in particular, because enforcing-FK-like-constraints tends to represent only a tiny portion of the consistency-rules-to-be-enforced-by-app-level-anyway).
OLTP Optimization Cheat Sheet (DBAs only)
“While I am arguing for dbdevs to avoid outright-inefficient SQL statements – I am sure that cluttering their mind with relatively-minor details would push it too farWhile I am arguing for dbdevs to avoid outright-inefficient SQL statements – I am sure that cluttering their mind with relatively-minor details would push it too far (in particular – beyong magic 7+-2 cognitive limit). As a result, I am all for further optimizations to be performed by DBAs; in other words – I see that dbdevs should enable optimizations (by providing reasonable statements to start with) and DBAs should perform those optimizations.
For DBAs, at least the following list should be kept in mind:
DO run RUNSTATS/ANALYZE/UPDATE STATISTICS on regular basis (normally – daily) If there is a situation when that “Ideal Execution Plan” discussed above is not picked up by your SQL compiler – DO use hints to force it (this also includes de-facto hints such as adding “OR 1=0” to WHERE clause). If nothing else helps – DO consider denormalization to improve performance. For a discussion of examples when denormalization can help – see, for example, [http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/technical-articles/denormalization-when-why-and-how] (unfortunately, denormalization examples are never simple, so discussing them won’t really fit into this book). Keep in mind that with each denormalization, app-level gets yet another responsibility for maintaining DB consistency.
In extreme cases, you may be tempted to manipulate stats to achieve desired result. I’ve seen it working, but it is sooooo fragile, that it should be used as a Really Last Resort™. DO consider “clustered” indexes Note that “clustered” indexes can also be considered under our “C++/Java/Knuth approximations” (in case of a clustered index, we can say that our table is no longer a list, but std::map<>/TreeMap/tree, with all the other indexes referring to the table by index, that’s it).
Beware: costs of updating a clustered index might be significantly higher than that of the non-clustered one
On a plus side – pretty often, clustered index is a Good Thing™ for those tables with PK being something like time, incremental ID, etc. (i.e. for a pretty much any historical table) – and having very few indexes (this may vary). In such cases, costs of updating a clustered index may be even lower than for the non-clustered index, plus locality during range index scans will be usually significantly better. DO consider non-key fields in indexes The idea here is to avoid the need for reading table pages while performing range index scans; the same thing can also be observed in our “C++/Java/Knuth approximations” (and while big-O asymptotic won’t change – we will be able to avoid referring from index to table data).
They can help quite a bit (though not as much as improving your big-O asymptotic) – but beware of including too-long non-key fields (especially VARCHARS); this may cause index becoming too large and using too much of valuable cache space. DO consider hash indexes. Keep in mind that hash indexes cannot be used for Range Index Scans.
NB: departure from our “approximations”. Note that while in theory, complexity difference between hash index and b-tree index is a difference between O(1) and O(log(N)) – in practice, b-tree index won’t really have more than 6 levels of pages even for a billion-row table. This, in turn, means that we can say that b-tree index is merely 6x slower than hash index – so it is actually also O(1). On the other hand: 6x is also considerable. for a completely cached DB role of hash indexes tends to increase further (as we’re no longer completely dominated by page read costs)
Overall – if you won’t need to range scan (never ever) – then hash indexes DO have an advantage. DO consider converting some of your statements into stored procedures Personally, I don’t really like storage procedures because of them causing very severe Vendor-Lock-In (and from my experience, careful use of prepared statements allows to achieve comparable performance while being MUCH more DB-independent). Still, I do recognize stored procedures as a legitimate optimization technique (especially when it can be demonstrated that they do help performance-wise); also – with heterogeneous app-level replication (as will be discussed in [[TODO]] section below), Vendor-Lock-In won’t prevent you from using a different DB for your reporting/analytical replicas, so it won’t be that
Keep in mind that even for stored procedures, we DO need to use prepared statements to call them. “ DO optimize your DB physical layout DO dedicate one completely-isolated RAID array (ideally – even the whole RAID card) to your DB logs
DO use BBWC RAID (or NVMe) at least for that-RAID-which-handles-DB-logs No, simple SSD-sitting-on-SATA won’t provide the-best-possible-performance (though BBWC RAID over such SSDs will).
DO keep an eye on your DB caches. DO ensure that you’re NOT double-caching (once at DB level and another time at OS level). In general – whenever possible, DO prefer DB-level caching. DO try to cache your whole OLTP DB (we’ll discuss how to limit its size in [[TODO]] section below) If caching your whole DB isn’t feasible – DO consider separating your caches for different tables (and then give more caching for tables such as USERS, and less caching for historical tables where it won’t do much good). In addition to improved overall caching of the all-important USERS table, this will also allow to prevent “cache poisoning” from scanning a historical table from affecting your USERS cache.
Wherever possible – DO use DB-level containers (even if they’re lying on top of OS files); this tends to reduce OS-level fragmentation greatly. If DB-level containers are not supported by your RDBMS – DO pay special attention to the underlying file system. DO use that-filesystem-which-is-recommended-by-your-RDBMS-vendor.
DO consider reorganizing your tables and/or indexes (unfortunately, they do degrade with time <sad-face />). Note that the need and frequency of required reorgs heavily depends on specifics of your RDBMS. While doing it – DO consider parameters such as PCTFREE or FILL FACTOR; while they’re unlikely the need to eliminate reorgs completely, they may help to make reorgs less frequent. Be ready to experiment (this is one thing which is very difficult to get right at the first attempt; on the other hand – penalties for doing it not-so-perfectly are rather mild too <phew />).
When populating data into a non-operational table6 – DO consider dropping index before populating, and creating it later (believe it or not, but it will be significantly faster7).
TL;DR for OLTP DB Optimization 101
This concludes our discussion on “OLTP DB Optimization 101”. In the next section, we’ll proceed to “OLTP DB Optimization 102” – including things such as app-level caches and app-level heterogeneous replication (which in turn allows to truncate our OLTP DB so it fits into 100G or so – and 100G can be fully-cached these days rather easily).
[[To Be Continued…
This concludes beta Chapter 27(c) from the upcoming book “Development and Deployment of Multiplayer Online Games (from social games to MMOFPS, with social games in between)”.
Stay tuned for beta Chapter 27(d), where we’ll continue our discussion into less-known ways for OLTP optimization, including app-level caches and heterogeneous asynchronous replicas]]
Acknowledgement
Cartoons by Sergey Gordeev from Gordeev Animation Graphics, Prague.The Indians have announced yet another extension, this one with righty Carlos Carrasco. The contract guarantees him $22MM over the next four years and includes two club options.
Carrasco will earn $4.5MM next year, $6.5MM in 2017, and $8MM in 2018. The option years are for $9MM and $9.5MM, respectively, and can each be escalated by $4MM based on top-ten Cy Young finishes, bringing the total max value of the contract to $48MM. Those options come with $662.5K in total buyouts. Carrasco was already set to earn $2.337MM in his first of three arbitration years, which the new deal leaves in place — meaning that Carrasco nets just under $20MM in new money.
Carrasco, who just recently celebrated his 28th birthday, posted a 5.29 ERA over his first four seasons (238 1/3 IP) with the Tribe and struggled last April, losing his starting job and even getting designated for assignment last summer. However, he started to turn things around after a stint in the bullpen. As a reliever, he posted a 2.30 ERA with 43 relief innings.
When Carrasco came back to the starting five, he closed out 2014 and in a small sample size of ten games he looked like an absolute superstar. During that span, the hurler posted a 1.30 ERA and 78 strikeouts (against just 11 walks) over 69 innings.
Carrasco, an ACES client, now has financial security going forward despite a rocky career which included a lost 2012 season thanks to Tommy John surgery. Now, with Carrasco and Corey Kluber both under contract, the Indians could have a potent No. 1 and No. 2 locked in for years to come. The Cy Young winner’s deal looks different however as he’ll earn a reported $38.5MM across his guaranteed five seasons while Carrasco will get $22MM across his additional three years. Kluber receives additional years on his deal, but the difference in average annual value is a modest $400K.
Carrasco, in theory, could have rolled the dice with another solid season of pitching. Even though he could have secured a sizable arbitration raise and even more leverage in extension talks by building on his close to 2014, he understandably opted for security.
On Saturday night, Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports reported that the two sides were discussing a deal. Rosenthal tweeted that the deal was done. Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports (Twitter links) reported contract details, as did MLB.com’s Jordan Bastian (via Twitter) and Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com (on Twitter).
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.ROCKWOOD, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- Four generations of Saylors have worked the family's dairy farm for nearly a century, but for the past three years, the cows have been doing something besides providing milk: They've been helping power the place.
"The farm used to get a lot of complaints," says farmer Shawn Saylor. "It used to stink a lot."
Growing up on the sprawling spread 90 minutes from Pittsburgh, 36-year-old farmer Shawn Saylor developed into a self-described science buff.
So it was no surprise that, when faced with rising energy costs, Saylor turned to technology.
He tapped into an abundant and easily accessible energy source: manure from about 600 cows. Watch how cow poo powers the farm »
"It's a pretty simple process. There's not really a lot to it," Saylor said. "Manure comes from the cows, and there's energy left in the manure."
The process is known as anaerobic digestion, and here's how it works:
With the help of a mechanical scraper in the barn, manure drops into a 19,000-gallon tank. The slurry then moves into the digester, which is 16 feet deep and 70 feet in diameter. It's heated there for about 16 days while the bacteria break down the organic matter in order to produce methane gas. That gas is burned in two engine generators to make electricity. See an interactive explaining the process »
Heat created by the generators keeps the digester hot, heats the buildings around the farm and helps provide hot water.
The electricity is used to power this farm and a dozen neighboring homes, Saylor said. And there's still some left over, which he sells back to the grid.
Overall, the poo power helps Saylor's bottom line.
"In savings, there's $200,000 a year, in either extra income from sale of electricity or cost offsets," he said.
"So you're talking about system project costs of over a million dollars to build the system but a payback of five years or less."
Before he installed the system, the pungent smell from the cows could linger for three to four days, Saylor said. "The farm used to get a lot of complaints from motorists, which is understandable. It used to stink a lot."
Now, the digesters reduce 98 percent of all odor, although he admits that if the wind blows, you still "get a whiff."
The farm's leftover solid waste is sold to the community.
"We use it for bedding for the animals," according to Saylor. "A lot of people like to get it for their gardens... because it doesn't smell much."
Farm-based digesters became popular in the United States during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. But the technology didn't catch on, possibly because of the high operational costs and declining energy prices, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Although Saylor had been interested in digesters for years, his dream didn't become reality until 2006. That's when he received a $600,000 grant from Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection.
But Saylor's work isn't done. He intends to make his farm entirely self-sufficient by using waste vegetable oil to make biodiesel fuel.
He said his goal is to waste nothing.
"In a biodiesel system, all the waste products can either be used or fed back into the digester to make more gas," he said. "I've always looked at new technologies and believed you kind of have to work with that stuff to stay with the future."
All About Pennsylvania • Agriculture Policy • Energy and Power EngineeringLast week's edition of this column was strictly limited to newcomers, fans who hadn't previously been given the honor of having their most bile-heavy moments of Internet commenting displayed to a wider audience. That's not the case this week, but we do have some programs making their 2015 TWIS debuts: Boston College, NC State, and Oklahoma.
Being the new kid in school can be extremely scary, so I'm helping these fans make the transition to our little School for Adult Children Who Can't Act Right by instituting a buddy system. Each will be assigned a more experienced member of the Schadenfreude student body as a mentor. This way, you'll have someone to talk to when you want to demand that your coach publicly burn every dollar he's been paid.
NEW KID: NC STATE
The first 17 minutes of NC State's game against Virginia Tech were fine; the Wolfpack jumped out to a 10-0 lead and forced three straight VT punts. The remaining 43 minutes... well, one Backing The Pack commenter can give you the only math that really mattered:
The experience of a NCSU football fan.
DISAPPOINTMENT = EXPECTATION + REALITY WHY DO I DO THIS? I'M INSANE.
So was Kurt Gödel! It's tragic to see some of history's greatest minds tortured like this, trying to contemplate the intricacies of logic. Better, I think, to embrace the simple philosophy of many PackPride commenters: I think, therefore NC State sucks:
That was about as an embarrassing display as I've seen and I've seen a bunch of them. NC State gets as little return on investment as any program in the history of sports. I really need to find a hobby to spend my time instead of torturing myself watch crap like that. About decided it won't matter who we hire... we just suck.
Apathy is your best friend. Looks like I have a couple of years of it to look forward to until the next coaching search revs up.
We are NC State. We will always be NC State. It doesn't matter who the coach is, who the players are, who the AD is... When it comes to football, we are mediocre. Dick Sheridan was our best coach over the last 30 years and he didn't win a championship. Philip Rivers was our best QB in 30 years and he didn't either. Russell Wilson won a Super Bowl in Seattle and took Wisconsin to the Rose Bowl, yet he was never able to win here. It's not them it's us.
It's the opposite of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Nothing that occurs on the outside of NC State -- changing head coaches, getting highly-regarded recruits, adding lethal levels of arsenic -- changes the state of the program. It continues, unwaveringly locked in permabad.
We're going to show you that change IS possible, NC State fans. It's not necessarily good, but it's possible.
NC STATE'S BUDDY: NEBRASKA
I mean, if this Corn Nation member can't convince you that a college football team can take a 180-degree turn within one season, who will?:
The Bo haters wanted an end to 9-3 seasons
and Riley sure has delivered. Thank you, Mike Riley, for giving us all the change we so desperately wanted. And don't worry about competing for championships, you still have time. I mean, you're only 62. You'll grow into this head coaching thing. It's not like you've been doing it for very long. I wish we'd never fired Bo but there's nothing we can do now. We are who we are. Eichorst really looks like a fucking genius now, doesn't he? Yeah, fire the 9-win guy! It worked out for us last time! God fucking damn it I hate my fucking life. Oh well, going to cheer for the Huskers even though this program is coached by a hugely incompetent staff.
Sure, the Bo Pelini-to-Riley change has been bad. But Nebraska just needs more changes!:
Somebody out there has hired a gypsy to curse this team
I swear to you all I will make it my personal mission to hunt down this gypsy and kill them. Upon doing so I will then carve out the gypsy's heart, burn it with the customary ritual herbs and scatter the ashes around Memorial Stadium. It's the only way.
Nothing's as static as you fear it is, NC State supporters. Why, last year, this Nebraska fan didn't need to go to the hospital!:
medical advice
Anyone have an idea how to remove a fork stuck in my left eye P:EASE!!!
The possible changes are EVERYWHERE, especially at HuskerBoard:
If Riley's such a nice guy...
Then why doesn't he do what's best for the program as well as the state of Nebraska -- admit that he's in over his head and step down, so that we can bring someone else in to right this rapidly-sinking ship? I think the fans would have a lot more respect for him he did this... every game he coaches sets us farther and farther back.
Randy Edsall's waiting:
This is what happens when you hire a mediocre coaching staff from a mediocre school. NU refuses to spend money on a big name coach who can get it done. Should of given Urb a blank check. Worst NU team Ive seen in quite some time.....so boring to watch. Even if we won half of these close games would we really be all that happy? The team would still be terrible just with a better record.
(Phone rings)
"Hello, can I speak to Urban Meyer?"
"This is he."
"Coach Meyer, I'm wondering if we can convince you to come to Nebraska by offering you all the U.S. currency in circul-hello? Shit. OK, try Jimbo Fisher":
I KNOW HOW TO FIX THIS......
It's so obvious......That damn cat of Pelini's is running around the depths of Memorial Stadium and Bo's put some kind of a curse on it! We MUST find the feline, box it up and UPS it back to Ohio.....curse over!!!! We win out by kicking everyone's ass and become the first 4 loss NATIONAL CHAMPIONS!!!!
Change is believing that finding a cursed cat and shipping it out of state will change your fortunes. You'll get there, NC State.
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NEW KID: OKLAHOMA
You made it to mid-October without an appearance on This Week In Schadenfreude, Oklahoma, but we kept the LandThieves chair unoccupied the whole time. Just sort of had a feeling you might turn up, I guess. (We didn't expect it to be after a loss to 1-4 Texas but, hey, neither did you, probably!):
If OU loses this game, I will be just down to rooting for every Baylor player to rip a knee since they deserve it, because they sure as **** didn't go to that shit-hole just for just a scholarship and playing football. **** this socialist parity college football bullshit. If we get placed on the college football meltdown board, I am really going to be pissed,
Everyone agrees that college football's main problem is that it's too socialist. All that equitable distribution of talent/resources/money!:
**** Bob Stoops, **** his caching staff and **** this team.
Failure to clear your cache does cause your browser to run more slowly and inefficiently, so this might not be a typo:
**** you Stoops. You 6 million dollar mother ****er. Go ahead and give your lame ****ing "We just got outplayed and out coached/we beat Alabama 2 years ago" excuse bullshit. You're one of the highest paid in college football. You should NEVER be out coached. I work in ****ing business. I work ****ing 10-12 hour days bc the 40k per year guys won't ****ing do it. That is why I make more. If I'm continually outworked by the 40k per year guys, I'd be ****ing embarrassed. But I take pride in what I do. If I was making 6 million dollars a year, I sure as **** wouldn't let lessor guys outperform me. **** you Stoops. You ****ing suck. You're a B grade coach making A level money. Go **** yourself and take your brother with you.
I WORK IN FUCKING BUSINESS. You know things are bad when you've lost the gigolo contingent, Bob Stoops:
We never make any ****ing adjustments ever. If we're gonna go 8-5 every ****ing year it shouldn't cost us this much money. Fire them all and forfeit the rest of the season.
OSU and Texas were both in trouble. Dissension on the team, vultures circling, the coach about to be run out of town. If OU just takes care of business it could be the final nail in the coffin. So what does Bob do? Go out and lay a ****ing egg and give both rival schools a new lease on life and signature win to start their ascent when he could have finished them. Great ****ing job Bob
So that's why the unemployment rate's gone down. Stoops saved the economy by losing to coaches on the hot seat!:
Someone took a shit in the sink in the men's restroom at section 102. I'm not making a joke. There was literally a shit in the sink. Whoever that guy was, he was more successful against the run than OU was today.
Or he was just as out of position as the Oklahoma defense. Either comparison works.
Sooner fans need to be buddied up with another program that's getting sick of its long-tenured coach losing games they think he shouldn't and failing to live up to expectations. You have already guessed which.
OKLAHOMA'S BUDDY: GEORGIA
Dawg Sports, I'm trusting you to set a good example for Oklahoma. You've got a lot more experience bemoaning the fact that your coach can't win anything that matters, and you just lost to a mostly crappy Tennessee:
God hates this team.
The Ole' Milwaukee Forever Snuggie Car Care Bowl Of Texas awaits.
Hopefully you won't have to face Colorado:
Let me say this to sum it up:
• Fuck Todd Grantham for leaving us with no defensive depth, a bad secondary, and a suspect defensive line.
• Fuck Rodney Garner for his shit recruiting.
• Fuck Scott Lakatos for his even more terrible recruiting.
• Fuck Mike Bobo for not leaving us a single viable QB prospect. In fact, fuck him for not getting a good QB to come to Georgia after Murray committed here in 2008. 2008!
• Fuck Pruitt for his shitty play calling today.
• Fuck Richt for letting things get this shitty. Find a walk-on punter! Barber has been bad for 4 years. After how awful he was last year, I can't BELIEVE we didn't find someone else for this year.
• Fuck Tennessee's shitty field for injuring star Georgia players again.
• Fuck Brian Schottenheimer for calling a pretty weak game.
• Fuck Butch Jones for being a slimy troll of a person who apparently has a history of physically assaulting his players.
• Fuck Mark Richt for being too scared of a slight change in offensive philosophy to go after an offensive coordinator like Lincoln Riley to run the offense.
Maybe you thought Bobo would stop being blamed for Georgia losses once he stopped working for Georgia. Oh, you beautiful, beautiful fool:
Fuck you Richt
Sorry not sorry. Take your million$s and take a fucking hike. You are the definition of entitlement. Go spread the gospel and leave UGA alone to rebuild. God bless. Prayers.
I don't care to hear about how our coach is healing the sick, or what not. This is football. I commend him but I just don't want to win. I want to ram the ball down the opponent's throat and run up the score. I want our players to have some swagger when they take the field and be able to deliver! Give me-quite and carry a big stick!! I don't want players or coaches to be classless jerks who are all talk and no walk. Nor do I want a meek and mild coach and player-I feel like I'm watching this show and ship go down-and I HATE IT.
The Resurrection of Butch Jones did have a higher degree of difficulty than the Wedding at Cana, though:
Fire. Mark. Richt.
And ban Greyson Lambert from the university, once he leaves.
The team reminds me of the following:
You've got a leaking sewage pipe in your house that's been filling up your basement with human shit, yet you've been thinking for the past 4 weeks "what the fuck is that smell?" And can't figure it out. We opened the basement door in week 5 and realized the sewage is waste deep. Here we stand in week 6 realizing we have to burn our fucking house down because it's become a hazard to the rest of the neighborhood. This team is hot garbage stuffed in sour ass. Another putrid performance that leaves me incredibly embarrassed for the 2nd week in a row.
This is why I paired you with Oklahoma, Georgia. You both have serious problems with misplaced feces.
NEW KID: BOSTON COLLEGE
Against Boston College, Wake Forest had:
Five first downs
1.2 yards per rushing attempt
Only seven more passing yards than penalty yards
Three points, which came on a drive that lost yards overall
A win
That last item is not sitting well with people at BC Interruption:
OMG PLEASE HELP
OMG... This was the worst ending EVER... PLEASE SHOOT ME... It will end the pain... TWICE WITHIN THE 10 AND WE COME AWAY WITH 0 POINTS So we have under 30 seconds and no time outs left and we decide to run the ball with an undersized back and an inexperienced line.... UP THE FUXKING MIDDLE... ARE YOU FUXKING KIDDING ME? I FEEL SO BAD FOR THE KIDS... THIS WAS PURE COACHING incompetence INCOMPETENCE INCOMPETENCE INCOMPETENCE I need to go off and die in the corner somewhere...
Fire all the coaches, cut all the players, disband the program.
OFF WITH HIS HEAD!
OFF with his head! Off with his head. Off with his head. There is absolutely zero reason to renew this characters contract after this season. It is even questionable to let him continue to coach at this point in time. Looking at his total performance this season he is BY FAR IN A WAY the very worst football coach in Division I. Apologize to his team - not a chance.
FIRE THAT
bald-headed meatball fart.
There's not a lot I can do here, Boston College fans, so I'm just going to pair you with the other fanbase that's nearly feral with anger after losing a winnable game.
BOSTON COLLEGE'S BUDDY: OREGON
Bring us home, Addicted to Quack:
DOESN'T OREGON HAVE A MERCIFUL DEATH LAW?
I got stung by some mad wasps today.
Dealing with that was a lot more enjoyable than watching this fiasco.
This team is worse than a dumpster fire. This is an entire landfill that was hit by napalm with the entire population of jolly Eugene bums pooping in the incandescent blaze.
LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER
THE SUN WILL RISE TOMORROW, MY PANTRY IS WELL-STOCKED, MY ROOF DOESN'T LEAK, NONE OF MY KIDS HAVE CANCER.
WHY TO I STILL FEEL LIKE SHIT?
THIS GAME HAS OFFICIALLY PASSED HITLER ON MY LIST
OH FUCK ME WITH A RUSTY TOILET SEAT
This morning, I threw a newspaper from the bottom of my driveway to my front door.
I think I can play QB for Oregon.
Maybe, but the door's definitely getting a starting spot in the Oregon secondary.Mika Brzezinski Called President Trump: Narcissist, Ignorant, Stupid, Mentally Ill, etc – In Less Than a Minute
Guest post by Joe Hoft
Mika Brzezinski and her husband to be Joe Scarborough constantly berate the current US President Donald Trump every day on MSNBC’s terribly unpopular “Morning Joe” show. Their disregard and disrespect for the President is consistent with other liberal main stream media outlets because the President is a Republican.
Earlier this month Mika went on an all out assault on the US President. In less than one minute she called President Trump – “Narcissist”, “Mentally Ill’, “Not Well”, “Ignorant”, “Stupid”, “says he can grab women anywhere” and insinuates that he might have homosexual tendencies.
President Trump apparently had enough yesterday as he tweeted the following in two tweets on Twitter:
I |
al ligation is effectively promoted over vasectomies, even though the former is “more invasive than vasectomy and has a higher (although still very low) health risk,” he notes in his report. That makes “the incentive [toward female sterilization] a disservice to women.”
Moreover, a vasectomy is “considerably more cost effective than female sterilization,” so it is a disservice to health plan providers, as well.
Another marked disparity comes with condoms.
Currently under the interpretation of the ACA contraceptive coverage guarantee, female condoms are completely covered if a person has a prescription.
Sonfield notes that it is problematic that “even if a method is available over the counter, you still need a prescription if you want it covered.” But, at least with female condoms, unlike the more ubiquitous male ones, coverage is an option.
This disparity in coverage for female versus male forms of contraception has potentially grave implications, namely promoting an undue burden on women to handle the logistics of family planning.
“Excluding methods used by men from the contraceptive coverage guarantee sends a message reinforcing the all-too-common cultural attitude that contraception is solely a woman's responsibility,” Sonfield writes in his analysis.
Since the pill became available for contraceptive use in the U.S. in 1960 and granted women an unprecedented level of sexual freedom, it has simultaneously put the onus of family planning on their shoulders.
“There is certainly a widespread attitude that contraception is women's business, not men's,” says Sonfield. “That's an unfortunate attitude that people have been working to change for many years.”
Inadvertently, the ACA is perpetuating that burden. At the same time, it potentially has the power to reverse that trend through improving the coverage of male contraception.
Congress is one avenue for expanding the contraceptive coverage guarantee interpretation to include male forms, though Sonfield believes it is unlikely that this current Republican-dominated one would make that move.
Sonfield notes in his report that the Obama administration could also effect the change by adopting a “different interpretation of the ACA provision and define methods used by men as preventative care for women.” However, he writes that this is not a move the White House “would do lightly.”
A more promising potential source of change is the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF), an agency of health experts supported by the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Under the ACA, any positive recommendation from that body is automatically incorporated into the preventive services requirement after a one-year grace period,” Sonfield explains in his report. Thus, the USPSTF has the potential to issue a recommendation regarding the coverage of male contraception forms that could rectify the disparity.
While Sonfield declines to predict the odds that these changes will occur, he says he is only more hopeful in light of the recent Supreme Court decision.
“I think there is certainly more momentum now. There have been a lot of people arguing for a long time that it [ACA] is going to be going away and that has been an impediment to improving it,” Sonfield. “I think the president himself said, now we can move forward and make health care better.”Ivanka Trump, President Trump's daughter and White House adviser, took Mr. Trump's seat during a meeting of G-20 leaders in Hamburg, Germany, on Saturday as Mr. Trump stepped away during the proceedings.
A photo posted to Twitter by a Russian official attending the session during the last day of the G-20 summit shows Ivanka Trump seated next to British Prime Minister Theresa May. Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan and German Chancellor Angela Merkel can be seen seated nearby.
Svetlana Lukash, the official who posted the photo which was subsequently deleted, is the Russian sherpa to the G-20, the group of 20 major industrialized nations.
In a since-deleted tweet, Russian sherpa to the G-20 Svetlana Lukash posted a photo of Ivanka Trump taking President Trump's place during a meeting of world leaders in Hamburg, Germany, on July 8, 2017. Twitter / @LanaLukash
A White House official confirmed Ivanka Trump sat in for Mr. Trump when the president of the World Bank began addressing the session.
"Ivanka was sitting in the back and then briefly joined the main table when the president had to step out," the official told CBS News. "When other leaders stepped out, their seats were also briefly filled by others."
The episode drew fire from observers who criticized the unusual move of having a family member take the president's place during a meeting of world leaders. Ivanka Trump joined the White House staff as an unpaid assistant to the president in March. Her husband Jared Kushner serves as senior adviser and is also unpaid.
Ivanka Trump on her new White House role
In an interview with CBS News in April, Ivanka Trump defended her role in the administration after previously stating she would remain a private citizen.
"I wasn't elected by the American people to be president," she told "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King. "My father is going to do a tremendous job. And I want to help him do that."
Earlier Saturday, Ivanka and Mr. Trump spoke at a World Bank event for a fund supporting women entrepreneurs. Mr. Trump announced a $50 million U.S. commitment to the fund and praised his daughter's work on empowering women.
"I'm very proud of my daughter Ivanka. Always have been," Mr. Trump said. "If she weren't my daughter, it would be so much easier for her. It might be the only bad thing she has going, if you want to know the truth."Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Donald Trump spent the day in Redding, California, where thousands turned up to hear him speak. Today's event was violence-free, and that's a change from the mobs of protesters that attacked Trump supporters earlier this week.
There is still no word on whether or not the anti-Trump protesters are Clinton or Sanders supporters, but Sanders says they "better not have any affiliation" with his campaign. Sanders says, although he understands the anger many Americans feel in response to Trump's rhetoric, no one is going to defeat him by "throwing eggs or engaging in violence of any kind."
Sanders also defended the current president, saying Republicans blame him too much. Sanders said, "Republicans blame Obama if it is too hot, if it is too cold, but maybe the Republicans might want to go back to the last months of the Bush Administration when we were losing 800,000 jobs a month, all right? When we were running up the largest deficit in the history of this country: $1.4 trillion."########## ########## ########## | PIONEER AWARDS 2.0 ########## ########## ########## | Call for Nominations #### #### #### | ######## ######## ######## | EFF/AUSTIN: The First Chapter ######## ######## ######## | #### #### #### | THE SETTLING OF THE INTERNET ########## #### #### | ########## #### #### | FTP.EFF.ORG:The Users' Site ===================================================================== EFFector Online October 22, 1992 Issue 3.07 A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 ===================================================================== THE SECOND ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL EFF PIONEER AWARDS: CALL FOR NOMINATIONS Deadline: December 31,1992 In every field of human endeavor,there are those dedicated to expanding knowledge,freedom,efficiency and utility. Along the electronic frontier, this is especially true. To recognize this,the Electronic Frontier Foundation has established the Pioneer Awards for deserving individuals and organizations. The Pioneer Awards are international and nominations are open to all. In March of 1992, the first EFF Pioneer Awards were given in Washington D.C. The winners were: Douglas C. Engelbart of Fremont, California; Robert Kahn of Reston, Virginia; Jim Warren of Woodside, California; Tom Jennings of San Francisco, California; and Andrzej Smereczynski of Warsaw, Poland. The Second Annual Pioneer Awards will be given in San Francisco, California at the 3rd Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in March of 1993. All valid nominations will be reviewed by a panel of impartial judges chosen for their knowledge of computer-based communications and the technical, legal, and social issues involved in networking. There are no specific categories for the Pioneer Awards, but the following guidelines apply: 1) The nominees must have made a substantial contribution to the health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications. 2) The contribution may be technical, social, economic or cultural. 3) Nominations may be of individuals, systems, or organizations in the private or public sectors. 4) Nominations are open to all, and you may nominate more than one recipient. You may nominate yourself or your organization. 5) All nominations, to be valid, must contain your reasons, however brief, on why you are nominating the individual or organization, along with a means of contacting the nominee, and your own contact number. No anonymous nominations will be allowed. 6) Every person or organization, with the single exception of EFF staff members, are eligible for Pioneer Awards. 7) Persons or representatives of organizations receiving a Pioneer Award will be invited to attend the ceremony at the Foundation's expense. You may nominate as many as you wish, but please use one form per nomination. You may return the forms to us via email to pioneer@eff.org You may mail them to us at: Pioneer Awards, EFF, 155 Second Street Cambridge MA 02141. You may FAX them to us at: +1 617 864 0866 Just tell us the name of the nominee, the phone number or email address at which the nominee can be reached, and, most important, why you feel the nominee deserves the award. You may attach supporting documentation. Please include your own name, address, and phone number. We're looking for the Pioneers of the Electronic Frontier that have made and are making a difference. Thanks for helping us find them, The Electronic Frontier Foundation -------EFF Pioneer Awards Nomination Form------ Please return to the Electronic Frontier Foundation via email to: pioneer@eff.org via surface mail to EFF 155 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02141 USA; via FAX to +1 617 864 0866 Nominee: Title: Company/Organization: Contact number or email address: Reason for nomination: Your name and contact information: Extra documentation attached: DEADLINE: ALL NOMINATIONS MUST BE RECEIVE BY THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION BY MIDNIGHT, EASTERN STANDARD TIME U.S., DECEMBER 31,1992. -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- THE EFF/AUSTIN CHAPTER A Progress Report by John S. Quarterman President of Autsin EFF. As of July 1992, the official name of our group is EFF-Austin, and we are a Texas nonprofit corporation. Our goals, adapted from those of EFF-National, are given in our Articles of Incorporation: (a) to engage in and support educational activities that increase understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by computing and telecommunications, and related civil liberties issues. (b) to foster a clearer social understanding of the issues underlying free and open telecommunications; and (c) to facilitate and encourage communication between individuals interested in computer and telecommunication technology and related social and legal issues. Among other activities in pursuit of these goals, we hold three distinct types of public meetings: member meetings; Public Forums; and Cyberdawgs. Member meetings consist of presentations by EFF-Austin directors and others on what EFF-Austin is doing, and questions and suggestions from the attendees. Our first general public meeting was held in May, at the Austin Technology Incubator. Close to sixty people attended to listen to what we had to say and to offer ideas. We are planning another member meeting for November. Public Forums have specific agendas and speakers, and both present information of interest to our members and the public, and invite discussion. Our most recent public forum was "The Net: What is It, Where is it, Who Uses It, and for What?", presented by John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell of Texas Internet Consulting and Matrix Information and Directory Services, and Anna Couey, an art networker from San Francisco. This was held at MCC and included online demonstrations of Internet applications such as anonymous FTP, archie, and gopher, as well as TELNET to locations such as Moscow and the WELL. The next scheduled Public Forum is on October 29. Noted science fiction author Bruce Sterling will speak and sign copies concerning his latest work, the nonfiction book, The Hacker Crackdown, just published by Bantam. This meeting will be held at the University of Texas. We are inviting local law enforcement officers to attend, considering the subject matter of the book. Cliff Figallo, Director of the Cambridge Office of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will also attend. Ed Cavazos is currently organizing a panel discussion on Sysop Liability that will be given in January of next year. In contrast to the formal presentation of a Public Forum is a "Cyberdawg". These are informal networking mixers. (The name comes from a hot dog picnic held last year at the Steve Jackson Games office in Austin.) We have held two Cyberdawgs so far, in June and August, at the High Times Tea Bar and Brain Gym (a local establishment that serves intellectual games instead of alcohol), and at Europa Books. They were well-attended by a diverse mix of the Austin electronic community. All types of computer users met to talk, exchange information, make contacts, and simply have fun. We have scheduled the next Cyberdawg for November, and plan to have Tracy LaQuey Parker present to sign copies of her latest book, The Internet Companion, just published by Addison-Wesley. Another method of information distribution that we have employed is staffing tables at conventions. For example, we held a table at the Government and Technology Convention in February of 1992, and have plans to be present at the 1993 show as well. We had a meeting at the Armadillocon Science Fiction Convention 9-11 October. Since several of our members are frequent travelers to SF conventions, we have presented panels and distributed literature at many such events. We consider this worthwhile, since science fiction readers are likely to be interested in the way society evolves to handle evolving technology. At all of these events we have been passing out EFF literature that we possess at the time. We have created information of our own, as well. There is the Info Disk, which contains text files that serve as a primer to relevant issues in the use of computers and networks. September saw the first issue of our online newsletter, Word, which we plan to distribute monthly. EFF-Austin also sponsors a moderated newsgroup, austin.eff, linked bidirectionally with a mailing list, eff-austin@tic.com. That newsgroup and mailing list are about EFF-Austin and local concerns, but they are already widely distributed outside of Austin and on BBSes as well as through USENET, UUCP, and the Internet. This is all in addition to the meetings of the Board of Directors (fifteen in the last twelve months). We currently hold these meetings on the second Tuesday of each month. -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- CURRENT SITE @eff.org Where Users Come First. by Rita Rouvalis (rita@eff.org) Carefully assemble four Sparcstation II's, nine gigs of disk storage, a T1 and what do you get? One hopping Internet site and the Heart and Soul of the EFF. Traditionally, netiquette has required that most ftp transfers be done druing non-business or off-peak hours. The reason for the request is that most ftp machines are also used for other tasks by the local users. ftp.eff.org, however, is a dedicated ftp, gopher, and WAIS machine. This means that it is not at the staff's disposal, but yours. So pound away on it at any time of the day or night. That's the reason we built it. Services like WAIS, and GOPHER underscore our enthusiasm for better, easier-to-use technology for accessing the information stored on the Net. The wide variety of subject matter found in our anonymous FTP archives is a working testimony to our belief in the free and open flow of all kinds of information, not simply the official EFF positions and publications (these are found only in the EFF directory). And not only is our hardware the key distribution point for official EFF documents like EFFector Online and NewsNotes, but we're also the virtual home for other, similar-minded organizations like Carl Kadie's Computers and Academic Freedom, the Index on Censorship, the Boston Computer Society, the Massachusetts branch of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), Beyond Dreams, and the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX). Last month, an average of 1371 files *a day* were sucked down from our archives. Some of your favorites, according to our statistics, are File Downloads in September /pub/cud/phrack/phrack-40 454 /pub/EFF/legal-issues/eff-fbi-analysis 230 /pub/EFF/about-eff 197 /pub/cud/cud/cud4.41 173 /pub/internet-info/ftp.sites 101 /pub/journals/CORE/core1.08 53 /etc/passwd 39 /pub/EFF/legal-issues/against-look-and-feel 39 /pub/EFF/papers/crime-and-puzzlement 33 /pub/journals/InterText/ITv2n4-ascii 29 One of the best-kept secrets on ftp.eff.org is the relatively quiet little corner occupied by the /journals directory. One of the most selective news stands in Cyberspace, it contains a small number of excellent and widely varied electronic publications. Our two newest additions to the magazine rack are CurrentCites, which presents selected articles on information transfer, electronic publishing, expert systems and artificial intelligence, and more; and ScreamBaby, a tense, neurotic 'zine that asks the all-consuming question "What the hell did *YOU* do today?" Other recent additions include a document on electronic communications from Human Right Watch (/pub/EFF/papers/electrifying-speech); the first edition of Word, the EFF-Austin chapter's newsletter (/pub/EFF/local- chapters/Austin_TX/Word1); and the EJournal Directory, an extensive list of electronic publications (/pub/journals/EJournal.Directory2.1). We are always looking for new files of interest to add to our ftp collection. If you know of anything appropriate, please drop us a note at eff@eff.org. -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- From the Univ of Wisconsin Microelectronics bulletin, Prof. F Cerrina as the author: "After the Microlithography '92 conference in Japan, we toured some of the leading electronics laboratories. Our visit to Hitachi's Central Research Lab included an amusing demonstration of the resolution of current lithography. On a four-inch wafer, they printed a map of the world that included the streets of London down to the smallest alleys. It's now possible to put a fully detailed map of the world on a six-inch wafer." Food for thought... (Submitted by Gary Delp ) -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- The Settling of the Internet by David Tyckson (DT673@ALBNYVMS.BITNET ) It has been nearly three months since I sent my original "What's Going On Here?" message to PACS-L, which dealt with the migration from electronic to print format of some of my favorite network publications. While I expected some responses to this message, I did not expect the flood of material that came to me both privately and over the network. I am finally clearing my mailbox of old messages and would like to report to PACS-L on this topic. The vast majority of responses disagreed with me and indicated that print is an appropriate, if not preferred, publication medium. Many replies stressed the rights of authors to receive royalty payments for print publications, the fact that print gets wider distribution than electronic media, and that the author has every right to select the publication format. One particularly thoughtful response (sent on PACS-L by Czeslaw Jan Grycz) discussed the role of electronic publication in the scholarly communications process. Other responses moved into a variety of related topics, including copyright, the cost of the network, and even the global environment. It is clear that my original message struck a nerve among many network users. Some responses were predictable (the editors of PACS Review were not pleased with my attack on the print version of their publication), some were enlightening (Brendan Kehoe gave an excellent review of the evolution of Zen and the Art of the Internet), and some were surprising (I did not realize that Zen had been written by an undergraduate student). Perhaps the most surprising response of all was finding myself quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a fact which I became aware of only when the Office of the President of my university called to find out more about my "article" in the Chronicle! After all of this discussion and publicity, what exactly is going on here? The Internet is not dying, as my initial message may have led some to believe, but is alive and very, very well. In fact, network resources comprise the biggest growth area in the information world at the moment. All of the training sessions, publications, and new network position advertisements clearly show that the Internet will be around for a long time to come. It is not death that we must worry about, but rapid growth. Because of this growth, something DID happen to the Internet last summer. The issues that I raised originally were not indicators of the end of the network, but were signs of its maturation. Whereas in the past the networks were the playthings (and workthings) of a few network elite, they have grown to encompass a much broader clientele. It is this volume of users that has resulted in the changes. Last summer, the number of network users passed the critical mass required to attract interest from commercial publishers and the press. While this attention will help the Internet to grow even further, it takes something away from the communal aspects of the early users. Like the telephone user who was required to move from a party line to a private line when he/she realized who else could be monitoring the calls, the presence of journalistic and commercial entities on the networks may change the nature of the information communicated over these networks. Information that has been given away freely in the past may now require some type of payment to a publisher. While the creators of information deserve credit (both intellectual and monetary) for their work, the formalization of this process will tend to discourage "skywriting" as we have known it in the past. In addition, authors who may formerly have spontaneously responded to other messages may now be cautious in what they say and how they say it. The numerous disclaimer statements at the end of author signatures are already a step in this direction. Last summer saw the passing of an era in networked resources. Before the summer, the network was populated primarily by pioneers, who explored its resources out of enthusiasm, interest, and a sense of exploration. Now it is being populated by settlers, who wish to mine the networks in some sort of production mode. The early users (pioneers) were able to explore and search in a somewhat unrestricted manner, creating their own rules as they went along. Some did it for the challenge, some in search of specific types of resources, and others just for the fun of seeing what was out there. The success of those pioneer efforts brought many more users onto the networks. However, these new users did not usually have the same motives for utilizing networked resources. Rather than exploring the network wilderness, the new users (settlers) want resources that they can use in their everyday lives. They also want guides to these resources and rules for their use. The commercial and journalistic presence in issues related to the network is a clear indication that we have evolved into the settler stage. Unfortunately, the cultures of pioneers and settlers do not always conform. Pioneers want freedom, while settlers want order. While some pioneers stake out an area and become leading settlers in an aspect of networked resources, others move on and continue to explore new areas. The pioneers laid the groundwork for the rest of us (I consider myself a very early settler) and we owe them our gratitude for making us aware of the capabilities of networked information. While we may lament the passing of the good old days of freewheeling information flow, we have moved on into an era in which more networked information will be available to more people than ever. Last summer saw the passing of the era of the wild, wild Internet. It is now up to those of us who have settled these new territories to develop rules, regulations, and guidebooks that will make information available equitably for everyone. I have faith that we, as information organizers, will be able to develop a culture that preserves democratic access to information resources. If not, we will have settled a land not worth inhabiting. David Tyckoson Head, Reference Department University Libraries University at Albany - SUNY (518) 442-3559 DT673@ALBNYVMS -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- FROM THE MBOX From: "Thomas Leedy, Admin A-402, Ext 2410" To: Electronic Frontier Foundation Subject: Where Can I Get One of Those Bumper Stickers? Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 09:46:31 EDT I saw a *great* bumper sticker on the Washington DC Beltway this morning and almost ran the poor guy off the road trying to read the Internet address...so I hope that I have this right. It said "I'd rather be telecommuting. " Do you people make these available? If so how can I get one? (The only other way I know is to steal the fellow's bumper!) Would be interested in other material/positions that the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes available. Thanks! Best... Tom leedy@micf.nist.gov [Editors note: Card-carrying members of the EFF can get one bumper sticker for free. Non-members can buy them for $2 each, pre-paid. Please include a self-addressed stamped business-sized envelope and specify whether you want: "I'd rather be telecommuting." "CYBERNAUT" "Highways in Cyberspace: 'Make it so.'" "My other car is a computer." Gifs of these can be viewed by ftp'ing to ftp.eff.org and cd'ing to /pub/EFF/eff-issues thanks to the generous volunteer work of Mark Sheenan (sheehan@indiana.edu).] -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- MEMBERSHIP IN THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION If you support our goals and our work, you can show that support by becoming a member now. Members receive our bi-weekly electronic newsletter, EFFector Online, the @eff.org newsletter and special releases and other notices on our activities. But because we believe that support should be freely given, you can receive these things even if you do not elect to become a member. Our memberships are $20.00 per year for students, $40.00 per year for regular members. You may, of course, donate more if you wish. Our privacy policy: The Electronic Frontier Foundation will never, under any circumstances, sell any part of its membership list. We will, from time to time, share this list with other non-profit organizations whose work we determine to be in line with our goals. If you do not grant explicit permission, we assume that you do not wish your membership disclosed to any group for any reason. ---------------- EFF MEMBERSHIP FORM --------------- Mail to: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc. 155 Second St. #37 Cambridge, MA 02141 I wish to become a member of the EFF I enclose:$__________ $20.00 (student or low income membership) $40.00 (regular membership) $100.00(Corporate or company membership. This allows any organization to become a member of EFF. It allows such an organization, if it wishes to designate up to five individuals within the organization as members.) I enclose an additional donation of $ Name: Organization: Address: City or Town: State: Zip: Phone:( ) (optional) FAX:( ) (optional) Email address: I enclose a check [ ]. Please charge my membership in the amount of $ to my Mastercard [ ] Visa [ ] American Express [ ] Number: Expiration date: Signature: Date: I hereby grant permission to the EFF to share my name with other non-profit groups from time to time as it deems appropriate [ ]. Initials: Your membership/donation is fully tax deductible. ===================================================================== EFFector Online is published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation 155 Second Street, Cambridge MA 02141 Phone: +1 617 864 0665 FAX: +1 617 864 0866 Internet Address: eff@eff.org Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the view of the EFF. To reproduce signed articles individually, please contact the authors for their express permission. ===================================================================== This newsletter is printed on 100% recycled electrons.The Orlando Magic inducted team owner Rich DeVos into the franchise's hall of fame on Tuesday.
DeVos, who turned 90 years old earlier this month, will be the lone inductee this year, a team official said.
DeVos, who purchased the Magic in 1991, was honored in an on-court ceremony a few minutes before the Magic tipped off against the Brooklyn Nets at Amway Center.
He joins three other members in the Magic Hall of Fame.
The team inducted Nick Anderson and franchise co-founder Pat Williams in its inaugural class in 2014. Shaquille O'Neal was the lone inductee last season.
The Brooklyn Nets at Orlando Magic NBA game at the Amway Center on Tuesday, March 29, 2016. Orlando won the game 139-105. (Stephen M. Dowell, Orlando Sentinel) (Stephen M. Dowell, Orlando Sentinel)
The Magic have won two Eastern Conference titles during DeVos' tenure as owner — a tenure also marked by the departure of O'Neal via free agency in 1996 and the acrimonious departure of Dwight Howard in 2012 via trade.
Vucevic, Ilyasova sit
Center Nikola Vucevic participated in the Magic's non-contact practice Monday and the Magic's shootaround Tuesday morning, but he did not play against the Nets.
Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel Rich DeVos (left) purchased the Orlando Magic in 1991 Rich DeVos (left) purchased the Orlando Magic in 1991 (Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel) (Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel)
"I feel like I still need another good practice or workout," Vucevic said. "So I'll do some work [Tuesday night] and [Wednesday] and then hopefully, if everything goes like it has been so far, with no setbacks, I'll be able to play in Indy [on Thursday]."
Vucevic has missed 13 consecutive games because of a strained right groin muscle.
Because the groin injury prevented Vucevic from running, coach Scott Skiles expects Vucevic to have lost some of his conditioning. Therefore, Skiles plans to play Vucevic initially in "short stints."
Forward Ersan Ilyasova sat out his third consecutive game because of a sprain of the joint that connects the collarbone and sternum.
Don't call home
Evan Fournier played his second straight game with a Band-Aid on his forehead. The Band-Aid protected the laceration he suffered in last Friday's game against the Miami Heat.
The cut required six stitches to close.
"It's nothing major," Fournier said. "Just a few stitches."
Fournier's parents are accomplished martial artists who specialize in judo, and Fournier attributes his physical toughness to them.
His mom and dad have suffered so many injuries during their careers that Fournier didn't even think about telling them about the gash on his forehead.
"I'm not even going to call them for a few stitches," Fournier said.
What would they have said?
Fournier joked they would have said, "Aw, shut up!"
Motivation
Tuesday's game was the first game the Magic have played since they were mathematically eliminated from the postseason race.
Skiles was asked how he keeps players motivated.
"Honestly, that's got to come from the players," Skiles answered. "As far as I know, still every two weeks money gets deposited into our accounts. So you've got to go out there and perform."
Tony Brown, the Nets' interim coach, was asked a similar question: how he keeps his players motivated to finish the season strong.
"Job security," Brown responded.
"Other than a couple of guys, we don't have guys with long-term contracts. So use your opportunity to help you keep your job."
jrobbins@orlandosentinel.com. Read his blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/magicblog and follow him on Twitter at @JoshuaBRobbins.THE ELECTION RESULTS ARE IN
ON AN ALL-NEW EPISODE OF SOUTH PARK PREMIERING ON
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9 AT 10:00 P.M. ET/PT ON COMEDY CENTRAL
——–
All-New Season 20 Episodes will be Available to Stream in HD
Exclusively on SouthPark.cc.com and Hulu
——–
NEW YORK, November 7, 2016 – The new administration has plans for Gerald on an all-new episode of South Park titled “Oh, Jeez” on Wednesday, November 9 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on Comedy Central.
PC Principal tries one more time to make peace between the boys and the girls. Meanwhile Gerald comes face-to-face with the Troll Hunter.
All-new episodes from this season will be available to stream in HD exclusively on South Park Studios and Hulu the day after they premiere. Fans will continue to have next-day access to new episodes, as well as the entire “South Park” library, across all internet-connected devices with a Hulu subscription. New episodes and a selection of curated episodes will be available to stream on SouthPark.cc.com, cc.com and the Comedy Central App.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the co-creators of “South Park.” Parker, Stone, Anne Garefino and Frank C. Agnone II are the Executive Producers of the Emmy® and Peabody® Award-winning “South Park.” Eric Stough, Adrien Beard, Bruce Howell and Vernon Chatman are Producers. Chris Brion is the Creative Director of South Park Digital Studios. “South Park’s” Web site is SouthPark.cc.com.
Comedy Central’s “South Park” launched on August 13, 1997. The series airs Wednesday nights at 10:00 p.m. and repeats later that night at Midnight (all times ET/PT). “South Park” season 20 will begin rolling out on Comedy Central channels internationally in October. The uncensored episodes are also available for download on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, XBOX Live, Google Play, Sony Entertainment Network, Vudu and Verizon Flexview.
A preview clip is available here.Islamabad, Pakistan - Pakistan's cabinet has approved a plan to introduce widespread political and administrative reforms to its tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, bringing landmark changes to an area that has long been a sanctuary for armed groups.
The changes, which include the extension of fundamental constitutional rights to citizens, will see Pakistan's constitution and penal code extended to the seven semi-autonomous tribal "agencies" for the first time since the country gained independence from the British in 1947.
"The time has now come for [the people of the tribal areas] to also be brought into the ambit of being Pakistani, to end the ongoing deprivation of their areas," said a statement issued by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's office on Thursday, following the cabinet meeting that approved the reforms.
The laws will give citizens access to fundamental rights and the ability to vote for representatives in provincial and local council elections, among other benefits.
READ MORE: ISIL expands in Afghan-Pakistan areas, widening attacks
Currently, the northwestern region is governed under the British-era Frontier Crimes Regulation, a draconian law dating back to colonial times which leaves citizens with no recourse to formal courts and open to collective punishment for the crimes of members of their tribes.
The lack of formal law and writ of the state in the tribal areas made them a haven for armed groups, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and al-Qaeda, for decades.
Pakistan's military regained control of North Waziristan - the last of the tribal areas still under Taliban control - after an offensive launched in mid-2014 that lasted until the end of 2016.
Since then, violence has dropped across the country, but sporadic high-profile attacks, such as the bombing of a shrine last month that killed 88 people, remain common.
Right to vote
Key among the reforms is a five-year plan that will see the tribal areas, home to more than four million people, merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, with citizens given the right to vote for representatives in the provincial assembly for the first time.
Pakistani army says it rooted out Taliban fighters from tribal region
On Thursday, Sartaj Aziz, who headed the government committee that prepared the reforms, said that citizens would be able to vote for provincial assembly seats in the next general election, scheduled for mid-2018.
The plan also envisages the holding of local council elections in each of the seven tribal areas by the end of 2017.
Previously, residents in the tribal areas could vote for representatives in the lower house of parliament. Yet laws passed by parliament had no validity in those areas.
The reforms package also proposes $1.05bn in funding be allocated to a 10-year plan aimed at rehabilitating and reconstructing infrastructure, including communications, power lines, water supply schemes, education and health facilities in the tribal areas.
READ MORE: Chaos follows Pakistan-Afghanistan border closure
Government social welfare services such as hospitals and schools are virtually non-existent in most parts of the tribal areas, and have been further decimated by years of military operations.
At the peak of those operations, more than three million citizens from the tribal areas were classified as internally displaced (IDPs), living in camps or migrating to urban areas.
The new plan envisages the complete return of IDPs by April 30, 2017, Aziz said.
The reforms will also see the introduction of a new law to govern the tribal areas, based on the concept of "rewaaj", or tribal customs. That act will formalise the holding tribal councils, also known as jirgas, to resolve local disputes, according to a report on the reforms released by the government.
"We have sacrificed a lot for Pakistan and for years we haven't been given our basic rights," said Amad Khan, a citizen from the Bajaur tribal area.
"This reform will bring schools, colleges and a proper health system in |
, and the fact that many internet providers offer unlimited hosting storage to customers, we propose the IIHF assist all members to create their country website.
The IIHF will give all Members storage space on their Hosting plans. For instance, either http://greece.iihf.com or http://www.iihf.com/greece
WordPress, which is an online open source website creation tool, can be used for the Website design. IIHF can decide of the Theme that all countries will use, and decide on the Pages that all websites need to contain. For instance: Teams, Standing, Statistics, Contact information etc. This way we can follow the example of the NHL where all teams are hosted on the NHL server and all team websites look similar and contain the same information. Also, when the IIHF wants to promote an event, all countries will be obliged to add that information on to their respective websites. Of course each country will be able to edit, chose the color scheme, chose their own banner, add information that they believe is relevant in their own country, but the basic look and feel of the website will be similar for all countries.
We are trying to develop the sport and the only thing that is missing from Greece is a few meters of ice. You noticed in the above graph that Greek ice Hockey grew in recent years, despite having a smaller size rink, and the only decision that halted this progress was the removal of our National Team from International competition. As we already stated, we need our National Team to participate. Our National Team is the foundation of the whole sport and only with participation can we one day have the Olympic size rink that we need.
We understand that removing us from the World Championship was a decision based on the belief that this will pressure our government. That maybe the threat of non-participation will force them to open an Olympic rink, but as you’ve seen, it had the opposite results. It actually helped the government by making their decision to eliminate ice hockey easier. Without participation of our National team, there is no point in the existence of the sport.
We would be in total accordance with the IIHF decision for removal of Greece from international competition if we didn’t have any facilities or the sport was not being developed. But this is not the case, there are permanent facilities, businesses owned by former players, and the sport was being developed with surprising increase of player registration, which was only halted by the removal of our National Team. Greek Ice Hockey was developing in all categories since our National Team qualified for the World Championships back in 2008.
Even traditional ice hockey nations like Canada is struggling in player registration lately. Of course we are not comparing to Canada in any way, but this only proves that all countries are struggling with the development of the sport.
It’s been a constant up-hill all these years, but we continue our efforts to progress the sport as best we can. We feel frankly that we are progressing at the same rate, if not a greater rate than teams participating now at the Division III championships.
We are not here to criticize but to offer solutions to the IIHF that can be applied to all Nations. A more detailed system with tangible objectives for all countries to follow is a more prudent rule.
Please re-evaluate your decision and allow our National Team to participate. It’s a matter of survival of the sport.
Thank you
Dimitris KalyvasA bunch of us met for breakfast on Sunday ahead of our annual trip to a big record show. Naturally, the conversation was peppered with plenty of music geekery. When the conversation turned to upcoming releases, I asked if anyone was buying this whole cassette revival nonsense. That’s when one of the guys — an employee of a major label — spoke up.
“It’s crazy, but it’s not going away. And I know why.”
He had our attention. “I was looking through the list of upcoming premium releases issued by the US side of the label. A bunch of them had catalogue numbers beginning with ‘P.’ I’d never seen that before so I called up my guy in America and asked about them.
“‘Oh, those are cassettes,’ he said.
“‘Cassettes? Why?’”
There was a pause. “‘They’re prison releases.’”
Prison releases? Yep. There are enough people incarcerated in the U.S. — over 2.2 million as of 2013, the highest prison population in the world — for convicts to form a viable standalone music market.
But why cassettes? CDs are forbidden because they can be turned into shanks. MP3 players are allowed but without Internet access, they’re kinda useless. How do you load them up with music? Vinyl? Fuhgeddaboutit. The only remaining option is the lowly cassette.
But you can’t use just any cassette. A little investigation uncovers companies like Fortress Audio and Duplication.ca offer blank cassettes made with clear shells (to prevent smuggling) and without any screws (they can be weaponized) just for prison use.
Then we have services like Music 4 Inmates and 8-Track-Shack that specialize in providing music for the incarcerated. Now take a look at this article in Spin a few years ago:
Cassettes may be a relic of the pre-digital era, but there are a few places in this country where those unloved plastic tapes are holding on strong. Although many corrections departments are tiptoeing cautiously into the digital future by introducing MP3 players to their inmate populations (see our feature on the subject), at prisons in New York and Illinois (as well as some facilities in other states), the only way an offender can listen to music is on a cassette ordered from an approved vendor. Pack Central, operated by owner Bob Paris, is one such company. Paris ran the mail-order department for a record store in Van Nuys, California, in the ’70s, and noticed he was sending a lot of packages into prisons. When he graduated from college in 1980, he opened Pack Central, with an exclusive focus on serving the nation’s incarcerated. “At the time I started,” Paris explains, “to fill up empty space in their classified section, Rolling Stone would run a list of names and addresses of people in prison seeking pen pals. I’d cut out those addresses, use them as a shipping label and send them a catalog. That got my catalog into facilities all over the country.”
So the reason cassettes remain a viable music storage format are its uses by convicted felons?
Yes, but that’s not the only explanation. Here are a few more:
Luddite Hipsters: “I love music SO MUCH that I’m showing it by using a super-inconvenient back-to-basics format. Cassettes are worse than even vinyl, so it must mean my devotion to music is that much greater.” Uh-huh. These romantacizers of the old-school mixtape obviously weren’t around when it was our only option for taking our music on the road. Recording a car tape in real time? Deliver me from that.
Collectibles: Why else would Blink-182 announce the reissue of four of their biggest albums on cassette? It’s not like everyone still has cassette machines lying around the house. There isn’t a single automobile manufacturer that still offers an in-dash cassette player–the last one was the 2010 Lexus SC430–so you’ll have to go back to a model made before then to find one. Still, if you enjoy dust-gathering tchotchkes…
Emerging Nations: I’ll give you this one. Cassettes do have their rugged attributes, making them well suited for hot and dusty places like India, Africa and Indonesia. In places like that, cassettes are definitely A Thing.
Japan: Er, what? Yes, the Japanese continue to hang on to cassettes. Walk into any small store and you’ll find plenty of blank packages for sale. Although the country has a reputation of being gadget-crazy, the truth is that large swaths of Japanese society are technologically conservative. Hey, fax machines are still a big deal in Japan. And let’s not forget that Sony just killed production of Betamax tapes earlier this year, even though they hadn’t made a Beta player since 2002.
I find cassettes to be hateful, backward things whose time has come and gone. But it looks like the cassette still hasn’t received that memo.Just as the Cuban Revolution turns 50, a new rebel uprising is about to take over the streets of Havana, but this time it’s headed by hundreds of zombies.
Panic reigns in the city, and the Communist government blames dissidents financed by the United States. Seeing the chaos, a Cuban slacker decides to open a small business. His slogan: “Juan of the Dead. We kill your loved ones. What can we do for you?”
So goes the plot of the Cuban comedy horror film “Juan of the Dead” (2011), which closes the 13th edition of the Havana Film Festival New York, running Thursday through April 20.
“With this movie, I wanted to talk about the way Cubans respond to problems,” says director Alejandro Brugués, born in Argentina but raised in Cuba.
“Generally, here we have three ways to face trouble: Move on with life as if nothing happened, put up a business and try to make some money out of the matter, or jump into the sea and row to Miami,” jokes Brugués.
But even though the director uses a zombie invasion as a metaphor to speak about Cuba’s issues, he clarifies that his second feature is a comedy.
“There is a universal humor in the film that reaches everyone, regardless if they are from Argentina or Hong Kong.”
“Juan of the Dead,” billed as the first zombie movie filmed in Cuba, was shot on landmark locations around Havana.
“We closed the Malecón for the shoot, and I had it all for myself for three days!” says Brugués, referring to Havana’s famous oceanfront avenue. “I felt like a child in an amusement park.”
This year, the Havana Film Festival New York includes more than 40 films from Latin America, the Caribbean and the U.S. They will screen at the Quad Cinema, the Instituto Cervantes and three other venues in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
The fest will open with Cuban filmmaker Ian Padrón’s debut, “Habanastation” (2011), a comedy about social inequality on the island, seen from the point of view of two children.
The documentaries selection includes “Las Carpetas” (“The Files”) by Maite Rivera Carbonell, about Puerto Ricans who were prosecuted for their political beliefs in the 1960s and ’70s.
As it did last year, the showcase will offer a selection of indigenous cinema, presenting stories from Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia.
“We want to highlight three topics in this theme: The recovery of memory, the current state of indigenous communities and the fact that they themselves narrate their own stories,” explains the festival’s artistic director, Diana Vargas.
The documentary “Nacimos el 31 de diciembre” (“Born on December 31st”) by Priscila Padilla Farfán, narrates the struggle of the Wayuu indigenous community in Colombia’s La Guajira to recover their real names, after they were arbitrarily changed to insulting monikers such as Borracho (Drunk).
mespildora@gmail.com
Havana Film Festival New York
From Thursday to April 20
www.HFFNY.com
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Jordan Henderson and Daniel Sturridge scored twice as Liverpool beat Swansea in a thriller to tighten their grip on fourth place in the Premier League.
Sturridge's opener came two minutes in and Henderson soon bent in a second.
But Jonjo Shelvey pulled one back with a fine 20-yard shot and Wilfried Bony headed in off Martin Skrtel to level.
The two sides of Liverpool Liverpool's 70 goals make them top-scorers in the league, above Manchester City, but only four teams have kept fewer clean sheets in the Premier League this season. And only Newcastle in the top half of the table have conceded more than Liverpool's 35 goals.
Sturridge headed in his second from Luis Suarez's cross but Bony pulled Swansea level from the penalty spot before Henderson stabbed in the winner.
The best and worst of Liverpool was once again on show as the Reds closed the gap to Premier League leaders Chelsea to four points.
But manager Brendan Rodgers was once again relying on his team's attacking class to override its defensive deficiencies as they maintained their bid to end a five-season exile from the Champions League.
There were flashes of fine forward play as Sturridge became only the second player to score in eight consecutive Premier League matches, taking his tally to 18 league goals for the season in the process.
The Reds are now the Premier League's top scorers with 70 goals but looked ragged at the back far too often for Rodgers's comfort.
Media playback is not supported on this device Rodgers salutes 'brilliant win'
Garry Monk's Swansea, who remain four points above the relegation zone, deserve credit for the way they fought back from Liverpool's early goals, and showed no little quality themselves after the exertions of Thursday's goalless draw with Napoli in the Europa League.
The hosts moved in front after just two minutes when Raheem Sterling played through Sturridge, who took the ball around visiting keeper Michel Vorm and clipped it into an empty net.
But the Reds were far from convincing, and Swansea had created two chances for Bony before Henderson doubled their advantage.
Sturridge chased down a long ball from Suarez and drifted in from the right before laying off for Henderson to bend a shot into the top corner.
But two minutes later the visitors made good on their early threat, Nathan Dyer cutting in from the right and feeding former Liverpool man Shelvey, who curled a first-time shot into the top corner off the underside of the bar.
Suarez the creator Suarez has not scored in five matches in all competitions but, with nine, he now has the joint highest number of goal assists in the Premier League - as well as being top scorer with 23.
And Monk's side were level four minutes later when Jonathan de Guzman's free-kick was headed in by Bony via a deflection off Skrtel.
But Liverpool restored their advantage 10 minutes before the break when Philippe Coutinho found Suarez and the Uruguayan lifted a cross to the far post for Sturridge to head in.
Again the lead was destined not to last. Two minutes after the interval Skrtel was penalised for his grapple with Bony in the area and the Swansea striker found the corner with the resulting spot-kick.
As the hosts looked to go back in front, Vorm turned wide from Suarez and Skrtel headed over from the Steven Gerrard corner that followed.
Media playback is not supported on this device Swansea deserved something - Monk
De Guzman bent a free-kick just wide at the other end but with 15 minutes left Henderson stabbed the Reds ahead for the third time.
Suarez's shot was blocked by Ashley Williams and after Vorm blocked Henderson's first shot the England midfielder prodded in the rebound from six yards.
Liverpool were not about to give up the lead again and Gerrard even had a late effort deflected on to the post by Chico Flores as they pressed for a fifth.BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. - A South Florida woman told deputies that she woke up early Friday to find a masked man armed with a knife leaning over her bed. She said the man raped her and then spent the rest of the time before he left talking to her, revealing himself to be her neighbor.
Timothy Walding, 18, of Boynton Beach, was arrested on charges of armed sexual battery and false imprisonment.
According to a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office arrest report, the woman was sleeping in her master bedroom upstairs when she was awakened by a masked man hovering over her. She said the man tied her hands together, undressed her, put on a condom and raped her.
After about 10 minutes, the intruder then forced the woman onto her knees and made her perform oral sex on him, she told deputies.
The woman was crying and pleaded with the intruder not to kill her, so he assured her that he wasn't going to kill her and then put the knife in a holster on the side of his pants, the report said.
After the ordeal, the intruder spent the rest of the time before he left talking to her, taking the time to put her underwear and shorts back on her, she told deputies.
"(The intruder) kept telling her that she knew him," the report said.
She said her attacker "continued talking to her about his life" and said he couldn't imagine leaving two children without a mother. She said he told her how his mother died when he was 12, and the more he spoke, the more she realized that he was "very young."
Finally, she asked the man if he was Walding, who lives on the same street as her, so he took off his mask and revealed his identity, the report said.
The woman asked Walding how he got inside her house, and he told her that he came in through the front door.
"You really should deadbolt your door because I didn't really want to do this, but I had to do it," Walding said, according to the report.
Walding then pulled a fish hook out of his pocket and said he used it to pick the door lock, the report said.
"The suspect told her that he stood outside of her front door for 10 minutes contemplating whether he should do this or not," the report said.
When asked why he decided to do it, Walding answered, "Obviously, it wasn't a spontaneous thing and I had this plan," the report said.
The woman was able to talk Walding into untying her hands and letting her onto the back patio so she could smoke a cigarette, the report said.
While they were outside, Walding said he couldn't go back home because he didn't know what to do and then asked her "if he could make this up to her by doing some yard work or by fixing something around her house," the woman told deputies.
She said no, and Walding then asked her if they could shake hands so that he would know that she wasn't going to say anything to anyone about what happened, the report said. She agreed and they shook hands, she told deputies.
The woman watched Walding walk back to his house, then locked the doors and called 911, she said.
Deputies went to Walding's home and arrested him. He was being held without bond Thursday morning at the main Palm Beach County jail.
Copyright 2017 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.It's hard to believe that the Toronto Zoo's panda cubs squirmed their way into the city's hearts just one year ago.
The Toronto Zoo's two panda cubs hanging out in their enclosure on their first birthday. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
The zoo celebrated Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue's first birthday with a heart-melting video this morning; have a tissue ready.
Happy birthday, little guys!
Some birthday cake and cupcakes for the panda cubs' first birthday party. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
Toronto Zoo staff laid out quite a tasty spread for the birthday boy and girl.
Happy birthday, Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue. The panda cubs turned one years old today. (Martin Trainor/CBC News)
In more serious news, the zoo's also celebrating the fact that, since the cubs were born, a leading international conservation group has advised that giant pandas are no longer considered endangered.
Toronto Zoo staff celebrate the pandas' first birthday. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
Instead, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature says the animals should be downgraded to a "vulnerable" species as their worldwide population has grown to 1,864 — up nearly 270 pandas — since 2004, The Associated Press reported.A second sailfish charges and strikes kayak; South African angler captures video of double hookup, the jump, and how he uses his hat to land the sailfish
A kayak fisherman in South Africa trying to catch queen mackerel to fill the freezer unexpectedly hooked up to two sailfish at once, and captured on video the dramatic moment one of the fish jumped just inches from his kayak.
The photo above is from the video taken by Jasper Pons, 44, who was kayak fishing with a friend off of Westbrook along the eastern coast of South Africa, where he found himself with his hands full, as detailed by Kayak Fish.
As Pons was fighting the first sailfish, a second sailfish charged and struck his kayak and, moments later, ate the second baitfish Pons had in the water. Suddenly he had two sailfish on separate fishing rods.
"I need to pay attention to the second sailfish," he related on the video. "One is going east and one is going south."
That wasn't Pons' only problem. The line with the second sailfish got tangled in the rudder. He put the reel in free spool, allowing line to freely unwind off the reel until his friend Warren came upon the scene to help out.
Warren untangled the line and took the fishing rod from Pons. Soon, the first sailfish was hauling Pons away from his friend, pulling him forwards, backwards, and sideways until he got it close to the boat, where it came out of the water.
Here's the part from the video showing the sailfish jumping close to the kayak; the rest of the video shows him landing the beast, if that interests you. You might want to mute the music:
"My old Penn reel was screaming in agony," Pons told Kayak Fish. "It was a clever sailfish. Pulling hard into the wind, I would battle my kayak round until I was facing upwind, and it would suddenly scream off downwind."
Pons took off his hat to use as a grip to grab the bill of the sailfish once he had the fish close to the kayak. He finally managed to pull the sailfish onto his lap and spread out the majestic sail.
Then he released the fish, as did his friend Warren after he landed the second sailfish.
The entire six-minute video can be seen below. You can see the chaos unfold as Pons battles two sailfish and tries to ensure he's getting everything on video. You can also see at the 18-second mark when the second sailfish strikes the side of his boat.
Not a bad day of fishing, considering the original target was queen mackerel.
More fishing stories on GrindTV
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Bizarre, sea-through creature baffles angler
Muskie anglers enjoy rare world-record spree
Enormous rare sea creature hauled from the depths by Florida fisherman
Follow GrindTV on Google+Our French Earl Grey Tea uses a wonderfully fragrant, medium-bodied black tea as a base and complements it with notes of lavender and pink rose petals, that play with the classic bergamot, to form a refined and restoring infusion.
The ingredients in our organic french earl grey loose leaf tea are:
Earl Grey
Rose Petals
Lavender
All ingredients are 100% Australian certified organic, free of chemicals, additives or flavourings.
This blend contains caffeine!
How to brew loose leaf earl grey tea?
Temperature: 100°C
Time: 3 – 5 minutes
Use 1 heaped teaspoon of loose leaf earl grey per 200ml of water.
Avoid steeping the earl grey infusion for too long, as it will release the bitters.
How to drink french lavender earl grey tea?
We recommend to drink it out of a cup, using your mouth.
Earl Grey Tea can be enjoyed straight up black or with milk and honey, if your taste buds are keen on it.
It is surprisingly refreshing as an iced earl grey during the hot summer months.
Check out our iced tea cocktail recipes.
What are the health benefits of french earl grey tea with lavender and rose?
Our organic blend is naturally high in protective antioxidants and is wonderfully restoring and relaxing, due to the addition of lavender and rose.
The main health benefits of earl grey are:
Cold and flu prevention
In Europe earl grey tea is particularly popular throughout the colder months, as it is believed to be very effective for preventing colds and the onset of flus, due to the bergamot it contains.
Boosting the immune system
Black tea naturally has a high amount of antioxidants, that can help prevent many diseases and infections, which makes it a great immune system booster.
Stabilising energy levels
The amount of caffeine found in early grey tea can provide a much needed “pick me up” in the middle of the day. At the same time however, it is mild enough to have relaxing properties, mainly because of the addition of lavender that we add in our recipe.
Anxiety and stress prevention
The minor amount of caffeine in our french earl grey tea can help achieve clarity and focus, whilst avoiding the adrenally exhaustive, jittery effect of a coffee’s caffeine high.
Further earl grey benefits are:
Heart Health: decreasing ‘bad’ cholesterol
Digestion & Inflammatory Issues: anti-inflammatory effects
If buying earl grey tea online from us is not an option for you, check out where you can buy french lavender earl grey tea in Australia: Find a stockist!
We recommend to call the listed stockist first, and ask about whether they sell the desired blend.
Store out of direct sunlight below 30°C.
Not intended to diagnose in any way. For treatment consult a healthcare professional.Recently I described how to deliver Database-as-a-Service using XaaS (Anything-as-a-Service) in vRealize Automation. In the meantime I added some add-ons to this.
It’s nice to have the ability to create a new database using self-service from vRealize Automation but when the database is running, users may want to edit it’s properties. User may want to add a user to a database to log in with or give users additional rights on the database. So I created a few XaaS services in vRealize Automation to do just that.
Running the script inside the guest OS with vRealize Orchestrator.
Next we need a script which creates a database on an existing SQL Server instance. I used the PowerShell script below:
#---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Database as a Service add-on - MS SQL Server # Create a new database user with db role # Erik Scholten (VMGuru) # January 2017 - Version 1.0 # # Variables: # [COMPUTERNAME] is SQL Server name # [DBUSER] is new dbuser account name # [DBPASSWORD] is password for new dbuser account # [DATABASE] is the database on which the account receives the rights # [DBROLE] is the role the account gets on the database #----------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import SQL Server module Import-Module SQLPS -DisableNameChecking # Replace this with your instance name $instanceName = $env:[COMPUTERNAME] $dbUserName = '[DBUSER]' $dbPassword = '[DBPASSWORD]' $Databases = '[DATABASE]' $roleName = '[DBROLE]' $server = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server -ArgumentList $instanceName [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') | out-null # Login already exists? if ($server.Logins.Contains($dbUserName)) { Write-Host("Create $dbUserName failed because username already exists.") } else { # Define user type and create the user $Login = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Login($server, $dbUserName) $Login.LoginType = 'SqlLogin' $Login.Create($dbPassword) $login.PasswordExpirationEnabled = $false Write-Host("Login $dbUserName created successfully.") foreach($databaseToMap in $Databases) { $database = $server.Databases[$databaseToMap] if ($database.Users[$dbUserName]) { Write-Host("Dropping user $dbUserName on $database.") $database.Users[$dbUserName].Drop() } $dbUser = New-Object ` -TypeName Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.User ` -ArgumentList $database, $dbUserName $dbUser.Login = $loginName $dbUser.Create() Write-Host("User $dbUser created successfully.") #assign database role for a new user $dbrole = $Database.Roles[$roleName] $dbrole.AddMember($dbUserName) $dbrole.Alter() Write-Host("User $dbUser successfully added to $roleName role.") } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 #---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Database as a Service add-on - MS SQL Server # Create a new database user with db role # Erik Scholten (VMGuru) # January 2017 - Version 1.0 # # Variables: # [COMPUTERNAME] is SQL Server name # [DBUSER] is new dbuser account name # [DBPASSWORD] is password for new dbuser account # [DATABASE] is the database on which the account receives the rights # [DBROLE] is the role the account gets on the database #----------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import SQL Server module Import - Module SQLPS - DisableNameChecking # Replace this with your instance name $ instanceName = $ env : [ COMPUTERNAME ] $ dbUserName = '[DBUSER]' $ dbPassword = '[DBPASSWORD]' $ Databases = '[DATABASE]' $ roleName = '[DBROLE]' $ server = New - Object - TypeName Microsoft. SqlServer. Management. Smo. Server - ArgumentList $ instanceName [ System. Reflection. Assembly ] :: LoadWithPartialName ( 'Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO' ) | out - null # Login already exists? if ( $ server. Logins. Contains ( $ dbUserName ) ) { Write - Host ( "Create $dbUserName failed because username already exists." ) } else { # Define user type and create the user $ Login = New - Object Microsoft. SqlServer. Management. Smo. Login ( $ server, $ dbUserName ) $ Login. LoginType = 'SqlLogin' $ Login. Create ( $ dbPassword ) $ login. PasswordExpirationEnabled = $ false Write - Host ( "Login $dbUserName created successfully." ) foreach ( $ databaseToMap in $ Databases ) { $ database = $ server. Databases [ $ databaseToMap ] if ( $ database. Users [ $ dbUserName ] ) { Write - Host ( "Dropping user $dbUserName on $database." ) $ database. Users [ $ dbUserName ]. Drop ( ) } $ dbUser = New - Object ` - TypeName Microsoft. SqlServer. Management. Smo. User ` - ArgumentList $ database, $ dbUserName $ dbUser. Login = $ loginName $ dbUser. Create ( ) Write - Host ( "User $dbUser created successfully." ) #assign database role for a new user $ dbrole = $ Database. Roles [ $ roleName ] $ dbrole. AddMember ( $ dbUserName ) $ dbrole. Alter ( ) Write - Host ( "User $dbUser successfully added to $roleName role." ) } }
Just like the ‘Database-as-a-Service’ we’re going to use the VM Guest Script Manager to run this script inside the database server. You can download the Guest Script Manager package from the VMware Development Center. Once downloaded, import the package into your Orchestrator instance.
Now we need to add the script above to the vRealize Orchestrator by running the ‘Guest Script Manager/Script Management/Add script configuration‘ workflow. Name your imported script ‘Create a database user (code)‘ (I added ‘code’ to the name to distinguish between the code and the actual workflow). Select ‘PowerShell’ as the script type and copy+paste this code in the script content window.
How to call the script?
So we’ve imported the script, now we need to create a workflow to run this script and input the variables which are mentioned in the script comments. This workflow is the actual workflow we’re going to call as XaaS service from vRealize Automation.
So create a new workflow called ‘Create a database user‘.
Drag and drop the workflow element ‘Run script in VM guest’ on your workflow canvas.
Click on Setup button at the top right to set the workflow parameters.
Set ‘scriptConfiguration’ as mapping type ‘Value’, click on input value and type in the filter the name of the script (‘Create a database user (code)’). Select it.
Set ‘scriptVariables‘ mapping type to ‘Value‘ but do not set any input value.
Click ‘Promote‘.
The result should look like this.
Create the XaaS workflow and blueprint
Now we have to retrieve input to fill the script variables mentioned in the script comments. The following input variables need to be provided:
[COMPUTERNAME] which is the SQL Server name.
[DBUSER] is the new dbUser account name.
[DBPASSWORD] is password for new dbuser account.
[DATABASE] is the database on which the account action is performed.
[DBROLE] is the role the account gets on the database.
The For each of these variables we need to add an Action element to the workflow which maps a workflow input. This results in an input prompt when running this workflow.
To do this:
Map DatabaseName: Drag and drop an Action Element on the canvas and place it before the ‘Run script in VM guest’. In the Search Choose the ‘addScriptVariableToArrayOfScriptVariables‘ action. Click on Setup button at the top right to set the workflow parameters. Rename “stringToReplace” with ‘ComputerNameVar‘. Set the mapping type to ‘Value‘. Select ‘Input value’ and set it to ‘[COMPUTERNAME]’. Rename “replacingString” with ‘ComputerName‘. Leave the mapping type on ‘Input‘. Set the Output Parameter Name to ‘scriptVariables‘. Click ‘Promote’.
Do the same for [DBUSER], [DBPASSWORD], [DATABASE] and [DBROLE].
Each mapping should look like this (Example: [DATABASE]):
Your completed workflow should look like this:
Now we need to create an XaaS service in vRealize Automation which calls the workflow that we’ve just created.
Go to ‘vRealize Automation/Design/XaaS Blueprints‘ and select ‘New Blueprint‘. Select the Orchestrator workflow you’ve just created.
Name your XaaS blueprint e.g. ‘Create a database user‘ and version it (1.0.0). Give the inputs nice user friendly input values so users who request this will know what they need to enter in which field. I also created some nice dropdown lists so users do not have to guess the values but select them from a predefined list. For now these are all static values but you can populate the field values dynamically for a more agile approach.
The last step is publishing the XaaS Blueprint, set the correct entitlements and enjoy a new Anything-as-a-Service. You can now request a new database administrator account without bothering the database administrators or ever opening SQL Server Management Studio.Over 93 per cent of Muslim women surveyed had been circumcised in Malaysia
Syahiera Atika, a 19-year-old Malaysian girl has happily embraced western-style capitalism but in contrast strictly follows the local interpretation of Islam as she informed the Vice of her circumcision.
Female circumcision involves the surgical removal of all or part of a woman’s clitoris. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classed this procedure as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
WHO also defines it as an operation that “involves partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”
Syahiera however, rejects the notion that it is inhumane and says that “I’m circumcised because it is required by Islam.” She refers to it as ‘wajib’, which means any religious duty commanded by Allah.
“I don’t think the way we do it here is harmful,” she said, adding that “it protects young girls from pre-marital sex as it is supposed to lower their sex drive. But I am not sure it always works.”
According to a 2012 study conducted by Dr Maznah Dahlui, over 93 per cent of Muslim women surveyed had been circumcised. This made Syahiera among the majority of Muslim women in Malaysia.
Dr Dahlui also noted that the procedure was increasingly performed by trained medical professionals in private clinics, instead of by traditional circumcision practitioners.
Shocking to Western sensibilities, Dr Maznah insisted that Malaysia’s version of the procedure in less invasive than in other parts of the world.
Obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr Mighilia of the Global Ikhwan private clinic located in Rawang, north of Kuala Lumpur, admitted that she performs a more drastic version with a needle or scissors. “I just take a needle and slit off the top of the clitoris, but it is very little,” she said. “Just one millimetre.”
WHO has declared FGM to provide no medical benefits whatsoever. It simply reflects the deep-rooted inequality between the sexes. For this reason, the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 unanimously passed a resolution calling it a “human rights violation” and urged states to ban the practice.
Some Malaysian medical practitioners also defend the practice by passing judgment onto other countries. “We are very much against what is going on in other countries like Sudan,”says Dr Ariza Mohamed, a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynecologist at KPJ Ampang Puteri Specialist Hospital in Kuala Lumpur.
“That is very different from what we practice in Malaysia,” she said adding “and there is a big difference between circumcision and female genital mutilation.”
All Malaysians however, do not support the practice. Syarifatul Adibah, who is the Senior Programme Officer at Sisters in Islam, a local women’s rights group, insists that female circumcision isn’t once mentioned in the Quran.
Instead she points to its popularity as a stemming from an increasingly conservative interpretation of Islam. “Previously it was a cultural practice but now because of Islamisation, people just relate everything to Islam. And when you link something to religion, people here follow it blindly, they don’t enquire,” she explained.
The practice is not banned in Malaysia, although public hospitals are prevented from performing the surgery. More concerning however is that in 2009 the Fatwa Committee of Malaysia’s National Council of Islamic Religious Affairs ruled that female circumcision was obligatory |
nativity table published in the monthly BLS Report. [PDF]
Employment Status by Nativity, April 2016-April 2017 (numbers in 1000s; not seasonally adjusted) Apr-16 Apr-17 Change % Change Foreign born, 16 years and older Civilian population 40,797 41,567 770 1.89% Civilian labor force 26,596 27,402 806 3.03% Participation rate (%) 65.2 65.9 0.7%pts. 1.07% Employed 25,460 26,354 894 3.51% Employment/population % 62.4 63.4 1.0%pts. 1.60% Unemployed 1,137 1,049 -88 -7.74% Unemployment rate (%) 4.3 3.8 -0.5%pts. -11.63% Not in labor force 14,200 14,165 -35 -0.25% Native born, 16 years and older Civilian population 212,172 213,021 849 0.40% Civilian labor force 131,891 132,415 524 0.40% Participation rate (%) 62.2 62.2 0.0%pts. 0.00% Employed 125,615 126,908 1,293 1.03% Employment/population % 59.2 59.6 0.4%pts. 0.68% Unemployed 6,276 5,507 -769 -12.25% Unemployment rate (%) 4.8 4.2 -0.6%pts. -12.50% Not in labor force 80,281 80,606 325 0.40% Source: BLS, The Employment Situation-April 2017, Table A-7, May 5, 2017. PDF
Over the last 12 months (April 2016 to April 2017):
The foreign-born labor force grew seven-times faster than the native-born labor force: 3.03% versus 0.40%. ADVANTAGE IMMIGRANTS
Immigrant employment rose 894,000, up 3.51%, while native-born American employment rose 1.29 million, up 1.03%. ADVANTAGE IMMIGRANTS
The labor-force participation rate (LPR), a sign of worker confidence, rose by 0.7% points for immigrants but remained unchanged for native-born Americans. At 65.9%, the immigrant LPR in April was considerably above that of the native-born (62.2%.) ADVANTAGE IMMIGRANTS
The number of unemployed native-born Americans fell by 769,000 down 12.3%; the number of unemployed immigrants dropped 88,000, off by 7.8%. A DVANTAGE NATIVE-BORN
The population data mirrors the employment surge. After a sharp post-election downtrend, April saw a strong rebound in year-over-year growth:
Change in Foreign-born population from same month prior year (age 16+; in 1,000s; BLS data) July 2016 1,176 Aug. 2016 1,478 Sept. 2016 1,471 Oct. 2016 1,711 Nov. 2016 1,545 Dec. 2016 886 Jan. 2017 351 Feb. 2017 177 Mar. 2017 56 Apr. 2017 770
The immigrant working age population appears to have surged by 770,000 between April 2016 and April 2017. Note that this is still smaller than the 900,000-1 million figure commonly cited as the annual legal influx of all ages. That could mean that the “Trump Effect” is still alive, albeit attenuated, in April. Prior to the election immigrant workforce growth regularly exceeded estimated legal inflow, evidence of the surge of illegal immigration that occurred in Obama’s last year.
(Of course, the foreign-born are only the tip of the immigration iceberg. The true measure of post-1965 immigration impact on the labor market and population would include their U.S.-born children. My estimate: factoring in U.S.-born children virtually doubles immigration’s depression of American wages).
What is happening? Frankly, we are disappointed and surprised by April’s sudden deterioration. The positive trend in American worker displacement and immigrant workforce share had been in place for several months—actually since the election—and was backed by significant anecdotal evidence.
This deterioration could be what statisticians call “noise”—the tendency of data to vary randomly around a major trend. Or it could be that panic among illegals is fading—perhaps because they’ve noted the frustration of Trump’s Executive Orders by rogue federal judges and, of course, the GOP-controlled Congress’ total failure to pass any measure of patriotic immigration reform.
It’s possible the positive trend could resume. But, ultimately, the Trump Administration must act if it is to cut immigration to tighten the labor market and reward its key supporters.
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email him) is President of ESR Research Economic Consultants.Now have the option of choosing a black or white frame!
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A word from the inventor!
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Here is the link he was looking for!CARACAS, Venezuela — On a rooftop bar in Caracas, Venezuelans clad in Ralph Lauren shirts and Gucci shoes sip $16 cocktails and discuss their latest shopping trips to Miami.
These are the sort of people who would fit Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s description of the “fetid oligarchy”: families that, over generations, accumulated fortunes from the country’s vast oil reserves at the expense, Chavez says, of the country’s poor. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those longtime members of Venezuela's upper crust are one or two "boligarchs" — a new political class that has amassed its fortunes by backing Chavez's Bolivarian revolution.
All became increasingly wealthy during an oil boom that saw the price of a barrel of Venezuelan oil rise from $8 when Chavez came to power to a high of $126 last year. The country as a whole has also benefited: The economy has been growing at an annual rate of 8 percent for the past five years, and Chavez has funneled money to social programs. With little foreign investment to worry about, Chavez initially gloated over the fall of Lehman Brothers, blaming it on the failings of capitalism.
But Venezuela is no longer immune. The sharp collapse in oil prices — the Venezuelan crude basket averaged $33.93 last week — has prompted the government to change its rhetoric.
“If this carries on for two or three years, which is possible, one would think that it would lead to difficult consequences,” Finance Minister Ali Rodriguz said on Tuesday.
Some analysts believe Venezuela could feel the pinch sooner — even within the next year. “We are heading towards a certain crisis next year,” said Asdrubal Olivares, director of Ecoanalitica, a financial consultancy firm in Caracas. “What most worries us in 2009 is that we're going to have an economy in stagflation — with a very strong stagnation of the economy and a very, very high level of inflation.”
The government saved up large reserves during the boom years, believed to be in the range of $47 billion, which should see it through the year, said Olivares. But beyond 2009 the outlook is bleak.
Inflation has already been hitting consumers hard. While poverty fell in recent years from 51 percent to 28 percent — in part because of massive government spending on social programs — inflation is now eroding the gains Chavez has made in reducing poverty. Prices rose by more than 30 percent last year, and by as much as 50 percent for essentials such as food.
“In 52 years living here I’ve never seen something like this,” said Pascuale Giacinto, a retired carpenter from Italy now living in Los Simbolos, a middle-class area of the capital. “My pension goes on electricity, telephone bills, but not much else.”
The government has set up food markets that sell basic food staples at controlled prices, but Giacinto said, “I don’t like going there because the things are awful."
Meanwhile, a black market exchange rate for the dollar — almost three times the official price — has encouraged a flight of capital to the tune of $22 billion, Olivares said. In the recent Stanford Bank scandal, it emerged that Venezuelans had invested about $3 billion out of the $9 billion that is believed to have been lost.
Venezuela's economy is tied up in oil, so the decline in oil prices has hit the country hard.
Venezuela depends on oil for about 90 percent of its exports, and oil revenues make up almost 50 percent of its budget. The government claims it is producing about 3.3 million barrels of oil a day, but independent analysts believe the figure is closer 2.7 million barrels a day, of which 700,000 are sold at subsidized prices on the domestic market.
Of the oil that is exported, 500,000 barrels are sold to countries on deferred payment deals under a scheme known as Petrocaribe, while 400,000 barrels that come from the heavy tar fields of the Orinoco Belt in the west of the country cost $15 to $20 a barrel to upgrade into conventional oil, which cuts into profits.
Signs that Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the national oil company, is struggling with its finances emerged earlier this month: It delayed payment of $8 billion to other companies.
“Production is declining because regrettably Venezuela has not been a good steward with its windfalls — with the high price of oil for the last two years,” said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow at the University of Miami. “That money has gone into social programs instead of going back into PDVSA.”
Pinon said that to make Chavez’s popular social programs sustainable, PDVSA should be investing in the maintenance of existing oil wells – and even upping production. He estimates that production fell by 11 percent last year.
Many speculate that the government may be forced to devalue the bolivar, the Venezuelan currency. It has been fixed at a rate of 2.15 to the dollar since 2003, in what was initially intended as a temporary measure to bolster Venezuela’s foreign reserves. But many economists believe a devaluation would provide the liquidity the government needs to maintain its significant public spending.
Rodriguez said Tuesday, however, that he feared a weak bolivar would curtail the government’s ability to import essential commodities — Venezuela imports 70 percent of its food.
Chavez has ruled out cuts in spending on the popular "missions" — projects that have brought free health clinics and literacy classes the country’s many barrios. But he either needs the price of oil to dramatically increase, or he needs to figure out a way to bolster the economy so the programs can continue beyond 2009.
For more on the global economic crisis:BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Poland and the Baltic states are uneasy about Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini’s bid to be European Union foreign policy chief, concerned that she may be soft on Russia, but look unlikely to block her, diplomats said on Monday.
Officials of the four countries declined to comment in public on their reservations about the appointment, due to be debated at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels on Wednesday.
But Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite made clear the former Soviet Baltic states are looking for the successor to Britain’s Catherine Ashton to develop a firm common line with Moscow over its annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine.
“Our main principle is that the person who will be appointed to the foreign policy position has to at least try to be neutral in regard to various differing opinions, and coordinate opinions of everyone - not [just] provide a narrow or very controversial position, especially on Ukraine,” she told reporters in Vilnius.
Baltic diplomats said Mogherini, who has only been foreign minister since February, lacked experience of eastern Europe - the EU’s biggest current geopolitical challenge - and had sent some questionable signals during the Ukraine crisis.
They complained that Rome had been reluctant to impose EU sanctions on Moscow over its behavior in Ukraine - an accusation denied by a source in the Italian Foreign Ministry.
“We have always voted in line with the rest of the EU in support of the sanctions,” the source said.
Opposition to her candidacy was “part of the normal process for a candidate in a complex landscape”, he said, adding that Italy’s position toward Russia had been in practice very similar to that of EU powers Germany and France.
Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said the 10 former communist central and eastern European countries that joined the bloc in 2004 and 2007 want at least one of the top EU jobs to go to someone from their region.
DIALOGUE WITH MOSCOW
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has been lobbying fellow leaders actively in support of Mogherini, 41, a close Socialist ally, making phone calls to several of his peers at the weekend, aides said.
Renzi’s top official on EU policy, Undersecretary for European Affairs Sandro Gozi, defended her against criticism from eastern Europe.
“Federica Mogherini has defended the Italian position and maintained always, even in the most difficult moments, a line of dialogue open with Moscow, which is a position that is in line with the European Union, and in my mind it is a position that demonstrates great common sense,” he said in comments he published on his own Facebook page.
A Baltic official said it was unfortunate that Mogherini had chosen to make her first visit on as holder of the EU’s rotating presidency to Moscow.
In Warsaw, Polish officials declined public comment. Poland has pushed its own foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, for the EU foreign policy job, but he is seen by some west European governments as too confrontational with Russia.
People close to Poland’s governing coalition said Mogherini’s stance on Russia was a problem for them.
“Bearing in mind Italy’s position on the Ukrainian crisis and the generally soft attitude of Italy towards Russia it will be very difficult for us to support... Mogherini,” said a member of parliament for Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civil Platform party, speaking on condition of anonymity.
An EU diplomat in Brussels, reflecting the mood among central and east European countries, said: “We need someone with gravitas. Mogherini is not that person. She is a repetition of Ashton. And we need someone else. She lacks experience.”
However, the misgivings were unlikely to result in her candidacy being blocked, diplomats said, asking not to be named.
One eastern official said his country was “not opposing (Mogherini), but not happy”.General Exclusions
JanSport warranties only apply to JanSport products purchased from authorized dealers. All warranties do not apply to any non-JanSport products like a device, even if packaged or sold with the JanSport product, or property carried in or on a JanSport product. JanSport is not responsible for direct, incidental or consequential damages for any reason including damage resulting from a breach of a warranty or condition such as scratches in a device surface, lost data or destroyed personal property. Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above may not apply to you.
Limited Edition & Special Collection Bags and Backpacks
Bags from limited editions and special collections that cannot be repaired can only be replaced with bags from that same collection, if inventory permits. Bags that are not part of a limited edition or special collection cannot be replaced by a bag that is.
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For warranty questions in other countries, please contact the point of purchase for further information.The AAP is all set to finally keep a promise made during its assembly campaign — a functional ‘mohalla sabha’ in every area in the capital.
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The mohallas have been demarcated on the basis of polling booths and the voters’ list in each area, said AAP leader Atishi Marlena. “We need a certified voters’ list from the Election Commission for each area. We have divided mohalla sabhas on the basis of polling booths. Each sabha will be based around one polling booth,” said Atishi Marlena, who is spearheading the project.
A team of 15 volunteers has completed the task of forming mohalla sabhas in every area, said sources, adding that the process also involved mapping the mohallas, digitising the results and transferring the data to an App.
The App — called My track — will track each mohalla; it will have details of each house and each facility in an area. “We asked our teams to track the boundaries of the mohalla, which will then be recorded. Our revenue or mapping department didn’t have the resources to do this kind of mapping. We have done this within four to five months… officials told us they would have taken two to three years to finish this task,” said Marlena.
The information will be useful while undertaking developmental works in these areas, said sources. The data collected by AAP workers — on the residents and facilities of every area in Delhi — will also come in handy as the party gears up for municipal elections next year.
In congested areas in old Delhi, the AAP team was able to record information about mohallas and trace their boundaries only in the night, said a source.
“These mohallas will be notified in the beginning of the new financial year,” said the source.
Meanwhile, the AAP’s initial concept of mohalla sabha has undergone some changes. Earlier, AAP volunteers and leaders, along with local MLAs, were supposed to organise ‘mohalla sabhas’ to interact with local residents and get to know their demands for the area. However, the government soon realised that the idea was impractical, said sources.“We have budget of Rs 50 lakh per mohalla, but people wanted projects worth crores. Now, we have decided to hold two meetings, one to seek suggestions and the other to hold a vote on which of these are practical,” said Marlena.
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In the forthcoming Delhi Assembly budget session, funds would be allocated for mohalla sabhas, which would be used to improve the infrastructure and facilities in each area.Enhanced vehicle to surface interaction
We already simulate the behavior of the physical dependence on the quality of surface on which a vehicle moves in War Thunder. At the moment we have a universal setup for all surfaces and in its properties it is a cross between standard surfaces(dirt track) and a metalled road (tarmac), which means that driving on top of any terrain is easy, but the tracks will not bite the the surface as effectively as the other, because of this, ground vehicles may drift on sharp turns.
Currently we are working on many different types of surfaces on which vehicles will behave differently. This will not only change the behavior for them, but also will allow us to create tactical diversity on certain maps through the creation of different unequal pathways or routes by using different types of materials.
(Poland with different surfaces setups: - Green - terrain, yellow - road, blue - cobblestone, gray - dirt track)
As an example, tracked vehicles will travel at a their maximum speed on roads, but because of the low traction they will tend to drift on sharp turns. When driving on the standard terrain the situation is quite the opposite - the vehicle will have the maximum traction, but it will be unable to develop high speeds. At the same time climbing up a steep and muddy slope may be much more difficult, because of the lack of the grip with the surface, vehicles can “slide” down.
Now we can add any surface, as well as fully simulate “crossability” for the vehicles on them, so you will have to choose carefully the routes to various capture points, as well as to places that allow you to get an advantage over opponents in one degree or another. Remember that the fastest route to a destination is not always the shortest!
Experience the new mechanics in battle, we are looking forward for your feedback on our forum!Video: Hand-hacking helps budding musicians Video: Hand-hacking helps budding musicians
(Image: Interfaculty Initiative in information Studies/University of Tokyo) (Image: Interfaculty Initiative in information Studies/University of Tokyo)
WANT to learn a musical instrument, but can’t find the time to practise? A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune. No spirits of dead musicians are involved.
PossessedHand, being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, also in Tokyo, electrically stimulates the muscles in the forearm that move your fingers. A belt worn around that part of the subject’s arm contains 28 electrode pads, which flex the joints between the three bones of each finger and the two bones of the thumb, and provide two wrist movements. Users were able to sense the movement of their hands that this produced, even with their eyes closed. “The user’s fingers are controlled without the user’s mind,” explains Emi Tamaki of the University of Tokyo, who led the research.
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Devices that stimulate people’s fingers have been made before, but they used electrodes embedded in the skin, which are invasive, or glove-like devices that make it hard to manipulate an object. Tamaki claims that her device is far more comfortable. “The electric stimulations are similar to low-frequency massage stimulations that are commonly used,” she says.
Having successfully hijacked a hand, the researchers tried to teach it how to play the koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument. Koto players wear different picks on three fingers, but pluck the strings with all five fingertips, so each finger produces a distinctive sound. A koto score tells players which fingers should be moved and when, and from this Tamaki and her team were able to generate instructions telling their device how and when to stimulate the wearer’s muscles.
PossessedHand does not generate enough force to pluck the koto strings, but it could help novice players by teaching them the correct finger movements. Tamaki and her team found that two beginner players made a total of four timing errors when using PossessedHand, compared with 13 when playing unassisted. After prompting from the device, the players also made one less mistake about which finger to use.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the players found it unsettling to have the device move their hand by itself. “I felt like my body was hacked,” said one. Tamaki is confident that people will get used to the idea once they see how useful it can be: “We believe convenient technology will overcome a feeling of fear.”
“It can be unsettling to have your hand move by itself: ‘I felt like my body was hacked’”
As well as helping would-be musicians, PossessedHand could be used to rehabilitate people who have suffered a stroke or other injury that impairs muscle control. Therapists already use electrical muscle stimulation to help these people, but existing non-invasive devices can only achieve crude movements such as contracting the entire arm.
Henrik Gollee, who researches rehabilitation devices at the University of Glasgow, UK, says PossessedHand could help patients train a wider range of movements. “I was surprised by the level of fine movement they can actually achieve,” he says.
Simon Holland, director of the Music Computing Lab at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, points out that there is a big difference between learning to play one song and being a competent musician. “You might learn a fingering and be able to reproduce that performance, without necessarily being able to perform simple variants,” he says.He’s a virtual dictator who presides over a virtual one-party state controlled by his own ethnic minority. True, he has been elected multiple times, but he relies on violence and intimidation to win “mind-bogglingly one-sided elections.” (1) In the last election, his party won all but two of 546 seats in parliament. (2)
When opposition supporters objected to one of his improbable election victories, he ordered regime forces to open fire, “killing 193 and wounding hundreds. Thousands of opposition leaders and supporters were rounded up and detained.” (3) Opponents who weren’t jailed were denied food aid, jobs and other social benefits. (4)
A rebellion against his regime has been met by “brutal campaigns” involving rape and the killing of his own people. (5) Last year, he sentenced two Western journalists to 11 years in prison for reporting on rebel groups fighting to overthrow his tyrannical regime. (6) And in 2006, he sent his forces into a neighbouring country to occupy it militarily, because it was weak and unable to defend itself.
Syria’s Bashar al-Asad?
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe?
The description fits the picture painted of these two leaders by the US State Department and its echo chamber, the Western mass media. But it is neither of these men. Both are reviled in Washington—and so automatically by the Western press—for reasons allegedly having to do with their bad attitudes to democracy and human rights and so it’s easy to believe the leader depicted above is one of them.
But the real reason the US State Department–and in train the mimetic Western media—treat these men as heinous criminals has to do with their attitudes to Western free enterprise and domination from abroad. Neither man has been willing to open his country to untrammelled exploitation by foreigners (or in Zimbabwe’s case to the descendants of settlers.) Neither votes in the United Nations as Washington directs, and neither is willing to act as a military proxy for the Pentagon.
But Meles Zenawi, the leader I’ve described above—the dictator you haven’t heard about—was willing to do all these things.
Meles, the prime minister of Ethiopia, died last Monday. An anti-Communist, he dropped out of medical school in the 1970s to fight Ethiopia’s then Marxist-Leninist government. As prime minister, he shepherded Ethiopia through a free-market, free-enterprise takeover that opened Ethiopia’s economy to foreign investors. (7) In 2006, when the United States asked him to invade neighbouring Somalia, Meles—the uncompromising local agent of US interests—was only too happy to comply.
For his services the Ethiopian strongman was showered with aid—$1 billion from Washington in 2010, and nearly the same amount last year. (8) And his “military and security services” are celebrated in Washington as “among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favourite partners…in Africa.” (9)
While Meles was the kind of leader Washington professes to revile, there were no campaigns for Meles’s removal engineered by the US State Department, and then taken up by a compliant mass media, and from there by liberals, soft-leftists, non-violent pro-democracy activists, and “no-fly-zone-arms-to-the-rebels” Trotskyists. All of these forces were too busy trying to outdo each other in denouncing the rogue’s gallery of socialists and economic nationalists Washington trotted out for disdain, allegedly because they hate democracy and human rights, but actually because they hate foreign domination. Meles never made Washington’s list of rogues. Nor by consequence the Western mass media’s. Nor by consequence the aforesaid leftists’.
Writing Meles’ obituary, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman felt moved to explain the gulf between Washington’s rhetoric about supporting democracy and human rights, and its practice of supporting their very enemies.
“Ethiopia,” wrote Gettleman, “is hardly alone in raising difficult questions on how the United States should balance interests and principles.” Contra Gettleman, the trouble here is that there is no balance between interests and principles. US interests—which is to say the interests of the one percent—vastly outweigh principles, which is why Washington continues to support leaders like Meles and tyrants in the Gulf. Principles are simply rhetoric to cover up the rape of other countries in the pursuit of profit.
“Saudi Arabia,” continued Gettleman, “is an obvious example (of interests trumping principles), a country where women are deprived of many rights and there is almost no religious freedom. Still, it remains one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: oil.”
Right, but not oil, as a resource US consumers and industry depend on that can’t be obtained elsewhere. Indeed, the United States is one of the world’s top oil producers and more than half of US oil is sourced domestically. Neighbouring Canada supplies as much oil to the United States as do all of the oil producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East combined. (10) The loss of Saudi Arabia as an ally wouldn’t leave the United States short of oil. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia is a source of only a small part of the oil the United States consumes. But it is a source of gargantuan oil profits for US businesses, not only directly, but through the recycling of petro-dollars through US banks. Saudi Arabia remains one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: not oil itself, but for what it delivers–immense profits.
Gettleman went on to point out that, “In Africa, the United States cooperates with several governments that are essentially one-party states, dominated by a single-man, despite a commitment to promoting democracy.” (11) But he didn’t say why. If it’s oil profits in Saudi Arabia, what is it in Africa? The Wall Street Journal is more forthcoming. Meles transformed a Communist-controlled economy by “loosening up of lucrative industries” and attracting “investment in agriculture and manufacturing.” (12) In other words, he helped make US investors—the one percent— richer.
Meanwhile, leaders who have resisted their country’s exploitation by the West’s one percent have been destabilized, sanctioned, bombed, and—with the help of plenty of leftists—tarred by the blackest campaigns of vilification.
1. Jeffrey Gettleman (a), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
2. Peter Wonacott, “Ethiopia in flux after leader dies”, The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2012.
3. Wonacott
4. Gettleman (a)
5. Jeffrey Gettleman (b), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
6. Gettleman (a)
7. Wonacott
8. Wonacott
9. Gettleman (a)
10. Danile Yergin, “America’s new energy security”, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2011; Juliet Eilperin, “Canadian government overhauling environmental rules to aid oil extraction”, The Washington Post, June 3, 2012; Sheila McNulty and Ed Crooks, “US groups unlock secret recipe for oil”, The Financial Times, March 3, 2011.
11. Gettleman (b)
12. Wonacott
AdvertisementsStudy shows Austin diners are some of the best tippers in the country
Maybe it’s because many Austinites have worked in the service industry. Maybe it’s because the average consumer here is sensitive to the city’s high cost of living. Maybe it’s simply the metrics of the study and data compiled. Regardless, July consumer data tracked by Square, “which provides transaction software and related credit card-processing equipment to retailers throughout the United States,” according to the Austin Business Journal, shows that people in Austin (at least in July) are really good tippers.
The data, analyzed and charted by San Francisco Business Chronicle and the Houston Business Journal, revealed that the average consumer tipped 16.7 percent in July, just behind San Antonio at 16.8 percent. The data came from “retailers ranging from small businesses to those as large as Whole Foods Market Inc.,” according to the Chronicle and Journal, though you can’t tip on your card at the Whole Foods in downtown Austin, so, who knows. Anywho …
Austin ranked #5 among the Top 30 cities in America, while Pittsburgh was #1 at 17.6 percent. Dallas and Houston came in tied for 9th, at 16.3 percent. Where do you apparently not want a job in the service industry? Cleveland, which came in 30th, with an average tip of 14 percent. Check out the full list and graphics here.From what we’ve seen and been told so far, the Quicksilver we see in Avengers: Age of Ultron is going to be pretty faithful to the one we’ve known for years in the pages of Marvel Comics. Runs really fast, protective of his sister, and probably the owner of a somewhat abrasive personality. That’s Pietro in a nutshell.
As for the Scarlet Witch, she might be a little more of a departure. I think Joss Whedon and company will present her character so that it feels familiar to comic fans, but her powers are definitely going to be different.
Here’s how Elizabeth Olsen, who is playing Scarlet Witch, described Wanda’s abilities to Empire Magazine (via ComicBookMovie.com):
The extent of her powers isn’t fully explored in Ultron. But she can manipulate objects. And she has visions, and she has the ability to share them.
To me that, sounds like telekinesis and clairvoyance, two powers that aren’t really in Scarlet Witch’s repertoire in print. Normally, the grouchy old comic book fan in me would start complaining here, but I’m actually alright with this.
Understanding why involves a discussion of Wanda’s powers in the source material, and how they’ve been expanded and abused over the years. When she first hit the scene, the Scarlet Witch had the mutant ability to create “hexes” that caused highly improbable events to happen. She couldn’t usually control them, but they always worked to her benefit. So if you fired a gun at Wanda and it had a 1-in-1000 chance of jamming, it was closer to 1-in-1 if she hexed you.
Or, maybe a wall you’re standing by would all of a sudden turn magnetic, and you’d suddenly find yourself disarmed:
Probability manipulation is a cool, unique power, and one that Tony Stark would no doubt love, since it involves science, or at least math. It’s also difficult to explain without quite a bit of exposition. Age of Ultron is going to have all the Avengers we know and love, plus Ultron, Vision, the twins and even more new characters. We don’t have time for an info dump on Wanda’s powers, so tossing out the hexes is a good choice.
Gradually, writers decided to play up the “Witch” aspect of Scarlet Witch, giving her honest to goodness chaos magic as well. Combined with her talent for making the impossible possible, she ended up as Marvel’s biggest deus ex machina, able to do things like ridding the world of most of its mutants and overwriting reality itself. It got a bit ridiculous at times, to the point where when someone would ask me what exactly Wanda could do, I’d just shrug and say, “Whatever the writer wants her to do.”
Even at a less ridiculous level, chaos magic isn’t a can of worms we need to open in the Marvel Cinematic Universe just yet. We haven’t even been introduced to magic in general — though that will change once Doctor Strange arrives — and Marvel movies have always tended toward sci-fi explanations over mystical ones (see: Thor and the Asgardians).
That leaves us with manipulating objects and having vision, which seem perfect for Scarlet Witch, at least for now. They’re abilities that appear “witchy” enough, but also could easily be explained as mental powers, like with the ever popular “using more than 10 percent of her brain” line, than as the result of some otherwordly energy source. We haven’t seen any MCU characters with those abilities so far, and they don’t exclude Wanda from being able to do even more in subsequent appearances.
We won’t know for sure until May, but this has all the appearances of the rare case where deviating from the comics was the wisest course. I want to see a Scarlet Witch I can easily understand in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and if it has to be one different from the version I’m reading at the most basic level, I’m just fine with that.City Reports 14,000 Gallon Sewer Overflow
Baltimore public works officials say a sanitary sewer overflowed into the Jones Falls early Friday, due to heavy overnight rains.
The more than 14,000 gallon overflow stopped around 5:30. It happened at a century-old structured overflow at North Charles and West Lanvale streets. Such overflow points are being phased out as part of the city's $1 billion consent decree with federal regulators. The structures act as a release valve when the pipes are |
She stopped taking it for granted that most of the children got a good night’s sleep, had their own beds to sleep in, and ate enough before arriving at school.
With Patrick, she began scheduling regular phone calls with his mother. “I had to cultivate that relationship, but when he found out we talked almost once a week, he started changing his behavior,” Davis says.
It took Davis at least three years of teaching in South L.A. before she began to feel truly confident in her relationships with her students and their families. She sought advice from veteran mentor teachers and signed up for as many professional development sessions as she could fit into her schedule. She learned to scour catalogs for books featuring black American and Latino protagonists that looked like her students. She adopted classroom management techniques that didn’t disproportionately single out black boys, an unfair but common practice in urban schools. And she figured out how to talk to her students about the beauty and linguistic variations of the language they spoke at home—usually African American Vernacular—and the importance of being able to switch into standard English when necessary.
Although Davis was able to become a more culturally sensitive educator over time, other teachers struggle to make that transition even with specialized training and support. About 17 percent of teachers nationally leave the profession altogether at the four-year mark. While those who leave cite a wide range of working conditions for doing so including a lack of mentorship, teachers in high-poverty schools are more likely to depart during the first year than those in lower-poverty schools. In an attempt to remedy that problem, school districts across the nation offer professional development training focusing on culturally relevant teaching techniques.
If progress has been slow with teaching cultural competency, Sally Campbell Galman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s College of Education, says part of the problem is that so many teacher trainers are older, white academics who are uneasy facilitating conversations about race.
Galman says that teacher trainers have to discuss openly their own white privilege—no matter how uncomfortable that might make them feel—if they want to be successful mentors. “If the white people aren’t ready, that’s just sad for the white people,” she says. “Nobody else gets to wait until they’re ready to deal with racism … I couldn’t look my students of color in the eye if I said, ‘I’m sorry, the white people aren’t ready … let’s skip it for today.’ ”
Galman adds that in an era of Common Core and standardized testing, too few programs allocate much time for training teachers in cultural competence. The vast majority of educators still have to figure it out on the job.
* * *
Davis meeting with Marisol Ceniseros and Michael Ceniseros during a parent-teacher conference. Joe Leavenworth/Slate
Today, 14 years after she became a teacher, Davis helps other teachers become more culturally competent with their students within Manchester Avenue Elementary, where she’s been for the last three years. In her new coaching role at the school, Davis focuses on helping educators engage with students who struggle most with the English language. Her official title is “standard English language coach,” a new position that the Los Angeles school district is trying out in 10 schools with high numbers of black and Latino students who have a hard time mastering academic English.
In practice, Davis helps teachers recognize their own biases and reflect on how those biases influence their expectations of students and approach to discipline. She also provides guidance in choosing books and other materials that the children will be able to relate to. She’s the only coach who’s not a person of color and only one of three white teachers at her school. “Obviously, the parents and the kids can see that [Davis] is Caucasian … and she’s different in that way,” says Kandice McLurkin, the district’s pre–K–12 coordinator and Davis’ supervisor. “But they can also see that she cares. She truly cares. And I think that’s why parents and kids open up to her.”
The end results of Davis’ efforts were apparent one Friday in late February, when she met with two teachers. Huddled around a low bean-shaped table in chairs built for kids half their size, Davis reported that many of the school’s most struggling readers had made measurable improvements. She had the spreadsheets in hand to back her up. But one boy, J.J., had not made much progress. When she came to the subject of J.J., Davis chewed her lip—a habit when she presents worrisome news.
J.J., a third-grader who should be able to read words fluently this late in the school year, still grappled with blending sounds together. It was a step back for the boy, who had been making progress before the winter break. “I’m also concerned that some of that could be what’s going on at home with him,” said Davis.
Although Davis is no longer at the helm of her own class, she continues to be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of student’s lives and remains in close contact with many of their parents, including J.J.’s. The three women discussed what to do next, eventually agreeing to transfer J.J. to a younger group—one that was still working on blending words. Davis promised she’d pull him aside before the end of the day to tell him about the change—“so he understands why it’s happening.” Any type of instability or disruption in routine is a trigger for J.J., she explained.
Davis hugs Michael Ceniseros at dismissal time. Joe Leavenworth/Slate
To an outsider it may appear an obvious step to take, but teachers commonly fail to communicate with parents and students about why they do what they do. By looping J.J. and his parents into the process, Davis hopes to build trust and accountability on all sides.
If there is a secret sauce to becoming a culturally competent teacher—white or not—Davis says it is time. Throughout those early years, she spent upwards of 13 hours a day on the job. When she scheduled parent-teacher conferences and only a handful of parents showed up, she made arrangements to meet them at fast-food restaurants at night or on the weekends. When students invited her to church choir recitals or local soccer league games, she made it a point to show up with flowers or orange slices. When kids confessed they had no books at home, she scrounged for sales at nearby bookstores.
“I do think maybe white, middle-class teachers have a hard time because they don’t know what it’s like to live in poor communities, but it’s not impossible,” she says, adding that too many teachers abandon the profession before figuring it out.
“Basically, there are no short cuts.”
Tomorrow’s Test is a weeklong series looking at the challenges, tensions, and opportunities as the United States shifts to a majority-minority student population in its public schools—a milestone the country as a whole will reach within the next generation. It is a collaboration with the Teacher Project at Columbia Journalism School, a nonprofit education reporting fellowship.
Read more from Tomorrow’s Test."Rick and Morty" has been off the air for nearly 18 months. And it seems like the wait for the third season is nearly over with the second episode titled "Rickmancing the Stone" expected to air sometime in the summer. The first episode, titled "The Rickshank Rickdemption," was suddenly released on April Fools' Day after fans were kept in the dark about the launch date of the new season.
Adult Swim's impromptu release saw steady progression from season 2 storylines. After the Galactic Federation invaded Earth, genius siblings Summer and Morty summoned the Council of Ricks in pursuit of their imprisoned grandfather. Rick C-137, in trademark Rick fashion, managed to transport his mind into one of the other Ricks to crash the meeting of the council before killing the rest of his doppelgangers.
The episode also teased a brewing rivalry between Rick and Morty, the two primary characters, after Morty and his sister set out to rescue their genius grandfather. “Who's stupid now, bi*ch?” reacted an annoyed Morty after he shot Rick in the head with a fake gun. After realising that it was a fake gun, Morty mumbled, “Uh, good thing I saw that note.”
There was also another subplot that saw Morty explaining to his sister that “Rick is hardly a hero who bails on things and leaves whole worlds behind." The siblings then set off to rescue Rick from the Galactic Federation prison.
'Rick and Morty' season 3 won't feature Mr. Meeseeks
Meanwhile, Ryan Ridley, one of the writers on Rick and Morty, recently told the Y Combinator podcast that Mr. Meeseeks won't be making a comeback in the third season. The blue humanoid creature became a fan-favourite during the show's opening season but was not featured in season 2.
“We’ve talked about how we’d bring back Meeseeks, and if we were… if we’re going to bother to do it. We’d want to really explore a different aspect of it. But that’s one way to do it, right there, is to show what the inside of a Meeseeks box looks like. That would have been really cool," said Rildley, via Inverse.
During a 2015 Comic Con, co-creator Dan Harmon made a “personal promise” that Mr. Meeseeks would return for Rick and Morty Season 3. “I’m going to force Mr. Meeseeks into Season 3. There was a heavy impulse in Season 2 to not call anything back from Season 1." However, it seems like Mr. Meeseeks won't be featured during any of the remaining 13 episodes of Rick and Morty Season 3.
'Rick and Morty' season 3 release date: 13 more episodes from July
To promote the third season of the animated series, a giant Rick is reportedly going to drive across the United States this summer in his "RickMobile." Rick and Morty season 3 episode 2 titled "Rickmancing the Stone" will air sometime over the summer. If the previous season is anything to go by, episode two could air in July.With British people and spirituality, 'it's complicated' – and many young people are opting out altogther
While religious issues continue to stir controversy in American politics, they haven’t featured at all in the general election campaign in the United Kingdom, despite the fact that this time around two major party leaders – Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband – are openly atheists. Part of the explanation may be cultural – as Tony Blair said in 2013, “One big difference between the U.S. and the U.K. is that it’s okay to talk about faith openly. In the U.K. we’re a little more... British about that.”
But as a new YouGov survey for the Times shows, the lack of religiosity in British politics also reflects the varied and often non-traditional beliefs of many British voters.
Overall, a third (33%) of British adults do not believe in God or a greater spiritual power of any kind – roughly the same number as believe in “a God” (32%). The rest either believe in a higher power but not a God (20%) or don’t know what they believe (14%). This is a slight shift from 2012, when YouGov found that 37% believed in a God, and 29% did not believe in a God or a higher spiritual power.
Younger Britons tend towards non-belief. Only 25% of 18-24 year olds believe in a God and 46% deny the existence of any greater spiritual power whatsoever. Among over-60s the numbers are flipped: 41% believe in a God and 24% are non-spiritual.
In comparison, Gallup has consistently found more than nine in ten Americans believe in God or a universal spirit of some kind.
Religion
The findings also show that 42% of British adults don’t have any religion, while about half (49%) identify as Christian.
Here, too, there are big differences between older and younger generations. 60% of 18-24 year olds and 53% of 25-39 year olds have no religion, compared to 41% of 40-59 year olds and just 26% of over-60s.
The survey also reveals how much British Christian identity does not line up with a conventional belief in God.
Only 55% of self-identified Christians believe in a God while 23% believe in “some sort of greater spiritual power”, but not a God. Nearly one in ten Christians (9%) don’t believe in any higher power, and 12% don’t know what they believe in. At the same time, 22% of non-religious people believe in some kind of higher power.
This may have something to do with having an officially established church. As YouGov's previous research has shown, most people consider Britain to be a "Christian" country, even though most people don't see themselves as religious.
PA image
See the full poll resultsThis weekend, almost 400 of the best weightlifters in the United States will be invading Chicago for the 2017 USA Weightlifting (USAW) National Championships. That means there will be over twenty thousand members of USAW, and even more weightlifting fans around the world, not competing this weekend. With a live webcast that will be providing all of the lifts, available for free, why not get a group of friends together and compete in Fantasy Weightlifting!
Fantasy Weightlifting?
Yes, just like American Football and Baseball, a group of weightlifters from the Houndwood Weightlifting Team in New Jersey have devised a way to compete against each other with an imaginary team based on actual results. These teams compete based on the statistical performance of the real weightlifters in actual competition. This performance is converted into points that are compiled and totaled according to a roster selected by each fantasy team’s manager. With over 56 million people in the United States already playing fantasy sports, it was only a matter of time until someone developed the game to be revolved around weightlifting.
Fantasy Weightlifting was developed by Chris Hernandez, Domenic Aversa, Christian Wagner and Joe Wagner, prior to the 2015 World Championships in Houston, Texas. In discussing the origins of the game with Aversa, he told me, “Initially it was pretty basic. Scoring was based on medals won and there were only a few of us from the gym. Now there are a lot more people into the game and we have a big draft party before large competitions, we really get into it.”
How Do I Play?
It is pretty simple really. The main requirements are:
Download this Scoring Spreadsheet
Ability to follow results from USAW National Championships
A group of friends to compete against (optional)
The scoring spreadsheet is where the statistical performance is tracked. It was originally created by the weightlifters from Houndwood and has been re-engineered by a guy from corporate America to make it as user friendly as possible.
It is currently created for up to five teams to compete against each other. Each team is comprised of 8 men and 8 women. If you want all your men in the 56KG weight category and all your women in the 90KG+ category that is fine; or mix and match your team as you wish.
Every athlete lifting in an A session (as of the May 5th start list) has been populated into the spreadsheet as an option to select onto your team. It is very possible an athlete in another session will win a medal, however with all due respect, it was a lot of data entry and we had to draw the line somewhere. Cells B2 through B9 have drop down boxes for the men, and cells B12 through B19 have drop down boxes for the women. When a team selects an athlete, their entry total and Weight category will automatically appear in the spreadsheet.
Athlete selection is encouraged to be in a traditional fantasy format where the team that selects first in the 1st round will select last in the 2nd round and 1st again in the 3rd round. The below graph illustrates this, with Team 1 making the 1st, 10th and 11th overall selections in this example:
How Does Scoring Work?
There are 5 potential ways an athlete can earn (or lose) points for your team.
Top 6 place finish will earn points on an escalating scale from 1 to 6 points. On the flip side, if an athlete bombs out, they lose your team 3 points.
If they earn a medal in the snatch, they can earn points on an escalating scale from 1 to 3 points.
If they earn a medal in the clean and jerk, they can earn points on an escalating scale from 1 to 3 points.
If they set a new American Record (any age category) – they will earn 2 bonus points per kilo. So if Colin Burns sets a new record in the snatch by 1 kilo, his fantasy team will earn 2 more points.
If the athlete successfully makes all six attempts, they earn bonus points for their fantasy team.
All these fields need to be entered via drop-down selections based on the actual results. However the scoring is automatic and the scoreboard sheet will give a points comparison based on the data entered and show how many athletes each team has to go.
Good luck to everyone lifting in Chicago and everyone following along at home! Let us know in the comments below who is on your fantasy team this year? Who do you think will score the most points for their fantasy team? Who are some sleeper picks that everyone needs to know about?
Featured image: @roblympian on InstagramOrigin Edit
The Super Bowl is currently played on the first Sunday in February. This is due to the current NFL schedule which consists of the opening weekend of the season being held immediately after Labor Day (the first Monday in September), the 17-week regular season (where teams each play 16 games and have one bye), the first three rounds of the playoffs, and the Super Bowl two weeks after the two Conference Championship Games, which is the next week after the Pro Bowl. This schedule has been in effect since Super Bowl XXXVIII in February 2004. The date of the Super Bowl can thus be determined from the date of the preceding Labor Day. For example, Labor Day in 2015 occurred on September 7; therefore the next Super Bowl was scheduled exactly five months later on February 7, 2016. Originally, the game took place in early to mid-January. For Super Bowl I there was only one round of playoffs: the pre-merger NFL and AFL Championship Games. The addition of two playoff rounds (first in 1967 and then in 1978), an increase in regular season games from 14 to 16 (1978), and the establishment of one bye-week per team (1990) have caused the Super Bowl to be played later. Partially offsetting these season-lengthening effects, simultaneous with the addition of two regular season games in 1978, the season was started earlier. Prior to 1978, the season started as late as September 21. Now, since Labor Day is always the first Monday of September, September 13 is the latest possible date for the first full Sunday set of games (Since 2002, the regular season has started with the Kickoff Game on the first Thursday after Labor Day). The earliest possible season start date is September 7.
Game history Edit
Television coverage and ratings Edit
Entertainment Edit
Venue Edit
Super Bowl trademark Edit
Use of the phrase "world champions" Edit
See also Edit
References EditOF COURSE: Progressive Activists Beg Obama to End Religious Protections Enacted by Bush
Progressive hatred for freedom of speech and the right to bear arms is dwarfed by their contempt for religious liberty, especially when it comes to Christianity.
Now that the end of Obama’s horrible presidency is in sight, they’re scrambling to get everything they ever wanted and their latest focus is on religious protections enacted by President George W. Bush.
Chris Geidner of the left wing site Buzzfeed reported:
Progressive Groups Ask Obama To End Bush-Era Religious Protection On Thursday morning, 130 civil rights and religious organizations, unions, and other progressive groups sent a letter to President Obama urging that he direct the Justice Department to reverse a Bush-era legal opinion about the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The 2007 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that, under RFRA, religious organizations seeking federal grants could not be forced to adhere to religious nondiscrimination laws in hiring. The 130 organizations — including the ACLU, Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Campaign, NAACP, and Planned Parenthood — counter in their letter to Obama that the opinion “relies on flawed legal analysis” that RFRA “provides a blanket override of a statutory non-discrimination provision.”
As usual, for the left it’s all about money and control:
In a 2011 analysis from the Federalist Society defending to OLC Memo, however, Derek Gaubatz wrote, “The outcome of this debate [over whether to keep or reverse the OLC Memo] will affect the ability of faith-based providers who engage in religious hiring preferences to compete with secular and other faith-based organizations for federal social service grants.”
The letter can be read here as well as the list of organizations behind the letter which is a virtual who’s who of left wing activists from big unions, gay groups, feminists and atheists to other assorted social justice warriors.
(Image: Source)Wow. Its been quite a while since I’ve written a blog. Excuse the absence, I had a lot of things changing in my personal life, to deal with, and been quite busy doing photo and video work. However the photo I took yesterday, deserves a blog post, because I never thought it would make such an impact.
First off a little back story. Heather Byrd and I are friends on Facebook, basically through the photo community with her being a model. We hadn’t really spoken until a couple weeks ago. I reached out to her to do a beauty shoot after I saw she was going through chemo treatments from leukemia. I thought this would be an awesome opportunity to showcase such beauty through a troubling time. She agreed to the shoot, and we set up a date for a few weeks out. Over that time, I kept thinking about the shoot. If you know anything about me or my style of photography, its that I like to tell a story. While I do like beauty work, and can appreciate how much goes into it, for me, it just doesn’t inspire me as much as making a visually thought provoking image. Im also known for doing things that are more on the comedic side of photography, so tackling such a serious topic was difficult for me.
I reached out to my team and told them I didn’t wanna do the standard beauty shot, that there was more to this story. We all brainstormed ideas, and with the help of my creative director Andi, we came up with out own version of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” seen below:
The painting shows Venus being born from the sea, and there are a few different interpretations of it, but one fact is commonly found in each one, that Venus was the epitome of beauty and intelligence. It would be a perfect concept, but would need a modern and thought provoking twist. Instead of the beauty of the forest and water behind her, it would be replaced with the coldness and drab colors of an old hospital room and bed. Instead of a woman draping Venus in beautiful cloth, a nurse would be covering her with a hospital gown. Instead of the two wrapped in love to her side, two doctors would be there, one with oxygen mask, the other with syringes and a chart. And finally, instead of her being presented on a shell where she is born, she would be standing on a pile of her own clothes, and wig.
Perfect. I called heather immediately asking how she would feel about doing the scene, and how she would feel about doing it nude. Thankfully she said yes.
I already knew a perfect location for the shoot and had the wheels in motion. I reached out to some friends to play the roles of the doctors and nurses. A huge thanks to Jessie, and Allister for letting us use some medical equipment and to Lamont for agreeing to play another role as doctor last minute.
As with any shoot comes challenges. First off the room we were shooting in was much smaller than I thought it would be, not much bigger than a jail cell, which actually added to the feel of the photo, but made lighting difficult. Second one of our props fell though last minute, the hospital bed. Andi improvisd and got one together using items we found in a nearby dumpster.
Finally the biggest challenge. Satisfaction. I always say its one thing to let down a client, its another to let down yourself. This photo HAD to be perfect, and to be 100% honest. I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous on a shoot. The idea was such a “big” concept, people took time out of their days, Heather drove nearly 3 hours for this. There was no room, for guessing lighting, or hours of setup and shoot. This had to work.
For lighting, I wanted to room to look very flat and bland. i put a 8 foot parabolic reflector way up in the ceiling with a white lightning x3200 head powered nearly all the way down. This was set to underexpose the room by about a full stop, just so I could get a base exposure. The surrounding white walls, would also help me keep light bouncing back on the subjects. The next light to set up was the light behind Heather, to show her glowing. This was an alien bee (simply due to the size of the light) 1600 at 1/8th power, and we would put just a bit of fog in between her and the light to make sure we got the glow we wanted. This light was also a great rim for the doctors and nurses too to draw them off the background. The final light was a large diffused beauty dish just left of Heather, to light her individually from the rest of the lights and to have her stand up properly. This lighting setup basically give me a natural vignette to the entire photo, meaning there was actually very little to do in post, other than to cool the color down a bit. I shot this with my Canon 6D, settings were 1/160, f/7.1, ISO160 and used my Tamron 24-70 VC/2.8 zoomed into 36mm. Another thing I didn’t touch on, was my camera was tripoded directly against the opposite wall of the room, meaning I used the 6D’s built in wi-fi and my iPhone to take the picture. I really love shooting this way, as it gets me from behind the camera, and allows me to direct the scene better.
We only shot for a total of 20 minutes. Thats all it took, and thats all that was needed. The picture we used was actually the last frame we took. Why was it the last frame? because as soon as I saw it, I knew THAT was the one.
I knew we had created something beautiful and special. I never could’ve guess what would happen next…
Mere minutes after posting the photo on Facebook, it received amazing praises. People related to it, and it brought something out in them. I recieveced so many wonderful and beautiful comments it was overwhelming. Things like this:
and
From complete strangers who had seen the photo, and was touched by it. Currently the photo has 371 likes (and growing) on my page and has been shared 98 times:
as well as 436 like on the Fstoppers Facebook page:
In addition two of my favorite photographers Zack Arias, and Jeremy Cowart took the time to say something about it:
Its amazing. For the first time in my professional photo career I knew what it felt to make a picture that actually moved people, to feel. It really is an unmatched feeling. It wasn’t about how much money I was going to make, or how many magazines the photo ended up in, what mattered was making a compelling image that people can relate to, understand, and learn from. What mattered was showing that in any situation, any at all, beauty can be found not in fancy clothes, or makeup, but in simply the strength in determination of an individual with zero desire of giving up.
A huge thank you to Heather Byrd for being so brave and courageous enough to do this photo with me. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for allowing me into your world for only a brief second. Another Huge thanks to the actors in this photo, Jessie, Allister, and Lamont. Without you guys this wouldn’t have been possible. Last but not least thank you to my team, my makeup artist Jessie Campbell, and Andi Bridges for all their help with pulling this shoot together and for donating your time to Heather and I. Lighting Diagram below:Boys and girls are different. It seems so obvious. Yet some medical conditions may cause some of those differences to become confused. And then telling apart boys from girls can prove challenging.
It’s one measure of how complex human biology is.
When it comes to whether someone looks like a boy or girl, hormones clearly run the show. For instance, a newborn girl’s genitals may appear somewhat or totally male if that baby had encountered too much of the hormone testosterone (tess-TOSS-tur-own) in the womb. Similarly, too little of this hormone can impair the development of a boy’s reproductive organs.
But male hormones shape other organ systems as well. These include the kidneys and bladder — but most importantly the brain. At birth and throughout life, for instance, the size and function of certain regions in the brain will differ between males and females.
Testosterone is an androgen, or male sex hormones. So how can it end up in the womb of a woman? She might have become exposed during pregnancy to a medicine containing this hormone. More commonly, genetic changes — called mutations — will tell her fetus to produce too much testosterone or to make this hormone at the wrong time. (Both males and females make the hormone, but in very different amounts). This could trigger a small but critical change in how a girl’s body develops.
When this happens very early in development, a baby may be born with one of several conditions. Collectively, they’re known as differences or disorders of sex development, or DSDs. (There is no scientific evidence showing that DSDs cause or are linked to transgender identity.)
DSDs are rare, notes William Reiner. He is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. He is also a pediatric urologist, specializing in diseases affecting the urinary tract and conditions affecting male reproductive organs.
The best studied DSD is something known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH. The grape-size adrenal glands manufacture small amounts of testosterone — in everyone. A mutation in genes might instruct these glands to produce an oversupply of androgens. This mutation would not likely affect boys. They already make lots of androgens, so their bodies would hardly notice a little more.
Girls born with CAH, however, can appear masculinized — more boy-like. In some cases, their reproductive anatomy might slightly, or even strongly, resemble a boy’s. Doctors refer to this condition as intersex.
In severe cases, a baby that is genetically a girl may at birth visually appear to be a boy. Babies born with characteristics of both sexes sometimes undergo surgery soon after birth. This would make their genitals look more characteristic of their genetic sex. Other times, doctors and parents together must decide which gender to assign a baby.
Reiner often sees patients who are born with DSDs and have intersex features. He also studies children and teens who transition to a different gender (the opposite of the one they had been assigned at birth, based on their apparent biological sex). Some of these children are transgender. Others may have encountered conditions in the womb that altered how parts of their body (such as the genitals) developed.
Another type of genetic error, or mutation, prevents the body from making an enzyme needed to produce DHT. This hormone is more powerful than testosterone in differentiating the male body. So too little of this enzyme could cause the bodies of male children to appear feminized. That means their genitals may somewhat — or even totally — resemble a girl’s.
What does this all mean? Says Reiner, “You cannot necessarily tell by looking at the genitals whether you’re going to have a child who has a male or a female gender identity.”Veteran riders remaining on board for at least one more year
Team Tinkoff Saxo has made further announcements in relation to its lineup of riders for 2014, following on from yesterday’s news that Oliver Zaugg and Matteo Tosatto would remain with the squad. The team has now confirmed that the Danish rider Nicki Sørensen and the Dutchman Karsten Kroon have signed new one year deals and will consequently be part of the setup in 2014.
“The value of riders like Nicki and Karsten can hardly be underestimated as they add a great amount of stability to the team and at the same time they are simply great guys to be around,” said general manager Bjarne Riis, announcing the news.
Sørensen is now 38 years of age. The former Tour de France stage winner about to begin what will be a staggering fourteenth season with the same squad.
He says that he remains hungry for personal success, but is also motivated to work for others when required.
“I still have a great passion for the sport, and I couldn't imagine being anywhere else than on this team, so I'm happy to extend my contract for another year, my 14th season with the team. Naturally, I'm targeting results on my own in 2014, but I'm more than happy to be a supporting rider as well as sharing my experience with the young riders,” Nicki Sørensen says.
Kroon is also nearing the end of his career. The rider, who is another former Tour de France stage winner, is 37 years of age and will soon start his seventh season with the team. He said that he was pleased to remain on board and that he feels he still has a lot to give.
“I know that I'm not as strong as when I was thirty, but I feel I can provide a lot of experience to the young riders,” he stated. “Basically, I love riding my bike and as long as my passion is intact and I've got something to offer, I want to be in the peloton.
“There are still good riders out there without a contract for next year, so obviously I feel very fortunate to continue to be part of one the best teams out there.”
The squad has been taken over by Oleg Tinkov, who bought Riis out and who will provide the bulk of the budget for the next few years. That sale has given the team a greater financial stability and enabled the completion of the roster.
Alberto Contador will continue to be the team’s top rider, with Nicolas Roche, Roman Kreuziger and Michael Rogers amongst the others who will also have chances to win.
Riis knows that Sørensen and Kroon will also have their own worth.
“Nicki might be a veteran by now, but he is still very strong and motivated,” he said, explaining the decision to extend the deals. “He takes a lot of responsibility in races and training and is one of the riders, who act as an extended arm of the sport management, and with his experience he can race every single race in the calendar.
“A lot of the same qualities goes with Karsten. He is a key person in our Classic campaign using his skills and routine to guide his teammates in the peloton. He knows these races better than most riders, and this definitely had a great impact on Roman's win in Amstel Gold Race this year.”Posted by Heather Harris
Three times a week I get forty-five minutes all to myself. Forty-five beautiful, usually interrupted, minutes. Luke, my four-year-old takes and nap, and my six-year-old takes a "play nap". What is a play nap, you ask? It is an incredibly brilliant invention of my mine that requires my daughter to stay in her room for forty-five minutes, doing whatever her weird and creative mind would lead her to do, as long as A) I don't hear it, B) It doesn't make a mess big enough that I need to come and deal with it, because God knows it will make a mess, and C) She doesn't come out of her room asking me for anything. Almost always one of these conditions is not met, but I'll take what I can get.
T he Vegetable Gardener's Bible. The cover has nerdy Ed Smith, holding a bountiful wicker basket of vegetables, in a button-up short sleeved shirt, denim jeans, and a straw hat with a vaguely wild fabric band, indicating, perhaps, that there is a little uninhibited side to Ed. He has helpful section headings like, "Some Kernals of Wisdom with your Kernals of Corn." Like Francis, I'm inexplicably drawn to Ed and his WORD system: Wide Rows, Organic Methods, Raised Beds, Deep Soil. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Amen, preach it Ed!. The cover has nerdy Ed Smith, holding a bountiful wicker basket of vegetables, in a button-up short sleeved shirt, denim jeans, and a straw hat with a vaguely wild fabric band, indicating, perhaps, that there is a little uninhibited side to Ed. He has helpful section headings like, "Some Kernals of Wisdom with your Kernals of Corn." Like Francis, I'm inexplicably drawn to Ed and his WORD system: Wide Rows, Organic Methods, Raised Beds, Deep Soil. The first five minutes of freedom are spent getting tea ready and scrounging some piece of chocolate out of the pantry, or a kid's treat bag. The next thirty minutes are spent reading a devotional. This week I read one about Francis of Assisi. That is one weird dude, but for some reason I really like him. Maybe because I'm quite certain he would appreciate a good garden. He might even preach to my stubborn carrots. The last 10 minutes are spent daydreaming, planning, or pinning about my garden. This week I returned to my dear friend,
Since I am very near the start (dare I hope for this weekend!?!) of peeling back the sod from my vegetable garden plot and finally getting the project going, I dusted off my old trusty friend for a refresher on the basics of preparing a garden site. I crossed my fingers and prayed that I had selected a location that Ed would approve of. Here' his advice:
1. Let the Sun Shine In: My site is pretty much in full sun all day, although the neighbor's collection of rare and bizarre trees block the late afternoon sun. I don't think I can cut those down though.
2. Judging Which Way the Wind Blows: Seeing as |
the Kenyan government specifically that Iran and Hezbollah would try to hit Israeli-owned targets during the September Jewish holidays, one report said.
The Westgate Mall, partly owned by Israelis, was reportedly cited in at least one warning.
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Kenyan newspapers reported that, according to intelligence sources, Kenya’s chief of staff and four key cabinet ministers — treasury, interior, foreign affairs, and defense — received the various warnings but failed to take action.
Kenyan government officials later confirmed the reports to the AFP news agency.
Warnings began in January and increased in September, with information about planned attacks in Nairobi or Mombasa between September 13 and 20, Kenya’s Daily Nation reported.
Intelligence reports seen by the Daily Nation indicated that Israel told the Kenyan government that Iran and Hezbollah were looking to attack Israeli-owned targets this month.
“The Israeli Embassy in Nairobi has raised concern with the Foreign Affairs Ministry that Iran and Hezbollah from Lebanon have been collecting ‘operational intelligence and open interests in Israeli and Jewish targets around the world including Kenya,’” read one of the reports.
The reports even identified the Westgate as one of the targets, along with Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica. It also named individual terrorists behind the attack. Sheikh Abdiwelli Mohammed,Sheikh Hussein Hassan and al-Shabab terror group leader Abdi Godane were identified as masterminds.
Godane is al-Shabab’s new emir.
Though Westgate, a Western-style luxury shopping center, was often named as a possible terrorist target, Kenyan government sources told AFP that the warnings were not given due attention.
“Israel had warned of attacks on their business interests,” said an official, “but apart from just being tossed from one office to another, nothing was taken out of the intelligence reports.”
“There is no way one can say there was no intelligence on this attack because those reports started trickling in from late last year,” said another. “And they were specific with targets, including Westgate.”
Michael Gichangi, head of Kenya’s National Intelligence Service, is scheduled to appear before lawmakers on Monday to answer questions about the country’s preparedness for terrorist attacks.
Israeli assets were targeted in 2002 in the Kenyan city of Mombasa. An Israeli-owned hotel in the city was bombed, killing 13 people, and a rocket was fired at an Israeli plane taking off at the same time in an unsuccesful attempt to bring it down.
Israel enjoys a close security relationship with Kenya, and has helped Nairobi during the crisis. Israeli forensics experts helped the Kenyan government comb the site of the terrorist takeover of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya’s cabinet secretary said on Twitter last week.
Earlier in the week, Israeli defense officials confirmed a team was dispatched to Nairobi within hours of the hostage crisis. The officials said the team was sent to advise authorities on the bloody standoff at the Nairobi shopping mall, and did not include combat units.
Last Tuesday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta mentioned Israel among the friendly nations who offered crucial assistance.
At least 18 foreigners were among those killed when the militants entered the Westgate mall on Saturday firing assault rifles and throwing grenades, including six Britons and citizens from France, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Peru, India, Ghana, South Africa and China.
Another 175 people were injured, including more than 60 who remain hospitalized.
Authorities have said at least five al-Shabab attackers were killed and another 11 suspects have been taken into custody.
In a statement, Godane said only that “some” of his fighters had been killed, possibly suggesting that others escaped.
During the four-day fight at the mall, the building’s roof collapsed, causing massive destruction. The collapse came last Monday, shortly after four large explosions rang out followed by billows of black smoke. A government minister said the terrorists had set mattresses on fire, causing the roof to collapse, but it seemed unlikely the fire would have caused the massive destruction.
Al-Shabab, whose name means “The Youth” in Arabic, first began threatening Kenya with a major terror attack in late 2011, after Kenya sent troops into Somalia following a spate of kidnappings of Westerners inside Kenya.
The mall attack was the deadliest terrorist attack in Kenya since the 1998 al-Qaeda truck bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, which killed more than 200 people.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Game On 2010 is Mozilla Labs‘ first international gaming competition. Game On is all about games built, delivered and played on the open Web and the browser.
Now we are at the final phase and there are 35 great games fighting to get the first prize. You can still cast your vote and get a chance to win a prize from the mozilla foundation:
Due to the awesome response from our wider community, we have extended the voting period for the Community Choice award until February 1. Take 5 minutes (or hours…) to play some magnificent games and vote your favorites for the Game On Community Choice award. We will be randomly selecting three lucky voters and send you a special-edition Mozilla Labs Game On swag pack Ref: http://mozillalabs.com/gaming/2011/01/27/your-game-on-finalists-35-great-open-web-games/
But now let’s take a look at some of these games; all the entries are located at this address, and these are some i’ve tested:
A to B A physics based game where the goal is simply to get the ball from point A to B. Each level, you get a set of modifiers. The modifiers can change the velocity, direction, or gravity of the ball.
Choice of the Dragon The entire series choice of … is based on multi-choice text adventure games, I played the one of the dragon, well written and funny.
Freeciv.net The beauty of civilization in a browser…impressive
OpenStreetGame A geographic game, you have to clic on the map as near as possible to the exact location of a capital.
Burning Universe is a game of planet management, ship battles and the struggle to control all the resources in the universe.
Check these games, what are your favourites?
And don’t forget to cast your vote!
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None FoundHere’s a fun, yet scary post in honor of Halloween. Although it’s meant with a little tongue in cheek, it is alarming what the food industry can get away with putting in their boxes, bags, and bottles without us even knowing it. Enjoy!
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
These verses uttered by the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth have become legendary, and the weird ingredients they talk about make us shake our heads in disgust. But at least we know what’s in the witches brew. The same can’t be said for most of the foods in our modern-day grocery store. Unfortunately big food companies have cast a spell over most regulators that allows them to manipulate us with advertising, make deceptive claims, and mislead us with ingredient labels.
All natural is one of those claims that makes most people feel better about the food they eat. After all, if it’s natural it’s got to be good, right? Well, as we’ve learned in my series “All Natural … Really?”, natural doesn’t mean anything. In fact, buying all natural foods may involve playing your own home version of the reality game show, FEAR FACTOR. Why? Check out some of these frequently used food additives that qualify as “all natural.” They might be a little more than you bargained for:
Beaver Anal Glands: This bitter, very smelly, orange-brown substance is also known as castoreum. In nature it’s combined with the beaver’s urine and used to mark its territory. In the processed food world it’s occasionally used in both food and beverages, typically as vanilla or raspberry flavoring. Watch out though, you won’t find it on the ingredient list since processed food manufacturers can legally call it “natural flavoring.”
This bitter, very smelly, orange-brown substance is also known as castoreum. In nature it’s combined with the beaver’s urine and used to mark its territory. In the processed food world it’s occasionally used in both food and beverages, typically as vanilla or raspberry flavoring. Watch out though, you won’t find it on the ingredient list since processed food manufacturers can legally call it “natural flavoring.”
Cow’s Stomach: Known as rennet and derived from the mucosa of veal calves’ fourth stomach, this ingredient is frequently used in the production of cheese to curdle the milk. Often listed simply as “enzymes” on an ingredient panel, it can be very hard to know exactly what you’re eating when you buy cheese. If you’re looking to avoid rennet, look for vegetarian or kosher certified cheeses.
Known as rennet and derived from the mucosa of veal calves’ fourth stomach, this ingredient is frequently used in the production of cheese to curdle the milk. Often listed simply as “enzymes” on an ingredient panel, it can be very hard to know exactly what you’re eating when you buy cheese. If you’re looking to avoid rennet, look for vegetarian or kosher certified cheeses.
Hair and / or feathers: Called L-cysteine or cystine by the processed food world, this non-essential amino acid is made from human hair or duck feathers and is used as a dough conditioner to improve the texture of breads and baked goods. Again, since cystine comes from natural sources, you can eat “natural” and still have hair in your food.
Called L-cysteine or cystine by the processed food world, this non-essential amino acid is made from human hair or duck feathers and is used as a dough conditioner to improve the texture of breads and baked goods. Again, since cystine comes from natural sources, you can eat “natural” and still have hair in your food.
Beetle Juice: No, I’m not talking about the 1988 movie starring Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis. This beetle juice is used in our food and is often called shellac, resinous glaze, or confectioner’s glaze on ingredient labels. Made from the secretions of the female lac bug, this substance is scraped from trees and branches then processed to be used on some of your favorite shiny candies and sprinkles.
No, I’m not talking about the 1988 movie starring Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis. This beetle juice is used in our food and is often called shellac, resinous glaze, or confectioner’s glaze on ingredient labels. Made from the secretions of the female lac bug, this substance is scraped from trees and branches then processed to be used on some of your favorite shiny candies and sprinkles.
Crushed bugs: Known as Carmine, Crimson Lake, Cochineal, or Natural Red #4 on ingredient labels, this red food coloring additive is made from insects like the cochineal beetle. Frequently used in yogurts and beverages to give them a ruby-red color, a cochineal beetle can be a tough to spot on ingredient labels since it can be listed as a natural color.
What’s so infuriating about these ingredients is how they can lurk in your food and you may not even know it. Whether they’re disguised as natural flavors, enzymes, glazes, or colors, you deserve to know if they’re in your food, right? Unfortunately big food companies disagree. Even after contacting Nestlé, Kraft, General Mills, Unilever, and Dannon, I couldn’t find out the truth. For example, when I asked if a specific product contained castoreum, I got the following response:
All of our natural flavorings are vendor supplied and are therefore proprietary information. We do not explicitly use castoreum. We cannot speak for our vendors that provide proprietary ingredients such as natural flavors. I want to assure you that the FDA does consider this ingredient as generally recognized as safe.
Do you believe that? I know I don’t. Food manufacturers know exactly what’s in their food, even if the flavoring comes from another supplier. Furthermore, they can expressly ask flavor suppliers to NOT use specific ingredients. But the bottom line is the food industry doesn’t want you or I to know the whole truth. That would hurt their business.
So in honor of Halloween, I’ve come up with a few new lines for Shakespeare’s Three Witches. And just as these witches’ prophecies foretold Macbeth’s downfall, if we all speak up, the processed food industry will be in for some real change.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Oil from a beaver’s ass,
Beetle juice shines food like glass.
Cochineal bugs make things red,
Hair and feathers condition our bread.
Poor calves slaughtered for our cheese,
Yes I’m scared of these mysteries.
Processed food it’s a shame,
Lying and deceiving is no game.
Since you’re acting with deceit,
We’ll fight to know what we eat.
Big food companies we’ve had enough,
It’s time to regulate all this stuff.
As always, if you’ve enjoyed this post, please share it by pasting a link on your Facebook wall, liking it, or emailing it to a friend. If you have a chance and would like to learn more about my novel, Fat Profits, click here. And for more inside scoop on the world of food, please subscribe to my blog.
In honor of Halloween, I’m sharing this Halloween post from last year (originally published on October 30, 2011.) Believe it or not, it’s been my most popular post to date. Crazy!: X Sports News via Naver1. Twice - Cheer Up 43 million2. BTS - Fire 28 million3. Girlfriend - Rough 24.5 million4. 4minute - Hate 23.6 million5. Taeyeon - Rain 21.3 million6. Got7 - Fly 20.7 million7. Suzy and Baekyhun - Dream - 18.5 million8. Zico - You are me, I am you - 16.8 million9. Jessica - Fly - 13.7 million10. BTS - Save Me 13.7 million11. Mamamoo - You're the Best - 13.6 million12. Jimin - Call You Bae - 12.5 million13. NCT - 7th Sense - 12 million14. Block B - Toy 11.5 million15. Lee Hi - Breath 11.3 million1. [+2,628, -233] Twice is amazing2. [+2,044, -227] Twice dominated the first half of the year, they were amazing3. [+1,416, -208] Twice is going to get so big, fighting!!4. [+403, -37] Twice's MV was released at the end of April but it's #1...5. [+405, -40] Honestly Twice was the biggest hit for the first half of the year ㅋㅋㅋ6. [+382, -38] Shashasha~ Twice shashasha~7. [+349, -33] Huk had no idea the 'Cheer Up' MV was that big, that's no joke8. [+358, -38] Godwice~ they hit a huge daebak this year~~ ^^ So proud of our Twice~♡Report: ‘Discussion Draft’ of Healthcare Bill to Be Revealed Thursday (VIDEO)
Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced on Tuesday that Republicans would see a discussion draft of the healthcare reform legislation on Thursday.
McConnell also declared that the press would get an opportunity to see the bill on Thursday. This addresses numerous concerns from the Democrat leadership that Republicans are keeping the bill secret.
McConnell stated at a press conference today:
“We’ve continued our discussions on the way forward on healthcare, as all of you know, because I’ve reported it weekly. For weeks now, we’ve been in intense discussions with all Republican senators, both in working groups that all members were free to come to if they chose to, and in the larger lunches that we have on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.”
The fact that everybody is not fully involved in these discussions is a bit unsettling, and Republican leadership continues to be shaky on all grounds and continue to undermine the goals of the President knowingly and willingly.
McConnell continued:
“I expect to have a discussion draft on Thursday, and we will go to the bill, obviously once we get a CBO score... Likely next week.”NOTE: I’ve deprecated Flowless (and have abandoned using Flow) in favor of what I wrote based on that from scratch: Simple-Stack.
So you should keep in mind that I am no longer using this, because Simple-Stack solves quirks that I didn’t like about Flow’s design.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
This is a follow-up article to Saying No To Fragments and Activities: Creating View-driven Applications with Flow.
While I claimed that that article will get to the point, it was more-so a comparison of how things are lately with Flow 1.0-alpha2 (and Flowless), versus how things used to be with Flow 0.8. So one could argue that it did not get straight to the point, after all.
So let’s get to it, shall we?
Flow: a backstack manager
As stated in a previous article, the primary task of Flow (and the Flow instance itself) is to manage the backstack. All it really cares about is the History (essentially a List<Object> ), and exposes operators that allow manipulating it.
Keys: representation of application state
The primary difference using Flow compared to just Activities is that instead of having an implicit backstack created by a series of Intents that open a bunch of Activities, you have a History of “key” objects that are just general Parcelable objects with hashCode() and equals() that represent what view you’re supposed to be showing.
(In fact, it doesn’t have to be a view, if you’re a heretic, you can even use Fragments with it. No, really; just use the newly added FragmentManager.commitNow(), and don’t use addToBackStack(), defer backstack manipulation to Flow instead. Theoretically, it should work, although I must admit I haven’t tried it yet.)
A possible example key would be the following:
But if you don’t like extracting values from annotations, then you can just use interfaces and method calls. It’s up to you!
This allows simple initialization for what your application state should be.
And it also allows you to easily set whatever view you want to test with instrumentation tests.
You might be thinking, “wait, but this is a whole bunch of methods in the key, I thought this was going to make my life simpler?!”
Actually, it does. Exactly because this kind of “behavior” that is encoded here in the key used to be thrown randomly into Fragments, that were manipulating the Toolbar title in the Activity directly.
Here this is something you can globally do in your dispatcher implementation, and it’s set properly on back press too with minimal effort (in fact, it works out of the box).
Custom Views, and listening to the lifecycle
This is a Flowless-specific feature, partly piggybacking on top of the InternalLifecycleIntegration fragment in the original Flow.
You generally need to know when your View is ready and its state is restored. You must also know when your View is killed, so that you can unsubscribe your subscriptions, or unregister from event buses.
Previous Flow examples used to show onAttachedToWindow and onDetachedFromWindow as the callbacks to be used, but that is actually unreliable. There are cases when onFinishInflate() is called, but onAttachedToWindow() is not. In that case, you do not receive any callback to onDetachedFromWindow(), which means that you can lose your state!
If you’re curious, this is most likely why the square/coordinators library exists.
Instead, Flowless introduces the FlowLifecycles.ViewLifecycleListener interface, which if you implement, then provides you the callbacks: onViewRestored() and onViewDestroyed().
Additional lifecycle callbacks
In other cases such as writing a CameraView, you might need to listen to permission results, or activity results.
For onActivityResult and onPermissionResult, you need to delegate these callbacks to the Dispatcher manually.
A possible base activity that hides this from you would be the following:
Once the permission result delegation is added, the dispatcher forwards this event to the current active view.
This way, you can handle any lifecycle event callback you need in your view.
ServiceProvider: sharing services across the view hierarchy
This is a new class in Flowless, its counterpart used to be Flow.Services.with its corresponding ServiceFactory. The ServiceProvider is pretty much just a Map<Object, Map<String, Object>> that is stored inside Flow’s InternalLifecycleIntegration to preserve them across configuration change, very similar to Mortar which is essentially a Map<String, Map<String, Object>>. The initial key in this case of course is the Key itself, and not a “scope name” specified as a String.
The difference is that in the original Flow 1.0-alpha2, the Flow.Services were managed internally based on a reference count, based on interfaces such as TreeKey or MultiKey. This could cause problems even if you weren’t using it, which is what caused the crash that made me fork Flow and create Flowless in the first place.
Instead, in Flowless, the ServiceProvider expects you to set it up in the Dispatcher however you see fit.
Through the magic of redefining getSystemService(), the ServiceProvider allows you to obtain any service from your context, just like you can obtain Flow via Flow.get(context).
Sharing a Dagger2 component
In the MVP example, this is how scoped components are provided down the view hierarchy. This allows us to obtain the Dagger2 component from any context — primarily within views of the custom view’s view hierarchy.
Dispatcher: which determines what happens on state change
The last and most important component of a Flow-based application is its Dispatcher implementation. This is what globally handles what should happen when you go from Key A to Key B.
The most typical implementation would persist the state of the previous view, inflate the new view, restore state to the new view, remove the previous view, add the new view, and callback to signal completion.
The following example also adds the Dagger2 component by DaggerService.TAG and associate it with the given key, making the component accessible within the view hierarchy.
In the middle, you can see the Service being set up for the current key: the Dagger2 Component.
This is basically where the “magic” happens. In this case, it’s 60 lines with comments, compared to the FragmentManager that is 2000 lines. I guess there’s a win there in simplicity.
Conclusion
Hopefully this helped understand how to use Flowless, and how to create a simple MVP-based (or maybe even MVVM-based with Data-Binding or RxJava!) application without using fragments or any kind of additional “arcane folklore” beyond an explicit backstack.
The app is driven with just simple parcelable POJOs, and you write how to switch between the states only once. Simpler than either FragmentTransaction s or Intent s.T4 Program, also called T4 Euthanasia Program, Nazi German effort—framed as a euthanasia program—to kill incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people. Adolf Hitler initiated the program in 1939, and, while it was officially discontinued in 1941, killings continued covertly until the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
In October 1939 Hitler empowered his personal physician and the chief of the Chancellery of the Führer to kill people considered unsuited to live. He backdated his order to September 1, 1939, the day World War II began, to give it the appearance of a wartime measure. In this directive, Dr. Karl Brandt and Chancellery chief Philipp Bouhler were “charged with responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians…so that patients considered incurable, according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing.”
Within a few months the T4 Program—named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4—involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill anyone deemed to have a “life unworthy of living.” Some physicians active in the study of eugenics, who saw Nazism as “applied biology,” enthusiastically endorsed this program. However, the criteria for inclusion in this program were not exclusively genetic, nor were they necessarily based on infirmity. An important criterion was economic. Nazi officials assigned people to this program largely based on their economic productivity. The Nazis referred to the program’s victims as “burdensome lives” and “useless eaters.”
The program’s directors ordered a survey of all psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and homes for chronically ill patients. At Tiergartenstrasse 4, medical experts reviewed forms sent by institutions throughout Germany but did not examine patients or read their medical records. Nevertheless, they had the power to decide life or death.
While the program’s personnel killed people at first by starvation and lethal injection, they later chose asphyxiation by poison gas as the preferred killing technique. Physicians oversaw gassings in chambers disguised as showers, using lethal gas provided by chemists. Program administrators established gas chambers at six killing centres in Germany and Austria: Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. The SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) staff in charge of the transports donned white coats to keep up the charade of a medical procedure. Program staff informed victims’ families of the transfer to the killing centres. Visits, however, were not possible. The relatives then received condolence letters, falsified death certificates signed by physicians, and urns containing ashes.
A few doctors protested. Some refused to fill out the requisite forms. The Roman Catholic church, which had not taken a stand on the “Jewish question,” protested the “mercy killings.” Count Clemens August von Galen, the bishop of Münster, openly challenged the regime, arguing that it was the duty of Christians to oppose the taking of human life even if this cost them their own lives.
The transformation of physicians into killers took time and required the appearance of scientific justification. Soon after the Nazis came to power, the Bavarian minister of health proposed that psychopaths, the mentally retarded, and other “inferior” people be isolated and killed. “This policy has already been initiated at our concentration camps,” he noted. A year later, authorities instructed mental institutions throughout the Reich to “neglect” their patients by withholding food and medical treatment.
Pseudoscientific rationalizations for the killing of the “unworthy” were bolstered by economic considerations. According to bureaucratic calculations, the state could put funds that went to the care of criminals and the insane to better use—for example, in loans to newly married couples. Proponents for the program saw incurably sick children as a burden on the healthy body of the Volk, the German people. “Wartime is the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill,” Hitler said.
The murder of the handicapped was a precursor to the Holocaust. The killing centres to which the handicapped were transported were the antecedents of the extermination camps, and their organized transportation foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians who became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps. They had long since lost all their moral, professional, and ethical inhibitions.
Like the Judenrat (“Jewish Council”) leaders during the Holocaust, psychiatrists were able to save some patients during the T4 Program, at least temporarily, but only if they cooperated in sending others to their death. The handicapped killing centres developed gas chambers like those later used at extermination camps. As the extermination camps did later, the handicapped killing centres installed ovens to dispose of dead bodies. The death camps that followed took the technology to a new level. The extermination camps could kill thousands at one time and burn their bodies within hours.
On August 24, 1941, almost two years after the T4 Program was initiated, it appeared to cease. In fact, it had gone underground and continued covertly during the war years. While the program claimed over 70,000 victims during its two years of open operation, the killing centres murdered even more victims between the official conclusion of the program and the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. The total number killed under the T4 Program, including this covert phase, may have reached 200,000 or more. The official conclusion of the T4 Program in 1941 also coincided with the escalation of the Holocaust, the culmination of Nazi programs to eliminate those deemed an embarrassment to the “master race.”WASHINGTON – Muslims from around the world are coming to America to wage “settlement jihad” and implement Shariah law, a Department of Homeland security whistleblower warns.
The eye-opening observations were made by former Department of Homeland Security officer Philip Haney at the ACT for America 2016 Conference Tuesday.
Haney warned that most Muslims do not migrate to America with the intention of assimilating into American culture.
“The observant Muslim base is the reason for civilizational and/or settlement jihad,” he said. “That is why they are immigrating to America, to come and coalesce into one solid unit with the intention – and it is intentional – to implement Shariah law, which according to Islamic theology is the grace and gift to mankind.”
As a Customs and Border Protection officer, Haney gathered a plethora of valuable intelligence on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organizations. However, in 2009 his superiors ordered him to eliminate critical “linking information” from about 820 records he had entered into CBP’s internal database.
Haney said the Obama administration refused to investigate Muslim Brotherhood members as terrorists because it relied on the Brotherhood and other Muslim groups with ties to terrorism to help shape U.S. counter-terrorism policy. The Muslim Brotherhood is a supremacist group known for establishing scores of fronts – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR – that pose as civil rights organizations. The Brotherhood’s agenda is laid out in a document introduced into evidence by federal prosecutors during the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history, U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation, in 2007-08. Obama’s former Attorney General Eric Holder abruptly ended the trial despite its success in shutting down a prime funding source for Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Get “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad” now at the WND Superstore!
In 2012, the administration purged all 67 of Haney’s records dealing with Muslims associated with the Tablighi Jamaat movement. The administration completely erased the records from the database and then investigated Haney for entering the information into the system, which was his job.
Haney chronicled his struggle to expose the truth of jihad and the administration’s effort to stop him in his book, “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad.”
Haney warned the ACT for America audience of existential threats facing America from enemies both foreign and domestic – specifically, the global Islamic movement and progressive leftists. He said the intention of these enemies is “to alter or to abolish” the U.S. government, words which are ironically found in the Declaration of Independence.
Haney noted Shariah precludes any form of human law, including the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, he urges opponents of Islamization to point to the Constitution as the reason for their opposition.
“If you build your rebuttal and your strategy on our founding documents by recognizing what they intend to do, which is to alter or abolish our current form of government, it puts you on a solid foundation, immunizing you from a lot of charges of Islamophobic, racist bigotry, because after all, you’re defending the documents our country was founded on,” Haney reasoned.
Not only do Islamic supremacists wish to abolish the Constitution, according to Haney, but progressive leftists seek to fundamentally alter America by making it more diverse.
This “diversity” was the impetus behind the Obama administration’s massive push to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S. by Sept. 30, a goal Obama reached well ahead of schedule.
As WND has previously reported, more than 98 percent of the Syrians who arrived in fiscal year 2016 were Sunni Muslim.
Haney noted the refugee admissions program is very secretive, as the federal government and resettlement contractors often do not alert local officials or local residents when they plan to place refugees in a certain town.
“I ask you, my fellow Americans: If this is such a noble cause, then why are they using such deceitful practices to do it?” Haney asked.
He listed cities where refugees have been placed without the consent of the locals, including Rutland, Vermont; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Emporia, Kansas; and Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
“This kind of thing is happening all over the country: an abrogation of due process and constitutional principles happening right in front of us,” Haney said. “They are aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal of settlement jihad, and it’s happening right in front of us.”
As Haney noted, Americans have been told many times there is no way to effectively vet the Syrian refugees, yet DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson claims the U.S. must give voice to the plight of Muslims. That attitude disgusts Haney.
“They’re not even doing the most basic law enforcement approach to protecting our welfare and the integrity of our borders, but they have morphed totally into a civil rights and civil liberties advocacy group,” Haney said. “And anybody who stands in their way will become the violent extremist.”
Haney issued a strong warning to government officials who fail to do their utmost to protect America from the threats it faces.
“History is a fearsome woman,” he cautioned. “If she fastens her eye on you, and you are on the wrong side of history, she will turn you into a stone.”
Get “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad” now at the WND Superstore!The 1968–69 season of the European Cup football club tournament was won by Milan, who beat Ajax 4–1 in the final, giving Milan its first European Cup title since 1963, and its second overall. A number of Eastern European clubs withdrew from the first two rounds when UEFA paired up all of the Eastern European clubs against one another.
Substitutions of two players at any game time were allowed; obligatory match dates were introduced (two weeks between the legs) and fixed on Wednesdays; the away goal rule was extended to the whole competition.
Manchester United, the defending champions, were eliminated by Milan in the semi-finals.
First round [ edit ]
First leg [ edit ]
Second leg [ edit ]
Milan won 5–3 on aggregate.
Celtic won 4–2 on aggregate.
Manchester United won 10–2 on aggregate.
Anderlecht won 5–2 on aggregate.
Rapid Wien won 6–4 on aggregate.
Real Madrid won 12–0 on aggregate.
Ajax won 5–1 on aggregate.
Fenerbahçe won 2–1 on aggregate.
Benfica won 8–1 on aggregate.
Reipas Lahti won 3–1 on aggregate.
Spartak Trnava won 5–3 on aggregate.
AEK Athens won 5–3 on aggregate.
AB won 4–3 on aggregate.
Second round [ edit ]
First leg [ edit ]
Second leg [ edit ]
Celtic won 6–2 on aggregate.
Manchester United won 4–3 on aggregate.
Rapid Wien won 2–2 on away goals.
Ajax won 4–0 on aggregate.
Spartak Trnava won 16–2 on aggregate.
AEK Athens won 2–0 on aggregate.
1 Ajax beat Benfica 3–0 in a play-off to reach the semi-finals.
First leg [ edit ]
Second leg [ edit ]
Milan won 1–0 on aggregate.
Manchester United won 3–0 on aggregate.
4–4 on aggregate. Ajax won the tie-breaking match 3–0.
Spartak Trnava won 3–2 on aggregate.
First leg [ edit ]
Second leg [ edit ]
Milan won 2–1 on aggregate.
Ajax won 3–2 on aggregate.
Final [ edit ]
Top scorers [ edit ]
The top scorers from the 1968–69 European Cup are as follows:A month ago, it seemed inevitable: a massive global oversupply of crude oil production would overwhelm storage tanks in Oklahoma and fill supertankers off Singapore.
Now, there are growing signs that the U.S. oil market can avoid the doomsday scenario in which it runs out of room to stockpile surplus crude, a development that oil traders worried would send crude prices into another tailspin.
One reason is that refiners, spurred by high profit margins, are rushing to buy crude and churn out more fuel in response to an unexpectedly swift rise in U.S. road travel and soaring Chinese demand for fuel-hungry sport utility vehicles.
Furthermore, shale oil drillers have hit the brakes on new wells faster than many anticipated. This could throw years of unyielding growth into reverse as early as May.
Oil price rebounds
Oil prices are starting to reflect these changes. U.S. crude has rebounded from a six-year low of $42 a barrel.
West Texas Intermediate crude was trading on Tuesday at $48.03 US a barrel and Brent oil was at $55.38 US a barrel. Prices were buoyed by news of a stalemate in talks with Tehran over its nuclear program.
Six world powers, consisting of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, are negotiating with Iran in Switzerland for an outline deal on the Iranian nuclear program that would be integral to removing sanctions on its oil exports. If sanctions are dropped, Iran could add an extra 500,000 barrels a day to an already oversupplied oil market.
News that negotiators were approaching a midnight deadline without a deal helped buoy crude prices.
"On a global basis I think sentiment has definitely shifted," says Amrita Sen from Energy Aspects. "The main reason it's shifted is that people are realizing demand isn't actually that bad; in fact, it's phenomenally strong."
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the chassis, the cost can be reduced for optimal TCO [total cost of ownership] and this approach allows for operating at scale where a typical single deployment might involve tens of thousands of servers at a time."
The sharing of resources lets Microsoft create a variety of configurations and replace compute, storage, or networking components individually without having to buy a whole new server. That continues Microsoft's modular data center designs also seen in its "data center containers."
Microsoft's Open Compute document continues:
The hardware system provides standardized interoperability at the blade, chassis and rack level by modularizing the interfaces between these components. The hardware system utilizes a novel mechanism for blade installation and removal, utilizing a cable-free approach for enabling a plug-and-play infrastructure. This approach allows us to use the same set of core building blocks to easily create different configuration topologies for specific cloud applications and different global data center environments. The result is streamlined manufacturing and assembly, the re-use of common components across deployments for volume economics, simplified maintenance operations during production usage, the ability to target technology refreshes independently across compute, storage, and networking components, and the ability to reuse infrastructure across decommissioning cycles. The design also supports high density deployments, with up to 96 servers in a 52U rack. This allows better cost amortization for common elements across the server blades, and is a good option for space constrained environments.
While Microsoft and Facebook are by far the largest champions of Open Compute, Laing said that Microsoft hopes to learn from the community. Microsoft also wants to "deliver a consistent cloud platform," in which customers who use Microsoft's public cloud services could also build similar platforms in their own data centers and connect the two.
In addition to public specifications for servers, motherboards, storage, racks, and interconnects, the Open Compute Project last year declared its intent to create a top-of-rack switch that could run just about any networking software and replace hardware typically sold by Cisco. Facebook is expected to announce more about the future of the Open Compute Project at its conference today.Wells Fargo Sues Self, Hires Different Lawyers To Respond
from the you-can't-make-this-up dept
In this particular case, Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium, according to Sarasota, Fla., attorney Dan McKillop, who represents the condo owner. As holder of the first, Wells Fargo is suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is itself.
Wells Fargo hired Florida Default Law Group., P.L., of Tampa, Fla., to file the lawsuit against itself.
And then Wells Fargo hired another Tampa law firm -- Kass, Shuler, Solomon, Spector, Foyle & Singer P.A. -- to defend itself against its own lawsuit, according to court documents.
Wells Fargo's defense lawyers even filed an answer to their client's own complaint.
"Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property," the answer reads. "All other allegations of the complaint are denied."
Ah, the nuttiness of our legal system. Reader Bettawrekonize sends in the news that Wells Fargo has sued itself in a foreclosure dispute And, of course, being on the receiving end of a lawsuit, the bank has hired some lawyers (different than the ones it hired to file the lawsuit) to respond:Isn't it great to know that, post-bailout, banks aren't wasting all that taxpayer money we gave them?
Filed Under: lawsuits
Companies: wells fargoHot off of their HAXLR8R demo day presentation last week, hardware startup Prynt was nice enough to drop by TechCrunch HQ to show off the latest prototypes of their smartphones cases, which contain built-in printers so you can instantly get a copy of that selfie with your best friends.
The small French startup has been working on turning your smartphone into a miniature Polaroid camera since January. They’ve spent much of that time visiting Shenzen to source parts and iterating on a simple design that sends a photo to the case over Bluetooth and then prints it by heating paper filled with ink.
The current version takes about 50 seconds from photo to printed paper and can only hold one piece of paper at a time. But the planned consumer version will hold 10-30 sheets of paper and take fewer than 30 seconds to print thanks to better hardware integration and a direct physical connection between the phone and case.
Prynt CEO Clément Perrot says that the case will only cost $99 when first made available via a Kickstarter early next year and will be able to support flagship phones with ~4.x-inch screens. They’re currently working on a mount that will also account for phablets like the Galaxy Note or iPhone 6 Plus.
One neat feature that could help the Prynt case gain traction is an augmented reality feature built into the company’s camera app. When you take a photo with Prynt’s app, it actually records a video of the moments around when you clicked the button and sends it to the cloud. When you hold up the physical photo to your phone’s camera with the app open, it is overlaid with a Play button that shows that video in place of the picture itself.
It’s like Snapchat but with a physical token that gives you permission to see videos. In order to make it even more secure, the company is looking into tricks like hiding pixels in images that would prevent them from being copied, so a photo of the photo wouldn’t bring up the play button in the app.
It’s really nifty to see in person, and in the longer run Prynt is looking at ways they could let you print a photo of one thing — say, your cat — and show a video of something else when it’s held to the app.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
SCHEME star Marvin Baird is hoping to make his mark in the world of dance music.
The drug addict star of the controversial BBC fly-on-the-wall series is releasing a dance track to celebrate his chaotic life.
Marvin, who has just moved from Kilmarnock's Onthank scheme into a posh house supplied by his new gangster managers, was due to record the final lines today.
The track is called Happy As Larry, after Marvin's favourite catchphrase, and begins with him bellowing the name of his beloved dog Bullet.
Marvin claims the song has been laid down with the aid of producers who worked with Scots rockers Biffy Clyro. And his managers have approached top DJ Tiesto.
The song is due to make its debut at T In The Park, Marvin added.
He said: "Everybody says the song is brilliant. I'm quite excited about it and it's just another string in my bow as far as I'm concerned.
"The management have been looking after me properly and this should be another big moneyspinner.
I'm not really meant to be talking about it because we are having a proper launch later on."
The Record yesterday revealed the interior of 31-year-old Marvin and girlfriend DaynaMcLaughlin's new home in Cleland, Lanarkshire.Daft Punk are an electronic dance duo formed by French producers Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo in Paris in 1993. Their music is a fusion of electronic styles including techno, house and disco that has since been described as ‘French house’. The duo are protective of their physical identities and are usually depicted wearing masks or with their faces out of focus – this was initially through shyness, although the image of man-machines was in keeping with the electronic nature of their music. We present 30 artworks inspired by the influential duo.
By Priscilla Tramontano
By Jonas Fleuraime
By Cash-89
By Tadeo Mendoza
By Priscilla Tramontano
By Jared Nickerson
By Kode
By Emiliano
By Nell Fjölmóð
By yourlilmunchie
By Priscilla Tramontano
By Jackson Armstrong
By Kode
By Lee Davies
By Gianni Rossi
By Alex Di Giovanni
By SENG
By Carlos Mayorga
By Reytime
By Victor B.S.
By Adrien Noterdaem
By kyzylhum
By Prop4g4nd4
By Dan-Solo
By Phishy
By Pavel Bartoš
By Lee Davies
By Mateja Petkovic
By Kuldar Leement
By Priscilla TramontanoStephan Tillmans, a Berlin-based artist, recently set to work capturing television screens the exact second they had been turned off. Each abstract system, according to Ignant, a German design, art and photography blog, is like a fingerprint. Unique to the moment of release, the duration of exposure and the device type, each of Tillmans' photographs is one-of-a-kind.
"The television picture is no longer visible -- instead, a structure of light, which in a fraction of a second, disappears in the picture tube and collapses," Tillmans explains on his personal website. (Roughly translated from German with the help of Google.) "The TV image is abstracted in this process and reduced to its essential element: the light."
Still found in televisions that haven't been replaced by newer (and slimmer) LCD screens, the cathode ray tube (CRT) technology necessary for this photography project has been around for more than 110 years. Also used in computer monitors, video camera, radar displays and more, cathode ray tubes are modified vacuum tubes in which images are produced by electron beams hitting a phosphorescent surface. In modern tubes, multiple beams of electrons are used to display millions of diferent colors.
Called "Leuchtpunktordnungen," Tillmans' work will be displayed in Stuttgart beginning Thursday, March 24, before moving to Washington, D.C.'s Goethe Institute in June.
All images copyright Stephan Tillmans. H/T @andrewcprice.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.It's been a year since The New York Times erected a paywall limiting users to 20 free articles per month and requiring that they pay for a digital subscription of $15 or more per month to continue reading. Now that the company has initiated the transition, it is locking down access a bit more. Starting in April, readers are going to get just 10 free articles per month — half as much as the paper offered before — in a move to help push people to sign up for its premium digital subscriptions.
So how have customers reacted to the paywall? The paper reported today that it has signed up 454,000 paid digital subscribers — a number that includes those who pay for access to read the paper online and on various mobile apps, as well as those who pay for e-reader and replica editions of both The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. That means the paper has amassed about half as many digital subscribers as its daily print circulation. The number also compares favorably with competing papers that have instituted paywalls: The Wall Street Journal, which started offering premium content on its site in the mid-1990s and has the highest circulation in the US, had 537,000 digital subscribers as of last fall. iPad-only paper The Daily reached 100,000 subscribers by its first birthday last month.
What do all of these numbers mean? Well, if you're not a fan of paywalls you're not going to be happy, as it seems that the system is gaining traction with consumers. Bolstered by the New York Times' digital edition (and a steep drop off in print circulation), many more papers have been switching over to the model. The Los Angeles Times instituted its own paywall earlier this month, and papers like the Boston Globe and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis all started charging customers for digital access within the past year.
If the New York Times' new 10-article-per-month limit won't satisfy your reading needs, you'll have the same options as before. The paper will still offer free access to articles accessed from links in emails, blogs, social media, and search, though the latter is limited to five free articles per day on search engines like Google. After that, you'll need to pony up $15 per month for a digital subscription with mobile app access, $20 per month for tablet and website access, and $35 for access from all three. Unfortunately those prices still don't include e-reader subscriptions for Kindles or Nooks, which both cost $19.99 per month."Couldn't reconcile myself to Rahul Gandhi's policies hence I defected though in my heart I don't call myself a defector”, says Himanta Biswa Sarma, a prominent politician from Assam who now has joined the BJP from the Congress. He says that the young Assamese have aspirations too and that has forced them to migrate and also agrees that the demographic change has shaken Assam's foundation. Being extremely critical of Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, he says, "Rahul acts like God and doesn't know how to resolve critical issues within state leaderships." Mr Sarma goes on to say that Rahul Gandhi treats any fresher to politics with suspicion and that anyone who supports him will be disillusioned. Reminiscing his days with the Congress he ends the conversation saying that no matter what party one is with, they have to perform.Stunt Jumps as shown on the in-game website from Junk Energy Drink
Stunt Jumps are unique places where you can launch off in a vehicle. There is usually a ramp to give you a target to aim for. Each stunt jump as a distinct start and end. If you miss the landing area, you will fail the jump.
While the vehicle is airborne, it will be under "carefree controls". Tilting forward or back will adjust the forward or back pitch while going left or right will roll the vehicle left or right. You can also affect the passage of time while performing a stunt jump. By pressing Up or Down on the Right Thumbstick you can speed up or slow down the speed of the jump. Do as you need to for adjustments.
You must then land the vehicle at a specific location with all wheels touching the ground. This helps a lot in securing a successful stunt jump. The number of stunt jumps completed can be seen on the progress scene. Each completed Stunt Jump will earn that character Driving Skill Points.
Counted Hobbies and Pastimes [ edit ]
To get the counted 10% toward your 100% you need to complete a minimum of 25 Stunt Jumps.
For the Show Off achievement/Trophy, you must complete all 50 Stunt Jumps
Stunt Jump Locations [ edit ]
Los Santos International Airport Stunt Jump 1
Los Santos International Airport Stunt Jump 2
Los Santos International Airport Stunt Jump 3
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 1
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 2
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 3
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 4
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 5
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 6
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 7
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 8
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 9
Port of Los Santos Stunt Jump 10
East Los Santos Stunt Jump 1
South Los Santos Stunt Jump 1
South Los Santos Stunt Jump 2
South Los Santos Stunt Jump 3
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 1
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 2
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 3
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 4
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 5
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 6
Downtown Los Santos Stunt Jump 7
La Puerta Stunt Jump 1
La Puerta Stunt Jump 2
La Puerta Stunt Jump 3
Little Seoul Stunt Jump 1
Little Seoul Stunt Jump 2
Little Seoul Stunt Jump 3
Little Seoul Stunt Jump 4
Del Perro Stunt Jump 1
Pacific Bluffs Stunt Jump
Rockford Hills Stunt Jump 1
Rockford Hills Stunt Jump 2
Rockford Hills Stunt Jump 3
Vinewood Stunt Jump 1
Vinewood Stunt Jump 2
Richman Stunt Jump 1
Great Chaparrai Stunt Jump 1
San Chianski Mountain Range Stunt Jump 1
San Chianski Mountain Range Stunt Jump 2
Grand Senora Desert Stunt Jump 1
Grand Senora Desert Stunt Jump 2
Sandy Shore Stunt Jump 1
Mount Chiliad Stunt Jump 1
Raton Canyon Stunt Jump
Paleto Bay Stunt Jump 1
Paleto Bay Stunt Jump 2
Mount Gordo Stunt JumpThis is a series of blogs starting from the day I was diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma. If you want to start at the beginning then please follow this link:
https://stellavig.blog/me-and-my-acoustic-neuroma/
Today is my 50th Birthday!!!
I have been home one week and time seems to have stood still again. I have managed very little. Although I was warned that I would be tired once home, the reality is very different. It is impossible to do anything without feeling so fatigued. The need for sleep is immense but not always possible and I find myself awake for hours at night, with endless random thoughts and dreams. Partly because of this, I have not managed to get downstairs after a shower before 2pm. My head hurts and my neck aches but all the time I am grateful that I did not have any visible facial complications or major balance problems.
I have not been outside of the house yet and my plans of daily walks have gone out of the window. Daytime television and the internet are fantasies, as I cannot concentrate on anything for a long time without a serious headache. I am reminded how hard our brains normally work without humans paying any attention to these inner workings. I count myself lucky that I have such fantastic colleagues and friends that I have been able to delegate all my activities with confidence and have left my trainees in great hands. Despite this, odd thoughts keep flitting into my brain of things I have not completed but these are very random and it is difficult to hold onto these thoughts to make any decisions! I am really struggling to see how I am going to return back to normal.
I have had the follow-up phone call from the John Radcliffe and am progressing as expected by all apart from myself! I will know next week whether this was a benign tumour but in my heart of hearts, I already know that all will be fine.
I think about today. I had started planning my 50th birthday a year ago. My sister and I had considered many ideas as to what we could do and had started to buy various little accessories for the party. I had never considered that I might not be well enough to throw a party. My diary is normally overfull and I could do with expanding my day from 24 to 30 hours. I really enjoy being busy and being organised (at work that is) and have many commitments in the diary a year in advance of now. This illness has made me realise the value of time and the need to enjoy the now. I know that I would not have stopped to consider my career and life plan without a serious illness to stop me and I am just so lucky that this is one illness that will let me get back to as near normal as possible.
When I woke up today, there were many cards, and the flowers have continued to arrive. I had so many beautiful bouquets since I arrived home and the doorbell has not stopped all morning with further deliveries. Each one is thoughtfully chosen with a heartfelt message attached and a trigger to make me cry. Patients, colleagues, friends, neighbours, trainees and complete strangers have left messages on the blog, Facebook and Whatsapp. How can I not feel better?
I struggle to get out of bed and have breakfast. I have been trying for two hours but I know what I want. I have developed a longing for toast with lots of butter. We must all go back to happy, safe times when we are in need. My mother and father were market traders when I was little. On Saturdays we would travel to Holyhead in Anglesey, North Wales. We used to arrive very early and would unload the van and set up the stall with my parents, brother and sister. In the far corner of the market, there was a huge bakery stall. They sold freshly baked bread, which first thing in the morning would still be piping hot. The smell of fresh bread drew so many customers and was good for trade for all in the market. They also sold homemade Welsh butter and jam. The three of us would enjoy doorstops of fresh bread with melting butter aplenty for breakfast and so the smell of bread always takes me back to this time. Holyhead market which was held in a Grade II listed Market Hall which was designed in 1855 by J Edwards Thomas. My brother, sister and I visited North Wales last summer and were saddened to see the ongoing demise of this beautiful building, I am so pleased to have learnt that Holyhead council have won a £2.4 miilion Heritage Lottery Fund grant and will restore it to its glory. Daddy would have been very pleased.
http://www.anglesey.gov.uk/empty-nav/news/press-releases-2017/january-2017/holyhead-market-hall-restoration-set-to-begin/130839.article
See I told you I hold random thoughts! I really do need to get up nd I need to have a shower. The plastic chair in the shower is a godsend as my legs feel so weak and I cannot stand for a long time. I feel like my 90-year-old father who needed a seat in the shower in the latter years! It still takes me around an hour to shower and get dressed. I cannot dry my hair with a hairdryer and natural drying leaves me with very frizzy hair. I have not been able to summon the energy to put on any make up and contact lenses are a luxury. There will be no photos of me on my birthday then!
The immediate family will be gathering in the evening and I am further grateful for mother nature’s best gift to me, of health and well-being. Everyday I am thankful that I have not had to manage a shortened life expectancy nor a physical life changing event. Those that do are so courageous and I can only empathise but cannot even start to fathom the emotions and decision-making undertaken by those individuals.
As I try to choose what to wear, I am reminded of previous birthdays. One of the delights of working in the NHS is that you develop an extended family. Traditionally we have had a family celebration and a work celebration. Somehow over the past few years the trainees have started baking me cakes and decorating them. The trainees are so talented! Every year the themes have become more amazing and the cakes are so professional.
One of the trainees has turned professional and baked my sister’s 40th birthday cake. She loved it!
She also made my Daddy’s 90th birthday cake which was incredible.
We added photos of the many friends and family whose company Daddy enjoyed on smaller cupcakes. Everyone enjoyed finding their own ones!
We often celebrate with my NHS family in a central London venue as this is convenient to all. One has become a firm favourite and we get very special treatment. Yet again a few years ago, we all had a very enjoyable evening and then I was surprised with my birthday cake.
I can only try to describe the horror on the faces of the other guests at the venue. We all work in a clinical setting and there are many situations which would make people turn away but it is the bread and butter of our workload and we get on with it. I think we forget how alien these situations can be to other people not in our profession. There are so many sad times, when as Daddy used to say, we cannot halt the natural timeline when people pass away, that we find a way to manage the strong emotions within our groups of friends.
The cake was amazing and the trainees had clearly thought about the things I really care about. I am passionate about ensuring that patients with diabetes do not develop foot problems and if they do that they get rapid access to care. Sometimes patients need minor or major amputations, which causes great mental and physical anguish to these patients and their families. We use maggots alongside surgical treatments for these patients. We call the maggots, minute surgical operatives, as they eat any dead tissue and clean a wound beautifully without destroying the healthy tissue around the damaged site. In the early days we would use free ranging maggots that would sometimes escape the bandaging containing them. Nowadays we use maggots encased in very fine netting which allows them to work but keeps them in one place!
This cake was a replica of a diabetic patient’s foot complete with an amputated toe and maggots which had escaped the netting! We were enthralled but my apologies to any non NHS staff who were put off their food that night!
Last year, I had another wonderful cake and really did not want to cut into it! I remember feeling exhausted during the evening and it is only in retrospect that one can explain why.
This cake was decorated to resemble a open human abdomen and came complete with surgical instruments with blood still dripping off them! It took me all evening to agree to cut and share it as it was absolutely beautiful.
This year feels very special. Yes of course a 50th birthday is special but this year feels as if I have been given a second lease of life.
I have spent each day post surgery in pyjamas as it takes too much energy to get into clothes but I have had to make the effort today. I seem to have spent the whole day having a shower and getting into trousers and a top. I cannot summon the energy to put on make up and as I am not allowed to dry my hair yet, I come downstairs looking like a bedraggled rat!
I must have my stitches out today and rather than wasting the time of the district nurses, I have asked my husband to take them out (with full permission from my Surgeon). There are millions of stitches and he takes them out for me very carefully and slowly. What a great birthday present!!! It is really odd how each of these very small steps feel like a gigantic leap towards being normal again.
I am spoilt by neighbours and family and I have a gorgeous cake bought by my husband (and a second one bought by my sister) but I am so tired. I cut the cakes and open my presents and cards but I just want to go back to sleep.
We make a decision that I will have a 50th birthday again next year and make sure I invite all my friends. It is saddening to think of my close friends from my early years, who I am in touch with via Facebook and LinkedIn but have not actually met or talked to for many years. I make a promise to myself to get in touch with all and try to meet up at least once in the next year. And I know that as soon as we start chatting it will be like we only talked yesterday. Children and work seem to take up all available time but I need to find time to catch up with things that really matter.
I go to bed as I have a headache developing. Thoughts start to wander into the future. My children are 18 and 20. I start to think about their 50th birthdays. What will life be like 30 years from now? 30 years ago we developed the mobile phone, disposable contact lenses and CDs effectively wiping out my beloved cassettes. The Mackintosh computer was the in thing! How we have changed. The current mobile phones have as much computing power as a roomful of computers and music is downloaded and played so CDs are going out of fashion. In contrast vinyls are making a comeback. What will be in vogue in 2047? Driverless cars, flying cars, communication by telepathy, travel by thought? Who knows?
Will global warming have caused shifts in water levels with London being flooded? Will the Great Barrier Reef still be colourful? Will we have inhabited Space? What kind of world will we live in? I say we but I will be 80. A macabre thought fills my head. Will I still be here by then? My Mummy suddenly passed away 63 of a heart attack and everyone tells me that I look like her.
Will the world have found peace or will it become more divided than now? Will it still be here? Too many questions and no answers. Now my head has started to hurt. More thoughts wander in and out. I have so many flowers. Perhaps I can dry them and turn my 50th birthday flowers into a present for the kids for their 50th. I start to consider all possibilities and fall asleep.In my last post, Part 1, I wrote about why you should ride. Now, lets talk about what you need to know about cycling and infrastructure.
So What do you need to know?
Many cyclists and drivers may not realize that cycling on the sidewalk is illegal, not to mention dangerous. Under Indiana law, cyclists have all the rights given to drivers on roads, but are also required to follow the same traffic regulations. Cyclists on the road are required only to ride as close as what is practical to the right hand side of the road, not to be confused with what would be possible.
Cyclists in Indiana are also legally allowed to ride two abreast. Last summer West Lafayette also enacted a Safe Passage Ordinance to protect cyclists on the road. Drivers have to give three feet of clearance to cyclists when passing. The ordinance states: “The operator of any motor vehicle driving on the roadway of West Lafayette may only overtake or pass a bicyclist when there is a safe distance of not less than three feet between the motor vehicle and the bicycle.” Lafayette also unanimously passed similar legislation on Monday.
I spoke to Steph Silva with Bicycle Lafayette, she says:
It is acceptable for children to ride bicycles on the sidewalk at a slow pace and they must yield the right of way to pedestrians, taking extra care at storefronts and anywhere foot traffic is heavy.
Children who are capable should ride in the street when possible. This might mean their parents ride with them on the side closest to traffic. In fact this is a great way to make sure your kids are ready to obey all traffic laws.
Adults should ride on the road or bike lane/path. In the case of heavy traffic and sidewalks present and in good condition, as well as little-to-no foot traffic, sidewalk riding can be acceptable. Improved bicycle infrastructure would alleviate the need for this patch style of solution.
The most important thing to remember is that crashes are more likely to happen when the cyclists visibility to a motorist is compromised. Sidewalk riding puts yourself and others at risk, and many sidewalks end abruptly or are not suitable for riding.
As a cyclist, your bicycle is a vehicle, and you can ride in the road. As the operator of a legal road vehicle (your bicycle), you must follow all traffic laws, just like any other legal road vehicle (cars) would have to. This means, riding WITH the flow of traffic, stopping at stop signs and traffic lights, and signaling your lane changes. Riding on the sidewalk isn’t only illegal, it’s dangerous. Cyclists are not as visible to drivers when they are on sidewalks.
Infrastructure Tell me more!
Essentially, there are three levels to bike infrastructure. Typically, the most desirable is a completely separated bike path. Completely separated bike paths are most desirable for drivers and novice cyclists alike. Unfortunately, bike paths that are completely separated from the road are not always possible or practical to build, so bike lanes that are physically part of the road are the next best option.
When a bike lane along a roadway would create a narrow situation for both the car and the cyclist a sharrow might be the only option.
Most people are familiar with separate bicycle infrastructure and bicycle lanes, but what is a sharrow? A Shared Lane marking, commonly called a “sharrow,” typically looks like a bicycle emblem with two chevrons above to indicate the direction of travel a cyclist should use. Sharrows remind drivers that the cyclist does have a right to use the road that driver has to share the road. Sharrows also show cyclists the recommended routes to take; however, cyclists are not required to use roads marked with sharrows or other bicycle infrastructure, and may use other roads not marked.
A shared lane marking give some visual connectivity between cycling infrastructure already in place. The markings help the cyclist know the most ideal routes to connect from bike lane to another bike lane or their destination. Behavioral studies have shown that streets with shared lane markings encourage cyclists to ride outside of the door zone, reduce wrong-way cycling, and sidewalk cycling.One again, the guys at Major League Mods have given Fanboy a peek at their latest work — a special Star Wars-themed surround sound system. This simple 200 watt 2.1 setup features two TIE fighter satellite speakers and a subwoofer modeled after, you guessed it, the Death Star itself. If you’re concerned about how they sound, each TIE fighter comes equipped with a Yamaha 2¾ inch mid-range and 1 inch dome tweeter with built-in crossovers. The Death Star sub comes with a 6½ inch driver, a full set of control knobs and switches — power, treble, bass, and so on — and features a custom paint job by Nub Graffix. In addition to the RCA inputs for the satellites, there’s also an auxiliary headphone jack for your favorite iDevice.
It might not be as powerful as any five or six speaker set, but its still potent enough to deliver. If you’d like to see or hear it for yourself, Major League Mods will have a booth at New York Comic Con on October 13th through 16th. If you take the time to stop by, they’ll even let you enter for a chance to win one of their custom R2-D2 Xbox 360s. And, finally, if you’d like to get in touch with them about possibly building you a custom in the future, you can visit their official website for more information.Key Highlights
Dogecoin price continued to break higher and faced a monster resistance around a bearish trend line as highlighted in yesterday’s post.
The price created a new low recently, and remains at risk of more losses in the near term.
100 MA continues to act as a pivot area for the price.
Dogecoin price failure to move above 76.0-78.0 Satoshis was a warning sign for buyers that resulted in a move lower.
Heading Lower?
Dogecoin price yesterday attempted one more time to take out a critical bearish trend line on the hourly chart. However, buyers failed once again to take the price higher, which resulted in a sharp decline. There was a new low created below 68.0 Satoshis, as the price fell towards 64.0 Satoshis. We forecasted recently that if buyers fail one more time, there might be a downside reaction. The recent decline found support just around 65.0 Satoshis, and moved back higher. The upside was stopped around the 100 hourly simple moving average, which acted as a pivot for the price. Moreover, the mentioned MA was also colliding with the 75.4% Fib retracement level of the last drop from 79.2 Satoshis to 64.7 Satoshis.
As long as the price is below the highlighted bearish trend line, sellers remain in control. Currently, it looks like they are attempting one more push lower, meaning there is a chance of a new low in the near future.
The Lower Bollinger Band might come into pay as a support, and if it is broken the price might head towards the last swing low of 64.7 Satoshis.
Intraday Support Level – 74.0 Satoshis
Intraday Resistance Level – 78.0 Satoshis
Let us see how long sellers can manage to defend the upside. Any further losses might find strong buying interest around 60.0 Satoshis.
Charts courtesy of Trading ViewThe flag-draped coffin of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos is followed by Marco's family during burial rites at the Heroes' Cemetery in Pasay, Philippine. (Reuters)
On a sunny afternoon last week, a crowd gathered outside the Supreme Court in Manila to honor a long-dead dictator.
They were fans of Ferdinand Marcos, the man who ruled the Philippines for two decades before being toppled by the “people power” revolution of 1986. He fled to the United States with his footwear-obsessed wife, Imelda, and a not insignificant portion of the country’s wealth.
Since his death in 1989, the Philippines has debated what to do with his remains. His embalmed corpse has been displayed since 1993 in a glass casket in his home province. Those assembled outside the court wanted to bury him at Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery.
Now, thanks to President Rodrigo Duterte, they got their wish.
On Friday, Marcos was interred in a private ceremony on military land, a striking symbol of the nostalgia for the kind of strongman politics that’s fueling the global rise of the populist right.
Activists and civil society groups stage a rally to protest the hero's burial accorded to former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos on November 18, 2016 in Manila, Philippines. (Dondi Tawatao/Getty Images)
The move fulfilled a campaign promise made by Duterte, who has praised the former dictator and said the burial will “heal” the country. Millions of Filipinos disagree.
[Imelda Marcos lobbied hard to give her late husband a ‘hero’s burial’]
“Ferdinand Marcos was a thief, a murderer and a dictator,” said Vice President Leni Robredo in a statement issued Friday. “He is no hero.”
The debate over the ceremony shows a nation divided on the weight of its authoritarian past and what that means for the future.
For many Filipinos, the Marcos era was a horror that cannot and will not be forgotten.
Marcos was elected in 1965 and declared martial law in 1972, during his final term in office. The suspension of democracy brought extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and torture.
Meanwhile, the Marcoses grew ridiculously, ostentatiously rich. They are believed to have made off with billions of dollars.
Former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos reads a statement at the Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu in 1986. (Jack Smith/AP)
But in the three decades since Ferdinand and Imelda fled, leaving behind her infamous shoe collection, their clan has largely escaped punishment and, in recent years, has even returned to public life.
Imelda is a member of congress, daughter Imee is a governor, and son Ferdinand Jr., known as Bongbong, is an influential former senator who narrowly lost the race to be vice president in Duterte’s government.
Support for the family comes mostly from those young enough not to remember martial law and those who deny or play down what happened during Marcos’s rule |
flight AH5017 was traveling from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers. Authorities lost contact with the plane shortly after they asked it to change course due to low visibility.
Reuters reports that Hollande said he would not exclude any theory as to what caused the plane crash, but weather is the leading contender.
Reuters adds:
"Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier said the strong smell of aircraft fuel at the crash site and the fact that the debris was scattered over a relatively small area also suggested the cause of the crash was linked to weather, a technical problem or a cumulation of such factors. "'We exclude - and have done so from the start - any ground strike,' Cuvillier told France2 television."
Fifty-one of the passengers aboard the plane were French.
Update at 2:23 p.m. ET. The Death Toll:
We've updated the death toll in this post from 116 to 118. President Hollande amended that number during his speech today.The 10 Best Video Games Of 2011
Enlarge this image toggle caption Bethesda Softworks Bethesda Softworks
I'm no great fan of placing the best games of the year in any sort of numeric order (though I can tell you that my own great passion of the year was Batman: Arkham City). What I can say is that these are 10 games that called out to me like Sirens. They lifted me from the day-to-day doldrums, widened my eyes with excitement, assuaged my anger at the plethora of terrible games that are out there, and generally entranced me exactly in the same way a trip to a faraway, exotic land does.
Batman: Arkham City (WBIE)
Whether you're a Dark Knight fan or one who dates back to the Golden Age of comics, Arkham City will satisfy all of your superhero fantasies. This wonderfully dark game fills you with unease and tension just as it amazes with pitch perfect game design. And even if you don't live in New York, this simmering, evil, dirty Gotham City is somehow the most attractive of tourist destinations, more appealing than anything Mayor Bloomberg could envision for Manhattan.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks)
When you ply your trade of swords and sorcery in Skyrim, it's like you're seething with panic and courage within one of the lurid Game of Thrones novels... with some Ursula Le Guin thrown in for good measure. It's crazy long; it's exceedingly romantic just as it's rife with anarchy and ethnographic detail. And it's completely, utterly savor-able. You'll feel like you have to pick an errant dragon's tooth from your punctured knight's armor when you're done fighting — Skyrim feels that fantastic.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Nintendo)
While this isn't quite the best in the lauded series, it certainly is Nintendo's best game of the year. The cheerful (and occasionally haunting) game allows you to ride the back of a giant bird called a loftwing, and you can't help but utter "Wheeeee!" as you soar. Skyward Sword may also be one of the last Zeldas to be spearheaded by the now 59-year-old game master Shigeru Miyamoto. Savor that magical Everyman brilliance while you still can.
In this trailer for Portal 2, Wheatley is introduced. YouTube
Portal 2 (Valve)
Failing to solve a puzzle in this science fiction world turned my stomach inside out, but I kept coming back for the humor. If Portal 2 didn't have the Ricky Gervais–like wit of Wheatley, a nervous Nelly of a blue-hued, yammering orb, it would have simply been an adroitly designed puzzle game. But the savvy addition of the nebbish-y robot, created by Erik Wolpaw and voiced by Stephen Merchant, makes Portal 2 more than memorable. The recipe elevates Portal 2 to greatness.
Bastion (WBIE)
This inexpensive action adventure, downloadable via the compelling Xbox Live Arcade service, is a nearly perfect tidbit of a game. The post-apocalyptic trope in its plot actually seems new-ish, due in no small part to the tight, hip dialog voiced by Logan Cunningham, sounding a bit like James Earl Jones. As the silent protagonist, The Kid, you really do feel like the stalwart hero, ever-plagued by the next pitfall. Moreover, some of the unforgettable music is catchy enough to be nominated for a Grammy. And when it's over you just want more, the litmus test of a terrific gaming experience.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Rockstar Games Rockstar Games
L.A Noire (Rockstar Games)
L.A. Noire, the extravagant experiment from Rockstar Games and Team Bondi, did something few new games that aren't series can do: It brought in people who don't normally play games. They came for the noir mysteries, which take place in a sprawling Los Angeles of yore. But the fine writing, the subversive undertone and the filmic essence brought players a unique experience that recalled adventure games of the '90s even in a thoroughly up-to-date open world.
Minecraft (Mojang)
Truly, this was the little indie that could. Minecraft stoked the fires of anyone who played with LEGO blocks or Lincoln Logs as a child. I prefer the Creative mode, which allows me to construct pretty much whatever my imagination allows, and lets me build without the worry of being attacked by monsters (which happens a lot in Survival mode). Minecraft burst out beyond nerd boundaries to be loved by young students and parents alike at home. And it was played in schools, too. Inspired by the underground delight Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft went mainstream, and then some. And we're all better for it.
Enlarge this image toggle caption THQ THQ
Saints Row: The Third (THQ)
This decidedly wacky creation featuring the Third Street Saints is a Grand Theft Auto-like open world game on steroids, one so full of kooky, urban gang action in the first 15 minutes that you feel like a breathless stunt person on a treacherous movie shoot. The searing lampoon that's built into everything from the crazy weapons you employ to the Die Hard-like dialog make this third installment a winner. Sly touches include the gang's own energy drink and the latest addition to the group, a cheesy Hollywood actor who joins in an effort to research his role in the Third Street Saints movie.
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Sony)
The savvy conceit in Uncharted 3 is profoundly ambitious: Create a game so filmic, so action-oriented, so inspired by blockbusters that the player feels like the superstar lead. And in chasing that ambition, Amy Hennig and her team often beat Hollywood at its own game. Part Indiana Jones, part Lawrence of Arabia and part Perils of Pauline, Uncharted 3 gives you the thrills and spills as Nathan Drake, the cheeky ancestor of Sir Francis, as he desperately searches for lost treasure, B. Traven style.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Superbrothers, Capybara) This stirringly nostalgic game for the iPad is old school right down to the 8-bit style graphics of a proud Scythian, a woman based upon the lonely nomadic wanderers first documented in literary tradition by Herodotus in 8th century B.C. But you need not know that to thoroughly enbrace this simple offering that's easy to pick up but sometimes a brain-buster to figure out. There's no audio dialogue, no high definition artwork — just you, the Scythian experience, and the glow of the iPad in the night as you imagine yourself to be an audacious traveler through lands unknown in search of your next adventure.
Harold Goldberg is the author of All Your Base Are Belong to Us, How 50 Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture. He can be found crowdsourcing a movie about games at www.playingwithfirefilm.com.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Life off the field may be complicated for Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston and the second-ranked Seminoles, but things are simple between the lines.
Winston threw for 225 yards and four touchdowns as Florida State broke a school record for points in a game in an 80-14 victory against Idaho Saturday.
An ongoing sexual assault investigation of the Heisman Trophy candidate continues to cast a shadow over the program while the team focuses on football. State attorney Willie Meggs told The Associated Press on Saturday it is unlikely that a final decision will be made before Thanksgiving on whether to charge the quarterback.
Lawyer Patricia Carroll claims Winston raped the accuser on Dec. 7, 2012. Winston's lawyer Tim Jansen said the sex between the two was consensual.
"The football field is a sanctuary to me," Winston said. "And it's like that for all of our teammates. When all of us are on the field everything is just zoned out. We focus."
Florida State (11-0), second in the BCS standings, is two wins away from a likely berth in the BCS championship game with the regular-season finale at Florida next week. This is the first 11-0 start for the program since the 1999 national championship season and the first time going undefeated at home since 2000.
The Gators (4-7) lost 26-20 to Georgia Southern on Saturday and will be heavy underdogs next week. Florida State should go into the Atlantic Coast Conference championship without a loss and be favored again. A trip to Pasadena for the title game is nearly within its grasp.
Winston, a Heisman Trophy front-runner, played just one series in the second half.
"It's not right for the game," Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher said when asked about getting Winston better stats with more playing time. "People know he played well.... He played exceptionally well and he's on a great team.
"To me, stats aren't the key for awards. It's how well you play, how you dominate your opponent and what you do. That's my opinion. People who look at numbers don't really know the player."
The Seminoles have dominated throughout the season, but 66 points was the largest margin of victory since a 69-3 win against Murray State in the 2012 season opener. They topped the 77 points the Seminoles scored in 1995 against North Carolina State in 1995 to remain unbeaten.
The 607 points scored by Florida State in 2013 broke the ACC single-season record set by the Seminoles last season. The 11 consecutive games of 40 points or more ties Texas' 2005 single-season FBS record.
Fisher, who criticized his team's focus early, admitted he was being picky, "but that's the elite standard we want to be held to."With a bit of bookkeeping legerdemain borrowed from the Bush administration, the Democratic Congress is about to perform a cover-up on the most serious threat to America's economic future.
That threat is not the severe recession, tough as that is for the families and businesses struggling to make ends meet. In time, the recession will end, and last week's stock market performance hinted that we may not have to wait years for the recovery to begin.
The real threat is the monstrous debt resulting from the slump in revenue and the staggering sums being committed by Washington to rescuing embattled banks and homeowners -- and the absence of any serious strategy for paying it all back.
The Congressional Budget Office sketched the dimensions of the problem on March 20, and Congress reacted with shock. The CBO said that over the next 10 years, current policies would add a staggering $9.3 trillion to the national debt -- one-third more than President Obama had estimated by using much more optimistic assumptions about future economic growth.
As far as the eye could see, the CBO said, the debt would continue to grow by about $1 trillion a year because of a structural deficit between the spending rate, averaging 23 percent of gross domestic product, and federal revenue at 19 percent.
The ever-growing national debt will require ever-larger annual interest payments, with much of that money going overseas to China, Japan and other countries that have been buying our bonds.
Reacting to this scary prospect, the House and Senate budget committees took the paring knife to some of Obama's spending proposals and tax cuts last week. But many of the proposed savings look more like bookkeeping gimmicks than realistic cutbacks. The budget resolutions assume, for example, that no more money will be needed this year to bail out foundering businesses or pump up consumer demand, even though estimates of those needs start at $250 billion and go up by giant steps.
Republicans on the budget committees offered cuts that were larger and, in some but not all instances, more realistic.
But the main device the Democratic budgeteers employed was simply to shrink the budget "window" from 10 years to five. Instantly, $5 trillion in debt disappeared from view, along with the worry that long after the recession is past, the structural deficit would continue to blight the future of young working families.
The Democrats did not invent this gimmick. They borrowed it from George W. Bush, who turned to it as soon as his inherited budget surpluses withered with the tax cuts and recession of 2001-02. But Obama had promised a more honest budget and said that this meant looking at the long-term consequences of today's tax and spending decisions.
There are plenty of people in Congress for whom the CBO report was no surprise, and some of them have proposed a solution that would confront this reality. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Judd Gregg, its ranking Republican, have offered a bill to create a bipartisan commission to examine every aspect of the budget -- taxes, defense and domestic spending, and, especially, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congress would be required to vote promptly, up or down, on its recommendations, or come up with an alternative that would achieve at least as much in savings.
In the House, Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Republican Frank Wolf of Virginia have been pressing a similar proposal but have been regularly thwarted.
The roadblock in chief is Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House. She has made it clear that her main goal is to protect Social Security and Medicare from any significant reforms. Pelosi has not forgotten how Democrats benefited from the 2005-06 fight against Bush's effort to change Social Security. Her party, which had lost elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004, found its voice and its rallying cry to "Save Social Security," and Pelosi is not about to allow any bipartisan commission to take that issue away from her control.
The price for her obduracy is being paid in the rigging of the budget process. The larger price will be paid by your children and grandchildren, who will inherit a future-blighting mountain of debt.
davidbroder@washpost.comSan Francisco Giants fans start bonfires on a street to celebrate their team's winning of the World Series against the Detroit Tigers in San Francisco on October 28, 2012. (Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – San Francisco police were asking for the public’s help in finding out what happened to a man who died after being injured during a celebration of the Giants’ World Series win in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
The victim, identified by the medical examiner’s office as 37-year-old San Francisco resident Sean Moffitt, went home after the Oct. 28 celebration and told his roommate he was attacked at about 9:30 p.m. that night in the 1500 block of Haight Street, police spokesman Officer Gordon Shyy said.
Moffitt told the roommate that several people had surrounded him and hit him in the head multiple times with a metal object, police said.
However, Shyy said investigators believe Moffitt may have been injured by accident in the rowdy celebration on Haight Street and are asking for the public’s help in determining what happened that night.
“We’re looking for first-party accounts, anyone who may have been videotaping or taking pictures,” he said.
After Moffitt went to sleep at home on the night of Oct. 28, his roommate noticed that his injuries had gotten worse the next morning and called 911. Moffitt was taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died on Oct. 30.
The Police Department’s homicide detail is investigating the case, which is considered a suspicious death pending further investigation, Shyy said.
Anyone with information is asked to call the homicide detail at (415) 553-1145, the department’s anonymous tip line at (415) 575-4444 or send a tip by text message to TIP411 with “SFPD” in the message.
(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)Show full PR text
DuPont Building Innovations joins the Power Matters Alliance
DuPont Building Innovations to champion embedding wireless charging solutions
for smartphones and tablets into DuPont™ Corian® solid surfaces used in furnishings for the home and public spaces
Elegant, functional and versatile, DuPont™ Corian® solid surface is used in a wide variety of interior design and architectural applications. The image shows a selection of colours from the current collection of DuPont™ Corian® for Europe Middle East and Africa (Photo Leo Torri for DuPont™ Corian®, all rights reserved).
June 27, 2013 - DuPont Building Innovations has joined the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and is working with other PMA members on wireless charging solutions for smartphones and tablets that can be effectively integrated into worktops made with DuPont™ Corian® solid surface.
"The next phase in wireless power is seeing it embedded into surfaces used for furnishing solutions," said Ron Resnick, President of PMA. "DuPont has been driving innovation for
decades in the area of advanced materials. DuPont™ Corian® solid surface is a globally renowned premium solution in the markets of furnishing and interior design, both commercial and residential. The collaboration between PMA and DuPont Building Innovations marks another step forward in the PMA's vision to make smart wireless power a ubiquitous part of our lives." PMA was founded by Powermat Technologies and Procter & Gamble in 2012 and its board also includes representatives of AT&T, Duracell, Starbucks and the U.S. Government's Energy Star (non-voting).
"We are excited to join the PMA and demonstrate once again the endless evolution capabilities of DuPont™ Corian® solid surface for creating the furnishing solutions of tomorrow," said Ruslan Yusupov, global marketing director of DuPont Building Innovations. "We have been exploring the right technologies and partners for integrating wireless power into specific applications of DuPont™ Corian®, and we have found both in the PMA. We recognize that wireless power is fundamental for the further development of our mobile society, and we look forward to combining it with the design versatility and beauty of DuPont™ Corian® solid surface. For decades, surfaces made with DuPont™ Corian® have brought superior functionality and style into homes and public spaces. Now we aim to bring this level of performance to new heights, while meeting the emerging needs of industries and consumers to remain powered up throughout the day." About the Power Matters Alliance (www.powermatters.org) PMA was founded by Powermat Technologies and Procter & Gamble in 2012. A wide array of PMA-compliant products are available at leading retailers, and compatible "wireless charging spots" have been installed at leading airports, stadiums, restaurants, gyms and hair salons. Membership of the PMA is open to all, and its technical specifications are available to all members at www.powermatters.org.
About DuPont™ Corian® (www.corian.com, www.facebook.com/CorianDesign)
The continuous efforts, the investment and the creativity of DuPont in research and technology, product innovation, new applications development and marketing have made DuPont™ Corian® solid surface a design tool offering exceptional versatility and almost limitless possibilities for producing high-quality, effective, functional and reliable solutions addressed to residential, public and commercial environments, both indoor and outdoor.
From kitchens to lamps, from bathrooms to the exterior cladding of buildings, from seating solutions to home automation systems, from radiators to touch control surfaces, from tables to furnishing and fashion accessories, to mention just a few: the "magic" of DuPont™ Corian® can be found today in an extremely wide variety of products, systems and objects that everyone uses or experiences in daily life. And the list keeps on growing.
DuPont™ Corian® solid surface (the whole range or specific colors) has received important independent certifications (like UL Environment GreenGuard Certification, Home Innovation Research Labs/NBGS Green Certified Product, Scientific Certification Systems, Ecospecifier). Its performance also has been certified by prestigious independent institutions (for example, by NSF International for food contact, The Royal Institute of Public Health and LGA QualiTest for hygienic performance).
The DuPont manufacturing facilities that produce DuPont™ Corian® solid surface have been certified according to ISO 14001. As a result of a multi-year improvement program, all of these facilities have achieved zero landfill status by reducing, reusing and recycling manufacturing by-products and waste.The Will of Fire has been passed on and it will be unleashed by a new war. A NEW PROJECT STARTS! Built with a new graphic style in a vast ninja world where you can run as you wish. Join in on 4-man team battles with up to 8 ninja battling simultaneously online using dynamic action ninjutsu. Go through a new era with the freedom to run and battle with acrobatic ninja action. This is Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker! In development by Soleil Ltd. and to be published by Bandai Namco Entertainment on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC/Steam at an unannounced date in the future. Anime Games Online hopes to have additional information as it is announced. For now, take a look at the first official trailer!Last week we introduced Divi 2.4, the biggest upgrade in Divi history and a giant leap forward for our most popular WordPress theme. There are so many great features to explore in this update that it was hard to describe them all on the release post, which is why we have decided to do a 2-week series of informational blog posts that will aim to teach you how to take full advantage of Divi 2.4 and its new options. In part ten of this series, I’m going to explore the new Custom CSS options and how you can use them alongside the Divi Library in lieu of adding custom css with a child theme.
Learn All About Divi 2.4 Here
The All New Custom CSS Tabs in Divi 2.4
Sections, Rows, & Modules all have their very own Custom CSS tabs in the Divi Builder. This lets you add custom css to your page and even more specifically, directly to individual elements on the page. There is nothing wrong with doing this via a child theme or within the Elegant Themes ePanel, but you might find yourself using those methods far less with these new features at your fingertips.
Section & Row Custom CSS Options
Sections and Rows let you define custom css for the main element, which is the whole section or row element in the html, and both the :after and :before pseudo elements. Check out a few examples below.
Use Pseudo Elements to Add a Section Divider
Ive added CSS to the section’s After field to create a carrot that points to the next section. This element is made from a square shape that is the same color of the section background color, and then rotated 45%.
display: block; position: absolute; content: ''; width: 40px; height: 40px; bottom: -20px; left: 50%; margin-left: -20px; background-color: #1e73be; -ms-transform: rotate(45deg); -webkit-transform: rotate(45deg); transform: rotate(45deg); z-index: 1;
Style The Section Container Via the “Main Element” Field
Here, I’ve added a transparent inset shadow to give my section a nice transparent border effect.
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 0px 0px 0px 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3); -moz-box-shadow: inset 0px 0px 0px 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3); box-shadow: inset 0px 0px 0px 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
Custom Row CSS
Adding custom css to rows will style the container that holds its columns and modules. I’ve added a simple border and some custom padding to add a nice box around the contents of the row.
border: 4px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.4); padding: 40px;
Custom Module CSS Gives You More Control Than Ever Before
In addition to being able to add custom css to a module’s outer container and its pseudo elements, you can also add styles to individual pieces of a module. I will go over a few examples below and even show you how the Divi Library can take these examples to a whole new level of awesome.
Create Rounded Blurb Images with CSS
This CSS gives the blurb image a large border radius, effectively constraining your images to perfect circles if your images happen to be perfect squares to begin with. I’ve even added a bit of spacing between the blurb image and title by increasing the image’s bottom margin.
line-height: 0; -webkit-border-radius: 100px; -moz-border-radius: 100px; border-radius: 100px; overflow: hidden; xmax-width: 200px; margin: 0 auto 50px;
Add Custom Borders To Any Module with Custom CSS
Here, I’ve simply added a top double-border and some custom padding to text modules. This is an easy way to bring attention to a block of text.
border-top: 4px double rgba(255,255,255,0.5); padding-top: 20px;
Use CSS Filters On Any Module!
CSS filters work great for things like images, team member portraits, and even Google Maps.
From left to right, the css filters are as follows: Grayscale, Sepia, Saturation, Blur, Invert. You can change the values in the parentheses to achieve different levels of these effects. Simply add any of the styles below to the Main Element CSS field of any module.
Grayscale -webkit-filter: grayscale(1); filter: grayscale(1); Sepia -webkit-filter: sepia(1); filter: sepia(1); Saturate -webkit-filter: saturate(2); filter: saturate(2); Blur -webkit-filter: blur(5px); filter: blur(5px); Invert -webkit-filter: invert(1); filter: invert(1);
Using Custom Module CSS With The Divi Library To Decrease Development Time
If you achieve an awesome effect with custom css, such as the grayscale filter or circular blurb image, and you think you might use it again, simply save it to your Divi Library for later use. If the custom css is the only thing you want to save, choose to only save the Custom CSS Tab when you are prompted to do so.
Anytime you want to add a module with that effect, just add it to the page from your library, and no matter what content you place in that module, your custom css will still take effect. If you think you might even edit that saved css down the road, you can set it up as a global module. Then, any time you need to edit the CSS, you only have to do it once.
A Step By Step Example
Say I added some custom css to make the portrait in a testimonial module grayscale. Now I want this effect to take place across my entire website anytime I add a new testimonial module to my page. Here is how I would set this up using Custom CSS and the Divi Library.
Step 1. Create A Testimonial Module
This can be done from right inside your Divi Library or on a real page. Either will do. I am going to do this via the Divi Library because I haven’t started building my site yet. After navigating the the Divi Admin Tab, select the Divi Library link and choose to Add New.
Choose Your Settings – I named my module appropriately, told the library that I want to make a module, that I only want to include its Custom CSS tab, and I want it to be Global (in case I want to update my testimonial portrait filter in the future).
Submit & Configure – After submitting I am prompted to choose a module (I chose a testimonial module) and then I am immediately taken to the CSS tab since it is the only tab I chose to sync. After I place my css filter into the Testimonial Portrait field, I can Save and update my new library item.
Step 2. Add The Saved Library Element into a Layout
Since I created this module from within the Divi Library, I need to make a new page for my testimonials. I want to add three testimonials so I added my new global module into each column of a 3 column row.
Step 3. Save and Preview Your Awesome Work!
Reviewing & Modifying – After looking at these, I think that the images need a little more color, so I am going to decrease the filter level to 50%. All I have to do is open the settings of a testimonial module and change my filter amount to 0.5. Note that the CSS Tab is green, telling me that it is the only global tab in this module.
After saving the module and updating my page, I can see that all instances of my global testimonial module have portrait images with a 50% grayscale filter. Beautiful.
All of The Above Without Ever Leaving Divi
It’s hard to believe we just did all of that with native Divi tools. This is only one example of how you can use Custom CSS and the Divi Library to improve your workflow. Not to mention being able to export your Divi Library for use on other websites.About a year ago Bruce Dawson informed me that Microsoft is fixing their decimal to floating-point conversion routine in the next release of Visual Studio; I finally made the time to test the new code. I installed Visual Studio Community 2015 Release Candidate and ran my old C++ testcases. The good news: all of the individual conversion errors that I wrote about are fixed. The bad news: many errors remain.
Description of The Fix
This is a description of the changes to the decimal to floating-point conversion routine as posted on the Visual C++ Team Blog:
The old parsing algorithms would consider only up to 17 significant digits from the input string and would discard the rest of the digits. This is sufficient to generate a very close approximation of the value represented by the string, and the result is usually very close to the correctly rounded result. The new implementation considers all present digits and produces the correctly rounded result for all inputs (up to 768 digits in length).
The Conversion Errors
I found errors on inputs of 17 significant digits or more, with corresponding exponents in a narrow range — between 12 and 18, for normalized inputs up to 100 significant digits (the maximum length I tested). For example, 6.9294956446009195e15, or 6929495644600919.5: it should convert to 0x1.89e56ee5e7a58p52, or decimal 6929495644600920; Visual Studio converts it to 0x1.89e56ee5e7a57p+52, or decimal 6929495644600919. This is one ULP (binary, and decimal as it turns out) too low.
In binary, 6929495644600919.5 is
11000100111100101011011101110010111100111101001010111.1
This is a halfway case (54 bits, bit 54 is 1), and should round up to nearest even. (Many of the errors I found are not halfway cases though.)
This example produces the same incorrect result through strtod() or as a compiler converted decimal literal. I am guessing that the run-time and compile time conversion code is the same since I have never found a mismatch.
New Code Vs. Old Code
The errors made by the old code occur for any length input; for the new code, errors only occur for inputs of 17 significant digits or more. Curiously, as input length increases, the new code produces more errors than the old code.
BTW, the example above fails on both the new and old code.
Update 6/2/15: Here’s an example that the old code gets right that the new code gets wrong: 3.7455744005952583e15. It converts to 0x1.a9d28ff412a75p+51 = 3745574400595258.5 (correct) in the old code, but 0x1.a9d28ff412a74p+51 = 3745574400595258 (incorrect) in the new code.
Bug Report
I submitted this bug report to Microsoft. I will update this article when I get a response. (My original bug report, from April 2009, was deleted years ago.)
How Could This Happen?
It’s hard to imagine how this bug escaped testing.
I used a simple loop, generating and converting strings with random length and exponent — barely a 20 line C program (not counting David Gay’s dtoa.c). It finds incorrect conversions at the rate of several hundred per million tested (exact rate depends on input length).
Update: On June 2, Microsoft marked the bug as “won’t fix”, since it would introduce “compatibility problems” with Visual Studio 2013. After I pointed out that it already has compatibility problems, they contacted me and said they would look into fixing it after all. They requested my testcase and I sent it to them. I will keep you updated.
Update (June 22): Microsoft decided to fix the bug; see James McNellis’s comment below.
Rounding Mode Support
The article from the Visual C++ Team Blog also says
In addition, these functions now respect the rounding mode (controllable via fesetround).
This appears to be true (it wasn’t before). I did only limited testing though; when the conversion bug is fixed, I’ll do full-scale random testing.The Establishment Media is hyping the dire prophecy of a Russian professor that the United States will have a bloody civil war and "disintegrate," after which the secessionist regions will be absorbed by other nations. The Establishment Media Moral: we must patriotically embrace our federal government or face horrendous consequences.
Certainly a full-blown civil war would be hellish. With modern weapons the casualties could exceed all our other wars. The disruption of food production and distribution chains in our specialized economy could trigger famine. To be imperially dominated by other nations could well mean the loss of our civil liberties.
However, our political establishment is playing a rhetorical game when it strives to link secession and civil war. There won’t be a civil war if we the people support a constitutional amendment to allow the fifty states of the United States to peacefully become fifty independent nations through voluntary disunion.
And why should we do that? Because unlike Alexander Hamilton in his parlor-game speculations known as The Federalist Papers, we’ve had generations of firsthand experience with the defects of federal government. We see today that every alleged benefit that Hamilton hypothesized for federal government has been perverted in practice.
Hamilton proposed that a federal government would resist foreign domination. In reality, our politicians prostitute our superpower military at every sufferance. We fought one world war to make the world safe for Imperialism and another to make it safe for Communism. Today our politicians bow to Israel, tomorrow possibly China.
Hamilton’s strength-in-numbers argument failed during the Cold War, when our military stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons yet still feared a first strike attack. What if, though, Massachusetts had seceded with only ten warheads? Wouldn’t the Soviets have refrained from attacking sovereign Massachusetts for fear of losing ten of their cities?
Disunion would protect the planet from thermonuclear destruction. By consolidating our vast arsenal of nuclear overkill under federal command, however, we equip a lone fallible human to destroy civilization — a power we would not want in the hands of the wisest saint, and wise saints aren’t elected President.
We witnessed the crippling weakness of centralized command in the 9-11 attacks, when the Commander-in-Chief was too busy hiding to bother with scrambling interceptors. And if it can’t protect its own headquarters from airline hijackers, what does a superpower military protect us from?
Moving to economics, Hamilton warned in The Federalist Papers that if the states remained independent, they would enact high tariffs that would cripple prosperity. A federal government, he asserted, would promote free trade. That myth, of course, didn’t survive the first session of Congress.
With Congress as battlefield, every state wages perpetual economic warfare against every other state. Our representatives legislate national tariffs (and regulations, subsidies, and import quotas) to benefit producers in their home states by afflicting consumers in other states, and then compete for "pork barrel" appropriations that loot the national treasury.
As one observer remarked, the attitude of the Michigan automakers in seeking a federal bailout is, “You won’t buy our crummy cars, so we’ll make you pay for them anyway.” Under federal subjugation, the citizens of forty-nine other states must endure such exploitation with little recourse except vengeful reciprocity.
Hamilton also claimed the national debt would encourage the wealthy to "Invest in America." Instead, politicians "invest" in their patrons at the country’s expense. Raise taxes to pay off debt, and politicians borrow more. Hamilton called the national debt a "blessing," but aren’t state and local debts "blessings" enough?
Today’s federal government infringes citizen rights far more than did the British Crown of Hamilton’s time. Hamilton’s fantasies about the benevolence of an all-powerful central government may be excused as historical navet, but today anyone who insists the federal leviathan is other than maliciously imperious is either blind or bribed.
How can anyone not recognize the monster is uncontrollable, when governors must resign over petty corruption but a President deceived us into war and bankrupted the nation yet stood divinely unimpeachable — as if the ancient pagan ritualism that equated kingship with godhood never went away.
An America of sovereign states, whose governments are more human-sized, will dismiss egomaniacs who proclaim that a citizen’s "glorious duty" is |
” on the left. However, his recent attempts to translate his theories into concrete policies for a possible future SYRIZA government in Greece reveal that there is nothing revolutionary in his thinking. He is in fact providing academic credibility to a modern reformist current and has become an apologist for the shift to the right on the part of the leadership of SYRIZA.
At the 6th Subversive Festival held in Zagreb in May Slavoj Zizek held a public debate on the role of the European left together with Alexis Tsipras, the leader of SYRIZA. Zizek gave the reasons why he supports SYRIZA and the expectations he has of the party. He also put forward specific proposals on the political direction that SYRIZA should take. Following an attack on Zizek by New Democracy in Greece, the Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia interviewed him where he repeated his views regarding SYRIZA.
The aim of this article is not to deal with the overall philosophical ideas of Zizek. In this article we will limit ourselves to dealing with some of the specific proposals that Zizek suggests SYRIZA should take up. We believe that there is nothing new in what Zizek raised in the debate with Tsipras. In fact, although he tries to cover his positions with a left rhetoric, his basic position on Greece comes straight from the Stalinist tradition of Popular Frontism, even including the old idea of forming an alliance with a so-called “progressive”, or as he puts it “patriotic”, bourgeoisie, as will become clear from the quotes we provide later in this article.
Zizek believes that SYRIZA is a new and unique phenomenon. He claims it is different from the radical movements of the past such as the movement led by Mandela in South Africa or the movement around Lula in Brazil. He says that these all came to power promising radical changes, but once in government only succeeded in carrying out limited reforms and essentially served the interests of global capitalism. He also claims SYRIZA is different from what he defines as the “radical left” that supports clear revolutionary principles but doesn’t attempt and doesn’t want to take the responsibility of power, thus condemning itself to certain failure.
Zizek claims that SYRIZA differs in the fact that while it is a truly radical left party with principles, it also has the additional quality of speaking the voice of reason in a European political environment that is gradually going mad. Zizek believes that the austerity measures being adopted all over Europe are dogmatic and based on fairy tales. This is what he said in the debate with Tsipras:
“Something very dangerous is going on now in Europe… I think that the European political elite is progressively losing its ability to rule. In other countries, even in the United States, with all the compromises, and so on... Obama, is somehow doing it... Europe, on the other hand, is losing its compass... The leaders don’t know what to do. The task ahead of SYRIZA is not some kind of crazy radical measures, but simply, in a very pragmatic way, which will have very radical consequences, to bring rationality, to give people hope, to stabilise the situation…” [Our emphasis]
And he goes on to say,
“…what I’m saying is that we should become more attentive to the irrationality that is deeply embedded in our daily reactions, the ideological irrationality of today’s global system... Krugman once gave an ingenious answer when he explained that even if we had known 10 years ago that the 2008 financial crisis would happen, we would still have done nothing to stop it. This is the tragedy of today’s capitalism. Even if you are fully aware you will still follow your illusions…”
Here we see how Zizek merely repeats an idea that is present throughout the reformist left in Europe: that the cuts in welfare spending are not necessary even from the point of view of capitalism, but an irrational ideological fixation of the European bourgeois politicians. Instead of explaining that, given the fundamental inner contradictions of a system based on profit, the bourgeois have no other policies to offer; instead of explaining that within the confines of capitalism there is no way out, he presents the situation as one where the European bourgeois have all gone mad and are behaving “irrationally”. From this it flows that a solution within the confines of capitalism is possible.
We have to ask the question: what is it that makes the European bourgeois – and reformist – political leaders act so “irrationally”? The European political leaders are currently acting within the context of the deepest crisis in the history of capitalism. It is this crisis that determines their policies and behaviour. Zizek, who has many times referred to this crisis in other speeches and also in some of his writings, this time does not seem to pay any particular attention to the concrete material conditions, nor does he provide an analysis of the class struggle that flows from them. All we need is some “rationality”, and he sees SYRIZA and its leader Tsipras as the bearer of this logical thought.
For Marxists this is an idealistic way of seeing things. Capitalism is certainly an irrational system, from the point of view of the real needs of humanity. But so long as it exists, what pushes it forward is the quest for profit on the part of all the capitalists. That which produces profit is logical and rational for the capitalists, that which does not is illogical and irrational!
Basing ourselves on the concrete analysis of the contradictions of the system, we pointed out a long time ago [see A Socialist Alternative to the European Union, By Alan Woods, 1997] that European unification that the bourgeoisie of Europe was attempting to achieve – albeit being the only road for them as they could not compete with the other economic blocs across the globe – could not be achieved. This, we explained, was because competition between the states that make up the European Union – states that are on very different levels of development – inevitably becomes ferocious when the share of the market of each of these declines rapidly in times of crisis.
Germany is at the heart of the European Union and has a double role as partner and competitor of the other EU member states. In the past economic growth was maintained in Europe by expanding credit to unheard of levels. So long as the economy was expanding, and the banks and big corporations were making big profits, debt was allowed to expand. But now debt has reached such levels that even the powerful German economy cannot shoulder all the European debt. It would be quite “irrational” for it to do so. The German ruling class is also not willing to consent to an uncontrollable printing of money as this would lead to massive inflation at a later stage of the crisis and such inflation would certainly be unmanageable. At the same time the ruling classes of Europe are presenting the bill to the poorer layers of society, thus putting at risk the social peace that was achieved in the post-war period. By attempting to achieve economic equilibrium they are destabilising the relations between the classes.
Thus we can see that what the ruling classes in Europe are actually facing is a real dilemma: they must cut spending in an attempt to reduce debt, but by doing so they are merely cutting further the market. Their policies flow from this situation and not from some ingrained “neoliberal” ideology. The serious strategists of the ruling class can clearly see this. The reformist leaders of the labour movement, however, can only see a system that has gone “crazy”. There are even some bourgeois thinkers who see things in these terms. For these technocrats the views expressed by the president of SYRIZA in international meetings seem quite logical: austerity should stop, the vicious cycle that prevents economic growth should stop also. Undoubtedly, everyone would like to see growth, rising wages, more jobs, etc. But is all this possible within the narrow confines of the capitalist system?
Zizek says, “the policies of austerity are not logical policies”. The question we have to ask ourselves is: what are the alternatives to austerity? The bourgeois in countries like Britain and the United States have applied what they define as “quantitative easing”, i.e. the printing of money, with little effect bar the piling up of inflationary pressures for the future. Basically what Zizek is objecting to is monetarism, i.e. so-called “neo-liberalism”. The alternative to monetarism, under capitalism, is Keynesianism, which would require massive amounts of public spending. With such high levels of public debt everywhere, where does Zizek propose the money will come from? As he excludes overthrowing the bourgeoisie [see below], but merely suggests some abstract “redistribution” of wealth, he is obliged to seek a solution within the logic of capitalism, and thus ends up as yet another modern-day reformist who clings to Keynesianism as a way out of the crisis. [For a detailed analysis of the ideas of the monetarists and Keynesians see: Marx, Keynes, Hayek and the Crisis of Capitalism – Part One, Part two and Part Three]
Austerity is nothing more than a form of class war; and it is an unavoidable choice for the ruling class and not merely a political choice. The outcome of this war will be determined by the policies adopted by the leadership of the labour movement. The working class has shown in several countries that it is moving in a very radical direction and that it is ready to struggle. In Greece this is abundantly clear. The general strikes, mass rallies and protests of the past few years clearly confirm this. The capitalists, in fact, are very much aware that sooner or later class struggle will erupt everywhere – not just in Greece – and they are getting ready for this.
But what are the leaders of the labour movement doing? What is the strategy, what is the programme of the leaders of the working class? More importantly, what should this strategy be?
In his interview with Eleftherotypia, Zizek says:
“…I am fed up with the left that states that it wishes to remain loyal to its principles and dreams of radical solutions and thus always ends up being marginalized, since it isn’t actually interested in winning; maybe because if it does enter into government, its ineffectiveness will be revealed. Contrary to this SYRIZA is ready to assume government in very difficult times for your country and without promising a quick solution. They are not some crazy lefties that will attempt to realize utopia and then when they fail they blame western imperialism.” [Translated from the Greek original].
We can understand why Zizek denounces those sects of the so-called “radical left” who in the name of purity of revolutionary ideas adopt methods and tactics which render them incapable of connecting with the real needs of the masses. However, the main characteristic of the sectarians is not their devotion to principles, as Zizek claims, but their rigidness when it comes to tactics and their vague propaganda of a programme that is revolutionary only in theory.
Sectarianism indeed leads to isolation from the masses and therefore failure. For what does “revolutionary purity” have to offer if the policies emanating from it lead to certain failure? However, the way to answer this sectarianism is not to denounce the revolutionary programme, is not to move the “strategic goal of socialism” to some undefined future, as Zizek does. Zizek, in a classical reformist manner, throws out the baby with the bathwater. He equates a principled defence of a revolutionary programme with sectarianism. In this he carries out a dishonest trick. In reality, it is possible to maintain a principled revolutionary stance and apply this in a flexible, non-sectarian manner to the labour movement as a whole. It is possible to connect the programme of revolutionary Marxism with the mass movement, as did Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in the past. Nowhere in the texts of these great Marxist thinkers will one find anything that would justify abandoning the revolutionary programme of socialism as a means of gaining power. On the contrary!
What is required is to defend the revolutionary programme together with flexibility in tactics. This is what would allow a mass revolutionary party to sink roots within the working class. The success of revolutionary policies depends on successfully connecting them with the needs of the working class, of using them as a lever to make conscious the task at hand: the overthrow of capitalism.
For Zizek, however, the overthrow of capitalism is something for the long distant future. For him it is still early days for any such attempts. According to Zizek at this stage the left should adopt a more moderate approach. Radical reforms are not necessary; all that is required, as we have quoted him above, is to work “simply, in a very pragmatic way, which will have very radical consequences, to bring rationality, to give people hope, to stabilise the situation…” Thus all that is needed is to break with the madness and irrationality of today’s bourgeois leaders and introduce reason.
The problem is that this return of reason, that Zizek wants to see, is accompanied by policies that are confined to this very capitalist system. Capitalism has its own rules that govern it and within these it is impossible to plan production and distribution. The idea of a redistribution of wealth without expropriating and overthrowing the bourgeoisie is utterly utopian. It amounts to kindly requesting that the small minority of wealthy capitalists voluntarily give up some of their wealth for the good of society in general. If Zizek can indicate where such bourgeois are to be found, we would be very interested to know!
Given the anarchic nature of capitalism, real social needs cannot be recorded and calculated, and therefore effective planning to produce goods to meet the social needs of the bulk of the population cannot be calculated either. Any policy that respects the rules of capitalism – a Keynesian policy that will raise demand for example, as the leadership of SYRIZA frequently puts forward – is not at all rational or reasonable for it ignores the way capitalism actually works. These kinds of policies cannot tackle the actual cause of the crisis but merely try to cure its symptoms using superficial remedies.
Hidden within Zizek’s views there is a reactionary illusion: that the left, when in government, will manage to convince at least a section of the capitalists to support policies that will be beneficial both for them and the workers. This is as senseless as trying to convince a tiger to become a vegetarian. To maximise profits the capitalists are demanding a cut in the cost of labour and they are competing with each other to see who can cut the most. To think that capitalists can behave in any other way is to ignore the real world we live in.
In order to stabilize the situation under capitalism and to give hope to the people, it is necessary that there be economic growth that produces a large enough surplus while at the same time the social relations nationally and internationally would have to be such as to allow the working class to receive a sufficient share of this. This is a scenario that has been realized – and even then only partially – under very special circumstances, such as during a prolonged period of capitalist growth like the one we experienced during the post-war period in Europe, but it is completely utopian during a period of deep capitalist crisis, such as the one we are experiencing today.
So while Zizek states that he is “fed up” with the sectarianism of the “revolutionary left”, he is not so fed up with reformism, a political tradition and practice that, despite its name, is in reality incapable of achieving even the mildest of reforms in today’s conditions. Despite his fierce attacks on capitalism, mainly of a moralistic nature, in reality his views reveal illusions in the potential for growth of the system. He sees it as a question of bad, mafia-type capitalists versus genuine, honest, productive capitalists who want the good of the nation.
The “realistic” alliances of Zizek
Having put forward such goals for SYRIZA, Zizek also suggests what he considers to be “novel” political alliances. He states in the interview with Eleftherotypia the following:
“What we need are true and reasonable alliances, not communist revolutions, but bourgeois parliaments that will bring results. The left should abandon its sectarian attitude and approach what one would define as the patriotic bourgeoisie.”
Earlier this year at the above quoted 6th Subversive Festival held in Zagreb in a debate with Alexis Tsipras Zizek dealt with this same question raising the need for an alliance with a so-called “patriotic” or “progressive” bourgeoisie. Here we quote some of what he said. [The full debate is available online]:
[Minute 50 to 54] “It’s a question of intelligent alliances... we will still live for some decades within capitalism... I will use an old term... a patriotic bourgeoisie... that has some genuine interest in producing for the people... It is not just about generally striking at the rich, but a very carefully planned strategy... There are things that work with capitalism if applied properly... competition, especially at small scale production of consumerist goods and so on... A dream for me of what SYRIZA should be, within this global redistribution, is to make life easier even for truly productive capitalists... This would be a true triumph for SYRIZA... They would say that not only did we make it easier for the workers, but if you are a good honest capitalist you should vote for us... And I am ready to come to you and be some kind of voice of ‘capitalists for SYRIZA’. That would be my dream.”
Here we are presented with undistilled reformism. Here we are presented with the view that there are good “productive” capitalists who want to produce and bad capitalists of the gangster mafia type. Since when have there been capitalists who have a “genuine interest in producing for the people”? Has Zizek suddenly forgotten all his readings of Marx? Capitalists invest if they can make a profit. That is the only thing that motivates them. If in Greece there were scope for profitable investment to be made in manufacturing industry you can be sure the capitalists would be rushing in with their money. Instead, they keep it stashed away in foreign banks or at most use it in speculative investment.
Zizek also introduces another very old idea: that small scale production can work on a competitive basis. Has he, again, forgotten, what Marx explained long ago, that from small scale production the road inevitably leads to large scale monopolisation, precisely through the mechanism of competition? Or are we to believe that a SYRIZA government will prove capable of turning the clock of history backwards to a time when production was still in its early stages of small scale family run enterprises?
Dear comrade Zizek, the only form of capitalism that is possible today is the one you have before you, one dominated by huge multinational corporations. The advice you are giving to the SYRIZA leaders is very dangerous indeed, as it sows illusions in the possibility of finding some kind of “progressive” bourgeoisie with which it would be possible to govern together in the interests of both workers and capitalists. Any such attempt would doom SYRIZA to failure, and the workers and youth of Greece would pay a very heavy price for such failure.
Zizek on the Greek state
How far Zizek is removed from a genuine understanding of Marxism can be seen by what he says about the Greek state:
“SYRIZA shouldn’t do some crazy leftist revolution. SYRIZA should even modernise the Greek state, make it finally an efficient, even a much better bourgeois state if you want... You will have to do the decent job that the Greek capitalist class wasn’t able to do for themselves. [Minute 58]
No doubt comrade Zizek has read Lenin’s State and Revolution. We wonder, from reading the above quote, whether he actually agrees with Lenin or if he remembers what he has read. In this quote we see the utterly reformist illusions of Zizek in relation to the Greek state. He clearly thinks the present bourgeois Greek state is no good, but in its place he envisages SYRIZA creating a “better bourgeois state”. By this we presume he means a state which is efficient, that does away with bureaucracy, nepotism, corruption, etc. This is in line with his views that somewhere in Greece there is an honest, productive, progressive bourgeoisie.
Thus, according to the logic of Zizek, since “communist revolutions” are ruled out – and consequently SYRIZA should not aim to overthrow capitalism – it would seem logical to “approach” this so-called “patriotic” bourgeoisie as a necessary ally in reforming the state and developing the economy! The only obstacle to achieving this realistic alliance seems to be a sectarian section of the left. And in order for the left to overcome this sectarianism what may prove necessary is the whip of someone like... Thatcher, as he states in the same interview with Eleftherotypia! We presume that by this he means a strong leader of the left who can impose unity on the left and bring it to its senses and adopt the realistic viewpoint that Zizek suggests.
We see how Zizek has no problem in suggesting that SYRIZA adopt a policy of class collaboration. He says that what is needed is imagination and the removal of taboos. We Marxists on the other hand, have no obligation to accept a seriously mistaken and dangerous position, no matter whose imagination has formulated it. On the contrary, it is our duty to expose the damaging role that these ideas can have for both SYRIZA and the labour movement as a whole.
Firstly, one has to ask oneself who is this “patriotic bourgeoisie” and whether it even exists at all and at the end of the day what common interests could it have with the working class. It is quite a different matter to enter into a discussion regarding an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie than to discuss the tactics that a government of the left should employ to win over the small business men and women who have gone bankrupt because of the current crisis. The small shopkeepers, the artisans, the small businesses are not the same thing as big business and the ruling class. They are the petit bourgeoisie who, in normal times, the big bourgeois lean on for political support. But in times of severe crisis these layers face bankruptcy and destitution. This layer can and must be won over by the left. But that cannot be done by inventing some phantomatic “progressive bourgeoisie”. The only way to win over this layer is by boldly putting forward a revolutionary programme that includes the nationalisation of the banks and big corporations. For example, by nationalising the banks and uniting them into one centralised state bank, it would be possible to offer cheap credit to the small businesspeople.
When Zizek speaks of the “patriotic” bourgeoisie, he is referring to an abstractly constructed social class, some kind of “progressive bourgeoisie”. Such a class is supposedly a progressive capital owning layer of society that is willing to inject its wealth into the economy by investing in production –and not keep its capital stashed away in foreign banks or offshore – which would transform Greek society by sweeping away the old remnants of history, such as for example the legal connection of the State with the Church. It is quite clear that such a class has never existed in the whole history of Greek capitalism and it certainly does not exist today either. Today such a class does not even exist in the advanced capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie played a progressive role in the past.
A concrete indicator of the absence of such a class in Greece today is its lack of any political representation. The small businesspeople that do react against the Troika, in reality are disappointed with the fact that the government is no longer able to protect them from the attacks of foreign capital. Desperate as they are, they turn either to right-wing demagogues and far-right parties, such as the Independent Greeks or Golden Dawn, or in some cases to SYRIZA.
It is important to point out here that the collaboration that the leadership of SYRIZA has suggested with the Independent Greeks does not flow from any political strategy of turning to this so-called “patriotic” bourgeoisie, but is a reactionary and opportunistic alliance that disappoints and confuses the rank and file. Unfortunately, Zizek’s superficial statements, instead of providing clarity on these questions – as they should – merely provide a “radical” cover for reactionary methods that have their origins, not in supposedly original ideas, but in the treacherous tactics of the Stalinist Popular Frontism of the 1930’s which are dangerous for the movement.
What should be SYRIZA’s position towards the petit bourgeois?
Instead of talking about approaching the “patriotic” bourgeoisie, the discussion should be focused on how could a government of the left secure the support, or at least the acceptance, of the petit bourgeois layers of society.
There is no doubt that the left will need to form alliances when it comes to power. However, its basic first duty should be to succeed in organizing and giving a voice to the working class. No discussion regarding alliances has any meaning without this basic precondition. The winning over of the petit bourgeois layers cannot happen by capitulating to the policies of those bourgeois parties who in reality do not have the consistent support of any part of society. The only way for a left government is to implement consistently the programme of the working class, which can be only the programme of socialist revolution. The nationalisation of the banking system and of the commanding heights of the economy is not a programme that is hostile towards the middle classes. On the contrary, this is the only way to control the flow of credit and to enable the planning of the reconstruction of production in the country. This would offer a breath of fresh air to the middle classes who are currently being crushed by the monopolies.
Advocating the “communist revolution” does not constitute sectarianism, as Zizek seems to think. On the contrary, the outbreak of events of a revolutionary character in various countries shows that we are not dealing with isolated, local events but manifestations of a deep crisis of capitalism as a whole. The revolutionary movements that we have seen in the recent period in countries like Turkey and Brazil, and even more so in Egypt and Tunisia, all express a deep desire of the masses for change. In all cases the masses raise demands that are de facto incompatible with the continuation of capitalism. They want jobs, good healthcare, good education, decent wages and so on. This means that they are objectively on a collision course with the system. Initially the masses may think that these demands can be achieved without challenging the very basis of the system, but through experience and struggle they will come to the conclusion that the whole system must be swept away. The question that we need to address is whether the left in Europe and around the world can analyze these phenomena, adopt the right course and lead the working class, not only in Greece, but in an organized and coordinated way, in every country. A new and mass revolutionary international organisation that will base itself on the solid foundations of Marxism is more relevant than ever.
Slavoj Zizek is a popular speaker with bold facial expressions and constant gesturing, who uses provocative jokes and verbal excesses, but he does not seem to be able to grasp the essence of the situation in Greece. Along with his support for SYRIZA, he also adopts uncritically the whole agenda of the party’s leadership, thus becoming its ideological apologist. He provides a theoretical backing for all the mistaken policies of the SYRIZA leadership with the glamour of a “radical philosopher”. His radicalism, however, despite his own intentions, is inconsistent and conceals the most insidious conservatism, the conservatism of class collaboration, which is the cornerstone of every social democratic policy. This is not what the rank and file of SYRIZA and the workers and youth in general in Greece require.
The Communist Tendency of SYRIZA understands that the masses have turned to the party investing it with their hopes and will continue to support it expecting significant changes in their lives. However, if their expectations are not met, Zizek’s statement that SYRIZA “is not promising a quick solution” will not be of much comfort to them. On the contrary, it is possible that he too will have to face their wrath.
For the Communist Tendency the only realistic option for SYRIZA is not to bend to the pressures of the bourgeoisie, but to struggle for a government of the left – offering a united front to the KKE – which would be a revolutionary government that would carry out a socialist programme establishing a democratically planned, nationalised economy. Such a government would explain that in order to guarantee jobs, decent wages, good healthcare, good schools and a general improvement in living conditions for the working people, the wealth of the big bourgeoisie, of the banks and the big corporations must be taken under public control. There is no other road, whatever Zizek may think.
Who can doubt that if the leaders of SYRIZA were to explain all this, considering their authority and also considering the burning desire for change on the part of the masses, that a successful socialist transformation of Greece is not possible? And Zizek, instead of using his reputation to support the backsliding of the SYRIZA leadership, would do better to use his reputation to explain the genuine ideas of Marxism. He has expressed the desire to see SYRIZA not only win the elections but also to keep winning and to stay in power. The way to achieve that is to carry out a genuine socialist transformation of Greece taking power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Such a successful transformation would indicate the way forward for the socialist revolution in Europe and around the world.How and why the US encouraged looting in Iraq
By Patrick Martin
15 April 2003
The widespread looting in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and other Iraqi cities, following the collapse of the Ba’athist regime of President Saddam Hussein, was not merely an incidental byproduct of the US military conquest of Iraq. It was deliberately encouraged and fostered by the Bush administration and the Pentagon for definite political and economic reasons.
Thousands took part in the looting in Baghdad which began April 9, the day the Hussein government ceased to function in the capital city. Not only were government ministries targeted, and the homes of the Ba’athist elite, but public institutions vital to Iraqi society, including hospitals, schools and food distribution centers. Equipment and parts were stripped from power plants, thus delaying the restoration of electricity to the city of 5 million people.
Perhaps the most devastating loss for the Iraqi people is the ransacking of the National Museum, the greatest trove of archeological and historical artifacts in the Middle East. The 28 galleries of the huge museum were picked clean by looters who made off with more than 50,000 irreplaceable artifacts, relics of past civilizations dating back 5,000 years. The museum’s entire card catalog was destroyed, making it impossible even to identify what has been lost.
The US military stood by and permitted the ransacking of the museum, an incalculable blow to Iraqi and world culture, just as they allowed and even encouraged the looting of hospitals, universities, libraries and government social service buildings. The occupation forces protected only the Ministry of Oil, with its detailed inventory of Iraqi oil reserves, as well as the Ministry of Interior, the headquarters of the ousted regime’s secret police.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a statement in Geneva declaring that the relief agency was “profoundly alarmed by the chaos currently prevailing in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.” The medical system in Baghdad “has virtually collapsed,” the ICRC warned, and it reminded the US and Britain that they were obliged under international law to guarantee the basic security of the Iraqi population.
General Tommy Franks, the overall commander of all US and British forces in Iraq, issued an order to unit commanders that specifically prohibited the use of force to prevent looting. This instruction was only modified after several days because of mounting protests by Iraqi citizens over the destruction of their social infrastructure.
The New York Times reported one such protest by an Iraqi man who was standing guard at Al Kindi hospital in Baghdad. Haider Daoud “said he was angry at his encounters with American soldiers in the neighborhood, mentioning one marine who he said he had begged to guard the hospital two days ago. ‘He told me the same words: He can’t protect the hospital,’ Mr. Daoud said. ‘A big army like the USA army can’t protect the hospital?’”
The role of the US military went beyond simply standing by, and extended to actually encouraging and facilitating looting. According to a report in the Washington Post, after the US military reopened two bridges across the Tigris River to civilian traffic, “the immediate result was that looters raced across and extended their plundering to the Planning Ministry and other buildings that had been spared.”
Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an interview April 11 with a Swedish researcher of Middle Eastern ancestry who had gone to Iraq to serve as a human shield. Khaled Bayoumi told the newspaper, “I happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering.”
He described how US soldiers shot security guards at a local government building on Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris, and then “blasted apart the doors to the building.” Next, according to Bayoumi, “from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them.”
At first, he said, residents were hesitant to come out of their homes because anyone who had tried to cross the street in the morning had been shot. “Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building,” Bayoumi continued. “The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the plundering continued there.
“I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one that watched with disgust.”
Similar scenes were reported in Kirkuk and Mosul, the two large northern cities with ethnically mixed populations. There the looting of public buildings has direct political overtones, since the destruction of property deeds and other government records will make it easier to conduct ethnic cleansing of Arab or Turkmen populations by the Kurdish forces that now dominate the region, in alliance with US Special Forces.
In Kirkuk, the site of Iraq’s richest oilfield, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has already installed its officials in the homes of former Ba’ath Party leaders. US soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade seized control of an Iraqi air base but permitted looters to leave the base with their stolen goods, even opening the gates to allow them to pass.
There was no effort to halt arson at the city’s cotton plant, or at office buildings, but US troops quickly occupied facilities of the North Oil Company, the state-owned firm that manages the huge northern oilfields. Colonel William Mayville, commander of the brigade, dispatched troops to three key oil facilities, while US Special Forces stood watch over four gas-oil separation plants. Mayville told the American media that he wanted to send the message, “Hey, don’t screw with the oil.”
In Mosul, northern Iraq’s largest city, hospitals, universities, laboratories, hotels, clinics and factories were all sacked and stripped of their goods. The 700 US troops sent to Mosul remained outside the city for more than a day while the theft and vandalism continued, leading to widespread complaints from city residents—reported even in the American press—that the US was permitting the pillaging.
Robert Fisk, writing in the British newspaper the Independent April 14, noted a pattern in the response of American forces to looting in Baghdad, which, he said, “shows clearly what the US intends to protect.” He continued: “After days of arson and pillage, here’s a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq’s history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.
“The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched—and untouchable—because tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course—with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq—and the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraq’s most valuable asset—its oilfields and, even more important, its massive reserves—are safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared, as Washington almost certainly intends, with American oil companies.”
Such concerns were already apparent in the actions of the US military at the very beginning of the war. The same General Franks who instructed US troops to take no action against looting in Baghdad or other cities gave the order March 20 for the First Marine Expeditional Force to invade Iraq a day early, because of reports, later proven largely false, that Iraqi troops were setting fire to the country’s southern oilfields at Rumaila.
The Centcom chief discarded previous operational plans and potentially put many soldiers’ lives at risk by acting before the air bombardment had begun in order to safeguard the real objective of the US war, Iraq’s huge oil reserves.
The most striking aspect of the outbreak of looting was the nonchalant attitude of US government officials in Washington. At a Pentagon press conference Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denounced the media for exaggerating the extent of chaos, and argued that the looting was a natural and perhaps even healthy expression of pent-up hostility to the old regime. “It’s untidy,” Rumsfeld said. “And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”
There is no doubt the Bush administration would take a less charitable view of the “freedom” to loot if mobs were breaking into corporate offices in downtown Houston, Washington or New York City.
As in every action of the Bush administration, personal greed and profit-gouging are an important aspect. The ransacking of Iraqi government facilities, added to the devastation caused by American bombing, is part of the process of demolishing the large state-run sector of Iraq’s economy, to the benefit of American companies. Already contracts have been awarded to private American firms to provide new school books, replace looted medical equipment, even train a new Iraqi police force.
In the Orwellian language of New York Times columnist William Safire, the US aim is to “introduce free enterprise and the rule of law”—by means of a criminal invasion, followed by widespread looting. This will set the stage for a much bigger theft: the privatization of Iraq’s vast oil resources and |
jokes about jumping the shark, right now. “Jump the shark,” a term for when a movie or TV show runs out of ideas, has already been applied to “Sharknado Live” on social media posts, along with unflattering comparisons to “Duck Commander Musical.”
That production opened and closed within five weeks at the Rio, suffering as the ratings for the TV show had begun to tailspin.
“Sharknado” thus far has proven unsinkable, with a sixth installment of the film series also announced after Sunday’s “Sharknado 5” release. There is ample opportunity for dazzling graphics, drop-in guest appearances (Caesars Entertainment has a deep bench of star resident headliners) and exaggerated humor.
And the firepower of the production team is undeniable. “Sharknado Live” is backed by Caesars Entertainment, The Asylum film company (which developed the “Sharknado” franchise) Royal Oak Management (a group of live-entertainment investors), Panacea Entertainment (which has dozens of top-level entertainment clients analso produced Donny & Marie’s show at the Flamingo until 2011) and Bernie Yuman’s SAY Entertainment empire.
Yuman has a long history on the Strip dating to his long run with Siegfried & Roy, signing them for their ground-breaking contract at The Mirage in 1989. Yuman is currently the producer of “On Your Feet!” the story of Gloria and Emilio Estefan. Yuman joined Caesars Entertainment Vice President of Entertainment Jason Gastwirth, Panacea Entertainment’s Eric Gardner, and Asylum’s David Rimaldi, David Latt and David Garber for Sunday’s post-show announcement.
“This will be a multisensory show full of music, humor and intrigue,” Garber said. “We have watched this niche sci-fi film explode into a worldwide social media phenomenon and annual TV event with many families watching together.”
So “Sharknado Live” is … (wait for it) … fin for the entire family (boom).
Round 2 for Tyson
Expect a Sept. 7 launch of Mike Tyson’s sequel to “Undisputed Truth” at Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at MGM Grand. Just some buttoning-up of the contract remains. Tyson is recovering from back surgery he had last month, but is recovering nicely and prepped for a return to the stage. The show is a production of Adam Steck’s SPI Entertainment, co-written by Tyson and his wife, Kiki Tyson.
The Center of attention
Pia Zadora said it best: “All my career, I have been turning lemons into lemonade,” she told a jammed crowd at Sand Dollar Lounge late Sunday night. The event was a fundraiser for the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Southern Nevada, commonly known as The Center.
The night of partying and live music from Rustyn Vaughn Lee was prompted by a homophobic Facebook post by Zadora’s sound man and longtime assistant “Video Dave” Bancroft, leveled last month against the Sand Dollar — a live-music haven catering to all demographics since 1976. Bancroft apologized, blaming his late-night rant on an evening of drinking, and Zadora released him from her camp.
The facility took in $10,400 for the Center’s wellness programs through a combination of auction items, merchandise sales and bar receipts.
“I am here with you,” said Zadora, a Golden Globe winner who headlines at Pia’s Place at Piero’s Italian Cuisine (her shows resume Sept. 1). “I’m here tonight, tomorrow, and wherever and whenever you need me.”
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on Twitter, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.Counting Pitches, Discounting Quality.
Often when I ask people how their session went, I get an answer that details the number of pitches they climbed, as if they're in direct competition with Alex Honnold or they're training for the 24HHH. There's no mention of how hard they were trying, whether or not they learned anything new, or if they made progress on something. Only a confirmation that they reached their arbitrary number of scheduled pitches for the session.
Again, let me say this: If your goal in climbing is to get in a predetermined number of pitches each time you climb, and that is enough to make you happy, then by all means, keep doing it. I wish my goals were as simple to achieve. I envy you. However, if you want to improve at rock climbing, then somewhere along the line you got bamboozled into believing that a certain number of pitches is directly related to getting better. It isn't.
Well, that isn't entirely true. Sometimes it is directly related. When you are a beginner, or new to route climbing, then it may very well be to your benefit to get in lots of pitches. If it's early in the season and you're getting your route legs back under you, I'll give you a pass. But if it happens every week, your pass is revoked.
Instead of concerning yourself with the number of pitches, try paying attention to the quality of the pitches, and the quality of the rest between pitches. If you're cramming 24 pitches into a three hour session, it's likely that you aren't rested well enough to give 100% physically, mentally, or emotionally to your performance on 23 of those pitches. If the desire is to improve, I would rather see someone give three high quality attempts at a hard project or a climb that exploits their weaknesses than send 15 pitches at the same grade they've been climbing for the past 5 years.
Quality, not quantity.AUSTRALIA’S second largest shopping centre could be built in north-west Sydney under plans by a major development company.
Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC) is planning to redevelop the existing Castle Towers shopping centre, adding a further 80,000sq m at a cost more than $911 million.
Castle Towers, originally built in 1979 and updated in 1991, is one of the best performing malls in the country, with an annual turnover of $670 million.
QIC is seeking approval to demolish the centre south of Target and David Jones, the sky bridge over Castle St and the Piazza building.
A new extension would then be built including a four-storey space fronting Pennant St to the west, incorporating a food court, speciality stores and restaurants.
No construction time frame has been set for the development.
Australia’s largest shopping centre is in Chadstone, Melbourne, and contains 510 stores and more than 9300 free car parking spaces.
media_camera An artists impression of the new development, seen from the corner of Pennant St and Showground Rd. Source: + one studio
The northern part of the centre including Myer, Target and David Jones will be retained or modified.
QIC Global Real Estate managing director Steven Leigh said plans would be put in place to ensure the proposed development works are staged to minimise impacts.
“Castle Towers will remain open for business throughout the proposed development outlined in the development application,” he said.
The development application, lodged with The Hills Shire Council on December 23, is markedly different from the initial plan approved by council in 2011.
The proposal also presents a radical departure from the concept plans shown to the Hills Shire Times in June last year.
media_camera The sections of Castle Towers that owners QIC proposes to demolish, replace, refurbish, retain and extend.
Those plans revealed minor changes would be made to the existing facade and rooftop of the building.
The extension was going to see the centre expand to take in the old Castle Hill Public School site (site B) bordered by Showground Rd, Kentwell Ave and Pennant St, next to the Castle Grand.
Current plans show the redevelopment will be restricted to the site which houses the cinema and Piazza, and the existing centre bounded by Castle St, Old Castle Hill Rd and Pennant St.
Castle Towers
According to documents lodged in council, the new proposal “reduces the sprawl of the centre, leaving ‘site B’ free for future commercial or residential development.
Mr Leigh said QIC’s new proposal better responds to the region’s consistent strong growth in both population and housing, which is driving the need for increased services and infrastructure in the area.
“The proposed transformation of Castle Towers will redefine the centre and position it as a world class integrated retail, entertainment and leisure destination,” he said.
“It responds to the changing market conditions and consumer demand for increased access to broader markets and authentic social experiences.”Geoffrey Morrison/CNET (triangles); Sakurambo (base chart)
The International Telecommunications Union is the regulatory body that establishes the parameters by which all TVs and their related paraphernalia (cameras and so on) work. Without them, every TV show would look different on every TV.
To help with the adoption of Ultra HD, otherwise known as "4K," they've put out the sexy sounding Recommendation ITU-R BT.2020. What does it mean for you?
Well, not much. Wait! Keep reading! True, these standards are for Ultra HD TVs, but they tell a lot about where the ITU expects and hopes televisions to go. Keep in mind, the current HDTV standard Rec. 709, was developed and finalized in the mid-to-late 1990s. Televisions and technology have come a long way since then. We have the technology ("we can rebuild him"), to do far more than what Rec. 709 specifies.
Let's start with the basic stuff you probably already know from the various Ultra HD coverage recently. Rec. 2020 specifies two resolutions, both with a 16:9 aspect ratio: 3,840x2,160 (what everyone calls "4K") and 7,680x4,320 ("8K"). All the same frame rates are included, from 24 to 60 just like now -- but a higher frame rate, 120 Hz, is also mentioned. This is interesting, as the maximum frame rate currently available is 60, and that's not even available on Blu-ray. Check out What is Refresh Rate? and What is the "Soap Opera Effect"? for more info on frame rates.
Unlike Rec. 709, there's no more interlaced, only progressive.
Color
Perhaps the most interesting recommendation in Rec. 2020 is the significantly better color. Currently, Rec. 709 specifies the following x/y coordinates for red, green, and blue:
(R) 0.640, 0.330
(G) 0.300, 0.600
(B) 0.150, 0.060
These are the specific values for the locations of those colors, as shown on the smaller triangle in the chart above. These colors are "OK" but certainly not as realistic as what we see in the real world. Anything outside that triangle is not captured by the camera, encoded on the disc, or accurately shown on your television.
Rec. 2020's color recommendations are insane (in a good way):
(R) 0.708, 0.292
(G) 0.170, 0.797
(B) 0.131, 0.046
These are massively deeper colors than what's possible now. Of all the aspects of Rec. 2020, this is the part I fear is most likely not to be implemented. These colors are so radically different (that is, better) than what we have now, it's going to take a lot to get current technologies to be able to produce them. Most TVs today are capable of a wider color gamut than Rec. 709, but not this wide. According to sources I spoke to, no current TVs can produce these color points. So this is likely a more difficult technological hurdle than upping the resolution to 4K. Maybe OLED or quantum dots can help.
The reference white, or color temperature, stays the same at 0.3127, 0.329 (D65, or D6500). Why mess with what's already right?
Wide-gamut TVs today
It's worth noting that implementing Rec. 2020 colors, or anything beyond Rec. 709 colors, isn't a great idea in current TVs. The entire television system, from the camera all the way to your TV, needs standards to work correctly. If there weren't standards, as I mentioned above, every TV program would look differently than every other program, on every TV. It would be chaos. Like, fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... eh, you get the point.
As it's set now -- or at least, how it's supposed to work -- the TV system itself doesn't add or take away anything from the camera to your TV, presuming the TV is calibrated. So you're seeing exactly what was shot by the camera, plus any flourishes desired and added by the filmmakers or TV producers.
Extended or wider color gamuts, or wildly oversaturated colors, are added by the TV, manipulating the correct image supplied by the Blu-ray or cable/satellite box. Worse, there are serious issues trying to get accurate colors if the TV itself starts with oversaturated color points. Specifically, if the TV is capable of crazy oversaturated colors, getting it to mellow out and create accurate colors is processing intensive and extremely difficult. So the wider the color gamut is from being accurate, the less accurate the TV can ever be. I'll dig further into this in a future article.
If you like oversaturated, hyper-realistic color, that's your prerogative, but it isn't accurate. And it isn't what the directors intended for you to see.
Bit depth
The other side of the color conversation is bit depth, or how many shades of each color there are. The current TV system is 8 bits per color: 256 shades, minus some margin on either end. This means that Rec. 709 is capable of a maximum of 16.78 million colors (256 red x 256 green x 256 blue).
Rec. 2020 stipulates 10 or 12 bits. With 10-bit, this means a possible 1,073,741,824 colors (1,024x1,024x1,024). Yowzers. With 12-bit (4,096x4,096x4,096), it's even crazier: 68,719,476,736!!! 68 billion colors. Beat that, Skittles.
This is exciting as well, meaning finer shades of colors, smoother transitions from light to dark, and so on.
Size
I've gotten some flak by being skeptical of Ultra HD in small screen sizes, as it's beyond what your eye can see from where most people sit. While no specific sizes are mentioned in Rec 2020 (obviously), there is this note: "Both 3,840 x 2,160 and 7,680 x 4,320 systems of UHDTV will find their main applications for the delivery of television programming to the home where they will provide viewers with an increased sense of "being there" and increased sense of realness by using displays with a screen diagonal of the order of 1.5 metres or more and for large screen (LSDI) presentations in theatres, halls and other venues such as sports venues or theme parks." That's 59-inches or more. Just sayin'.
Bottom line
Personally, I think the resolution increase from 1080i/p to 4K/8K is the least interesting part of Rec. 2020. Better color and bit depth? Sign me up. Unfortunately, it's hard to say what of the current version of Rec. 2020 will survive to future revisions, and when, if ever, any of these revisions may come to fruition. The first version of Recommendation BT.709 was approved in November of 1993. Obviously, a lot changed between then and the most recent change (April 2002), and now. With Rec. 2020 the ITU wants to establish a direction and guidelines for the next generation of televisions. Will it be 10 years before we see TVs and content matching this standard? Will the standard change? We shall see. It is, for now, a fascinating and hopeful direction.
If you want to read the full Recommendation, the ITU has it as a free download on their Web site.
Got a question for Geoff? First, check out all the other articles he's written on topics like HDMI cables, LED LCD vs. plasma, Active vs Passive 3D, and more. Still have a question? Send him an e-mail! He won't tell you what TV to buy, but he might use your letter in a future article. You can also send him a message on Twitter: @TechWriterGeoff.Liberal candidate for the Canning byelection Andrew Hastie has slammed the media for targeting his family about their religious beliefs.
The former SAS soldier was on the hustings in Mandurah with former Prime Minister John Howard when he told a gathering of media he wanted to "address some questions about his religion".
Mr Hastie also wanted to put to bed question about his father - a Presbyterian priest - who is understood to have strong leanings towards creationism.
"Today I have some questions to answer about my religion," Mr Hastie said outside the Mandurah Forum shopping centre.
"I'm an Anglican and I make no apology for that.
"However questions have been raised to me by the media which focuses on my wife and my father and I think that is totally unacceptable.
"I won't go into what people ask me about him, because frankly it's not relevant."
Clearly emotional, Mr Hastie said he had no problem with "people coming after him". But he made it clear the media should not target him and not his family.
"The first one pertains to my wife with her work as a receptionist at the local church in Perth where we live close to SAS base," he said.
"In her responsibility as a receptionist in that office she uploaded blogs as published by the pastoral staff.
"A blog was posted in relation to the issue of homosexuality and Ruth was responsible for posting that, but she was not the author of it."
Mr Hastie said he was opposed to same-sex marriage.Bill Maher takes on conservative teenage pundits.
Earlier this week Bill Maher explored conservative teenage pundits, comparing them to Republican adults noting that 14-year-olds cannot mimic the Rachel Maddow show, but can do the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh just fine.
“When 14-year-old boys sound exactly like you do and can produce radio shows and books and speeches that sound exactly like yours, maybe you should rethink the shit that comes out of your mouth.”
Maher ended by explaining just how easy it would be for a teenager to host Limbaugh’s Sean Hannity‘s shows: “Step one, be a giant dick. Step two, there is no step two.”
“Remember the Republican debates we had this year? They applauded for the idea of letting a sick man without insurance die. Herman Cain got cheers for saying he’d electrify the border fence. They booed a gay man serving his country in the military. No wonder 14-year-old boys can do your act, you act exactly like 14-year-old boys. There’s no ideology here. It’s just about being a dick.”
You can watch the video below:
(Visited 111 times, 1 visits today)Sawini Kabi fears she may have to reconsider her higher education plans. The Class 12 student has been accepted by the Florida Institute of Technology for an engineering course but is no longer sure if an undergraduate programme in the United States is a good idea.
Kabi’s apprehension stems from media reports in January of a leaked draft of what is allegedly an unsigned executive order that talks about cancelling the stay-on period for overseas students in the US – extensions of one year for work and practical training for all students, and two years for science and technology graduates. “If I cannot work there for some years, I do not really see the point in going,” she said.
Even rumours can be devastating for the thousands of Indian students heading abroad, for whom the programme of study is rarely the only consideration. A major deciding factor for those digging into their savings or taking loans to pay for their courses is how easy a country makes it for them to join its workforce. “You want to earn money in the same currency you are spending,” said Shray Jindal of Global Education Consultancy Services.
Education consultants expect the uncertainty over visa regulations in the US to lead to greater interest in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. The size of Indian contingents to these countries have already grown significantly over the past six years.
Top choice
In 2015-2016, over 1.6 lakh students from India were enrolled in American universities, making the US the top higher education choice for Indians, according to the Open Doors Report on international students. “It [the US] was the big one,” said education counsellor Pervin Malhotra. “Students could work, it has a large Indian diaspora community, people felt comfortable.”
Arshad Nasser, studying industrial design at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, planned to apply to US universities for a PhD but has been forced to reconsider. “Students take large sums from India and you need a window to earn at least a part of that,” he said. “Not long ago, my friend completed a two-year master’s programme and was able to repay her loan within a year of working in California.” The stay-on period is also when companies recruit and students attempt to obtain work visas.
Sthithpragya Gupta, a final-year mechanical engineering student at IIT-Delhi, has applied to American universities for a master’s in robotics. “The opportunity to work in the US was my primary reason for not applying to universities in Europe,” he said. “My plan was to study, work for five-six years there to gain experience and then return to set up something on my own. This was meant to be a long-term investment.”
Such a plan seems more and more uncertain now in the backdrop of the document leak as well as the Donald Trump administration’s entry ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and its reported plans to overhaul the H-1B work visa programme.
However, the furore over US visa reforms has impacted some students more than others. Piyush Agrawal of Abroad Education Consultants observed that applicants from non-STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) backgrounds were more put off by the rumours than their counterparts in science. “Also, members of the Muslim minority are no longer considering the US,” he added.
Reflecting this concern, the first statement Arshad Nasser made when asked about studying in the US was, “I am a Muslim.” He said he knew of friends “who just want to complete their study and get out.”
Permanent residence ease
A good programme of study is not the only draw for students. Education consultants said a large section of their clients look for what Shray Jindal calls “permanent resident ease”.
They pointed out that for long, the United Kingdom enjoyed a clear edge over others in attracting students in this regard. But, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, enrolment of Indian students in that country dropped from 29,900 in 2011-2012 to 16,750 in 2015-2016. This drop was attributed to stricter visa regulations. “Over 2010-2011, UK made it mandatory for students to get jobs that would pay them as much as UK graduates to obtain work permits,” explained Agrawal. “This made it very difficult to find jobs. Consequently, despite an increase in the number of scholarships, the numbers have dropped.”
Pointing to another reason why the United Kingdom lost appeal among students, Jindal said, “The stay-on period is just three months.”
Back-up plans
With the United Kingdom a difficult proposition and the United States looking uncertain, students in India are hauling out and dusting their back-up plans.
For Kabi, it is Canada. “My daughter had applied in four US universities and one in Canada,” said her mother, Sovana Sangram. “We had planned to apply at a second Canadian university but when she received her confirmation from Florida, we did not. But we will now think about it and take a decision.”
Consultants Malhotra, Jindal and Agrawal all agreed that Canada would see a sharp increase in interest. Statistics from the Canadian Bureau for International Education showed that in 2015-2016, 49,000 (14%) of the 353,000 international students enrolled in the country’s universities were Indians – a growth of over 25% from their numbers in 2014-2015.
“In Canada, you can get a work permit for up to three years after graduation,” said Agrawal, explaining the spike.
Australia, too, is highly popular and, judging by the anxious queries they are fielding daily, education consultants expect it to get even more so. Records with the Indian High Commission in Australia showed that in 2015, 42,166 Indians were enrolled in higher education institutions and vocational education training programmes there. In 2016, that number rose to 49,280 – while enrolment in language and other short-term courses and schools took it up further to 51,809.
New Zealand is also seeing a massive influx of Indians students, with their numbers rising from 11,415 in 2010 to 28,370 in 2015, according to statistics available on the government website Education Counts.
For IIT student Arshad Nasser, his Plan B is either Germany or Italy. “They are leaders in my discipline, industrial design, and education is subsidised or free,” he explained.
Germany, despite the language barrier outside educational institutions, has seen Indian enrolments more than double from 5,038 in 2010-2011 to 13,740 in 2015-2016, according to the DAAD-German Academic Exchange Service. Jindal pointed out that the country allows students to stay on for 18 months after their graduation, with or without a job.
Other options
Apart from these popular choices, Jindal said countries like Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden were also attracting Indian students. “Most of them have some entirely free or heavily subsidised programmes,” he said. “And with some of the European countries, you get a Schengen visa, and with their train networks, you can travel to other countries to appear for interviews too.”
He conceded that some may face a language barrier in these countries – students and prospective applicants routinely discuss this in online chatrooms and on social media – but added that this problem was “not insurmountable”. After all, he reasoned, “during the programme, you do pick up another language and those courses are free or really cheap”.
Malhotra pointed out that these countries tend to attract science students.
Settling down
However, the influx of Indian students into new territories has not been without tension. A 2015 response to a Quora.com post on living in Germany said: “There is racism and racist attack, sometimes reported but most of the time goes unreported… Personally I have known [of a] couple of such attacks [that] happened.” The respondent furnished a link to a June 2015 report on a violent attack on Indian students in the university city of Jena.
Similar attacks on Indian students were reported in Australia in the 2000s.
There have also been many cases of deportation of Indian students, for many of whom the opportunity to work and settle abroad is not just an important consideration but is often the only one. Consequently, under-prepared candidates are pouring into countries like New Zealand, facilitated by agents in their home countries. In 2016, over a hundred of them were served orders for deportation after it was discovered that India-based agents who had done their paperwork had used fake financial documents.
Alison Booth, professor at the Auckland University of Technology, confronts such problems on a routine basis. “There is a large group of students who go to private tertiary education providers for short certificate courses and diplomas, expecting permanent residency to follow,” she said. “Some have cheated on their exams or have had their scores inflated. We realised later they had to be retested.”
As a board member of the New Zealand India Research Institute, Booth found herself attending a meeting on this issue with the Human Rights Commission, at a police station in Manukau, an Auckland suburb, with a large Indian population last year. Many of those facing deportation had disrupted the government’s Diwali celebration.
“Many well-qualified students come for degree programmes or research. They are a completely different case and many get good jobs,” Booth said. “But government desire for foreign-student income has opened the floodgates and this small country is having trouble absorbing so many people.”
Malhotra encouraged a “more balanced view”, even of the US visa regime situation and the proposal to double the minimum salary requirement for H-1B visa holders to $130,000. “The companies were getting cheap labour through the earlier system and local graduates were denied,” he explained.Why are we so determined to remain indifferent in the face of the Syrian people convulsing to death from Sarin gas? I have no answer, but during this period of the High Holidays, we are obliged to confront this question.
“Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon/The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave/ They buried us without shroud or coffin/And in August the barley grew up out of our grave.”
These lines are from the poem “Requiem for the Croppies,” by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who died last week. They were pointed out to me by a friend, also an Irishman, who observed how Heaney’s verse — which commemorated the British crushing of an Irish uprising in 1798 — eerily conjures up the reality of Syria now.
Let’s recall a few basic facts. First, by the time the Western powers began to consider intervention in Syria, more than 120,000 people had been killed. Second, the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s regime at the end of August was decidedly not the first time these had been deployed. Back in June, the French government said it had “no doubt” that “the regime and its accomplices” — which include the Islamist terrorist organization Hezbollah — had engaged in chemical attacks against civilian centers.
Third, when presented with evidence of chemical weapons use, the response of many Western politicians has been to equivocate and demand further evidence, as though obtaining such proof in Syria’s killing fields is a mere walk in the park.
The insistence upon further evidence has been accompanied by other rationalizations for not getting involved. There’s the view of both left-wing and right-wing isolationists that Syria’s warring groups are all bad, and that the end of the Assad regime will usher in Al Qaeda. That view was debunked in recent days by the journalist Elizabeth O’Bagy, one of the few foreign correspondents who has spent considerable time in Syria and who provided an eyewitness account of politically moderate Syrian rebels defending Christian and Alawi villages from both the regime and from Islamist extremists.
Her conclusion? “Moderate opposition forces — a collection of groups known as the Free Syrian Army — continue to lead the fight against the Syrian regime.”
Then there’s the slippery slope argument — the idea that we are going to get dragged into a ground war in Syria, just as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given that the operation being discussed is a limited one that will be prosecuted from the air — so limited that it may not have the desired effect of “degrading,” as the Obama administration puts it, Assad’s military capacity — this objection is misleading, a deliberate falsehood.
Why are we so determined to remain indifferent in the face of people convulsing to death from Sarin gas? I have no answer, but during this period of the High Holidays, we are obliged to confront this question.
After all, we Jews have spent the last seven decades asking whether more could have been done to avert the Holocaust. Could we not have bombed the railway lines to the concentration camps? Could we not have smuggled more weapons to resistance fighters, both Jewish and non-Jewish? Well, yes, we could have done much more, but we also could have done a lot less. Imagine if the current crop of politicians currently dominating the Syrian debate, from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to the leader of the British Labor Party, Ed Miliband, had been in office instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
Next week, all eyes will be on the U.S. Congress as it considers the White House’s request to strike at specific military targets controlled by the Syrian regime. Already, this is shaping up to be a story of weak leadership and moral failure. President Obama didn’t have to refer the matter to Congress, just as British Prime Minister David Cameron wasn’t obliged to take the matter to Parliament, but both have been overwhelmed by the isolationist mood in their respective legislatures.
Now, sadly, there are reasons to expect that the vote in Washington will falter along similar lines as the vote in London. As The Washington Post noted, both House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are portraying the vote as one based upon “conscience.” And when it comes to Syria, there is little conscience around these days.
In his poem “Shema,” Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, addressed “You who live secure/In your warm houses”:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for JNS.org.Martin and Emma Wackrow with newborn daughter Olivia, who was born in Britomart Station's women's toilets.
Auckland's busiest train station has been boasting about better arrival times, but no one expected this passenger to arrive early.
Baby Olivia Wackrow was born on November 5 at about 4pm at Britomart Station after her mother, Emma Wackrow, went into early labour inside a cubicle in the transport centre's women's toilets.
The Wackrow family had arrived in the CBD by train from Avondale and were walking up Albert St to meet friends for dinner when Emma started to feel very uncomfortable.
DAVID WHITE/STUFF Emma Wackrow says she went to the toilet not know she was about to give birth.
"The baby was really moving a lot, it was quite painful," Emma said.
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"But I didn't really think anything of it because she had been doing this for a couple of weeks, then over the next 20 minutes it kept happening, and I thought 'this is unusual'."
DAVID WHITE/STUFF AT customer representative and student nurse Ashley Lang helped deliver the baby in the Britomart women's toilet.
The Avondale residents decided to head back to Britomart to take the next train home, but upon arrival Emma had an overwhelming urge to use the toilet.
"The whole thing happened within a space of 10 minutes, from going into that bathroom to holding her in my arms.
"It's funny just how the human body knows what to do, instinct kicked in and everything took care of itself really."
DAVID WHITE/STUFF Baby Olivia Wackrow was born in stall one of the Britomart women's toilet.
While in the toilet there was no time for Emma to panic as she was focused on keeping her 2-year-old son Luke calm, she said.
"I didn't want him to see me in pain. He kept saying 'are you OK mummy?'
"And I was saying 'yeah mummy is fine, mummy's just got a sore tummy'."
Even with all the commotion inside of the bathroom, commuters surprisingly continued to enter it and use the toilets, she said.
"The worse thing was they kept using the hand dryer and Luke is really scared of it, so I screamed'stop using the hand dryer you're scaring the toddler!'."
Meanwhile, Auckland Transport (AT) customer representative and student nurse Ashley Lang was busy selling HOP cards when her friend and co-worker Vivi Tiavolo rushed to her booth.
"She said someone was screaming and giving birth in the bathroom and could I come and assist," Lang said.
The baby was most of the way out when Lang entered the bathroom stall, she said.
"I let her do her thing for a minute, then I introduced myself and we got busy delivering the placenta."
Lang, who was eight months pregnant herself, had delivered fake babies while studying midwifery, but had never done the real thing before, she said.
"I was really shocked, I think adrenaline kicked in and I was glad she was as easy of a birth as it could be, nothing tragic happened."
This was the fastest birth Lang had ever seen, as labour usually took between five to seven hours for women giving birth for the second time, she said.
Lang said she was worried while delivering the baby hers would get the same idea.
"Maybe Emma will show up to my birth and help me deliver."
Emma's husband Martin Wackrow said the situation was very intense and a lot happened really quickly.
AT spokesman Mark Hannan said this was the first baby to be born inside of the station.
The Wackrow family will be receiving a HOP card with $100 on it to thank them for their support for public transport, he said.Each decade brings forth a new crop of talented Hawaii musicians. In the 1970s, Gabby Pahinui, the Sons of Hawaii and Sunday Manoa gave voice to the Hawaiian Renaissance, the movement sparking a revival of cultural identity for Native Hawaiians. The ’80s and ’90s were the Golden Age of contemporary Hawaiian music. Artists such as The Manao Company, Kapena, Israel Kamakawiwoole, Kealii Reichel, Hapa and the Kaau Crater Boys bestowed Hawaii, and the world, with their sweet melodies, vocal harmonies and thematic guitar and ukulele riffs.
Lucky for us, their music has no shelf life. If anything, it only gets better with age. But it’s worth setting aside these dependable local favorites to listen to someone new. The five young artists profiled in the following pages are keeping Hawaiian music traditions alive by composing and singing in olelo Hawaii (Hawaiian language), drawing inspiration from their native home and with lightning-fast picking on the ukulele. Here are five Hawaii musicians, with the makings of the next Brothers Cazimero, Ernie Cruz Jr. or Jake Shimab |
emen and women.
He told Hare he'd try to do something in the hour or so before the flight landed. But Colas cautioned that while volunteers make an effort to welcome military personnel whenever they come through the airport, he wasn't sure he could pull anything off in such a short time.
Nevertheless, he got on the phone with the police and fire departments, the airlines and anyone else he could think of.
"There must have been 15 Chicago firemen and an equal number of Chicago police and they formed a corridor for the Marines when they got off the airplane," he said.
Rajan said the Marines didn't know what to make of it, starting with the slightly unnerving experience of looking out a plane window to see a fire truck.
"For a second, we were like, 'Are we in trouble?'" he said.
After they realized the reception was for them, the Marines soaked in the scene, even as they said police officers hustled them off to another gate so they'd make their flight to San Diego.
"They were just so thankful — very, very appreciative," said Linda Kozma, an American Airlines employee who helps military personnel flying in and out of O'Hare.
Hare didn't know about any of it until she woke up Tuesday and heard Rajan relating the whole story in a voice mail.
"I just thought it was really beautiful," she said.Muammar Gaddafi looks like a flake, so we don't expect logic from him. But with all their fine suits and braided uniforms, we do expect it from those higher up in a Western military campaign that still does not have a clearly identified leadership and cannot agree on its objective.
After repeatedly being told this was Europe's war, it was revealed in the muddied waters of talk shows and background briefings that for now at least, the Americans run it.
When American Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked who was in charge, he replied: "[We are] leading it now. We're looking to hand off that leadership in the next few days."
To the Europeans? Not so fast, say the Turks, who late on Sunday blocked a deal for NATO to take control of the no-fly zone over Libya. Back to the drawing boards on that one.
So if we don't know who is leading, then surely we understand the objective - yes?Shania Twain has announced plans to release her first album in 15 years, led by the single "Life's About to Get Good" that's scheduled to arrive in June.
The title for the new set has not yet been revealed; it is due out in September.
Twain made the announcement during her appearance on The Voice Monday night, where she appeared as the first-time-ever fifth judge on the show and a key adviser to the contestants.
When writing "Life's About to Get Good," Twain explained in a statement, "I was at home looking out at the ocean and I said to myself, 'Here I am stuck in this past of negativity, but it's so beautiful out. I'm not in the mood to write a 'feeling-sorry-for-myself' song.... You can't have the good without the bad. And that's what the song ended up being about."
Twain's last album, Up!, was released Nov. 18, 2002 and topped the Billboard 200 albums chart.
Guests at Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California, will be the first to hear Twain's new material, as she headlines the country music extravaganza this weekend.Talk about heavy metal! This shiny, lumpy rock spotted by NASA’s Curiosity rover is likely made mostly of iron—and came from outer space! It’s an iron meteorite, similar to ones found in years past by Curiosity’s forerunners Spirit and Opportunity, but is considerably larger than any of the ones the MER rovers came across… in fact, at 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide this may very well be the biggest meteorite ever discovered on Mars
The transmitted photograph from the Martian surface combines a series of high-resolution circular images taken by the Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) of Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument with color and context from rover’s Mast Camera (Mastcam). Curiosity snapped the images during the 640th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars – May 25, 2014 back here on Earth.
The imaging shows angular-shaped cavities on the surface of the rock. One possible explanation is that they resulted from preferential erosion along crystalline boundaries within the metal of the rock.
Another possibility is that these cavities once contained olivine crystals, which can be found in a rare type of stony-iron meteorites called pallasites, thought to have been formed near the core-mantle boundary within an asteroid.
While iron meteorites are fairly common on Earth, on Mars they are by far the most common types of meteorites that have been discovered—if just for the sheer fact that they are highly resistant to erosion.
Credit: http://goo.gl/SzAa3kMessaging app has been asked to add traditional drinking vessel to its emoji list, with group arguing it warrants recognition
Beaming pile of poo? Check. Sexually suggestive aubergine? Check. Enduring symbol of Catalan community and conviviality? Hmmm.
A cultural association based near Barcelona is asking the mobile messaging service WhatsApp to add the porrón to its list of emojis, claiming the spouted glass pitcher possesses a “cultural and social meaning” that warrants recognition.
In a petition at Change.org, the Blaus de Granollers argue that the wine flask – beloved of locals and feared and abused in equal measure by tourists who struggle to master its vinous stream – is “a symbol of our land” that occupies a unique place in Catalan culture.
“[It] is much more than a kitchen tool,” the group says in a letter to WhatsApp’s CEO, Jan Koum. “It helps to create community, to strengthen bonds during meals.”
The porrón, it adds, is passed from hand to hand, allowing many people to drink from the vessel, thereby creating a sense of cohesion and equality.
“It makes you feel part of a team. Besides, it helps us Catalans remember our roots – and you already know that if you lose your roots, you lose your identity.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jan Koum, CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp. Photograph: Tobias Hase/AFP/Getty Images
Given the proliferation of WhatsApp food and drink emojis, the group says, the porrón merits representation.
“How can there be emojis for ice cream, vintage style jugs and a glass of some unknown drink - but not one for the porrón?” the letter asks. “It’s a symbol that represents the most essential thing in society and it doesn’t even exist as a WhatsApp emoticon. How can this be?”
However, not everyone has shared the Catalan love of the vessel. Five pages into Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell writes less than admiringly about it and the associations it stirred.
“[We] drank out of a dreadful thing called a porrón. A porrón is a sort of glass bottle with a pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever you tip it up; you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips, and it can be passed from hand to hand,” Orwell wrote.
“I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as soon as I saw a porrón in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine.”
A week after the petition was launched, more than 700 people have signed it. “I think it’s a universal symbol that millions of people can identify with if they’ve ever shared jokes and laughed with a porrón in their hand,” wrote one supporter.
A similar campaign waged by paella lovers resulted in the rice dish winning its own emoji in June this year.
WhatsApp said it did not create emojis, which are agreed by an industry consortium. It added: “While we appreciate feedback from our users, we do not have the ability to make any changes to the current list of emojis.”THE PROBLEM
Illinoisans suffer from the second-highest property tax rates in the nation.
Their state is the third most corrupt in the nation.
And driving this expensive and corrupt reality on the local level is the fact that Illinois has more units of local government than any other state in the nation. With 6,963 units of local government, Illinois beats its nearest competitor by more than 1,800.
Illinois is a large state, but its size and population don’t account for its high number of local government entities. Florida, which is larger than Illinois, has far fewer units of local government, with just 1,650. And Illinois has more layers of general purpose local government than any other state in the country. Sixty one percent of the state’s residents live under three layers of general purpose local government (municipal, township or county governments); in 40 other states, residents never have more than two layers.
This doesn’t include special districts, such as libraries, parks, forest preserve, fire protection, sanitation, transportation and even mosquito abatement districts. In fact, in some areas of Illinois, citizens have up to 16 different local government agencies operating in their area.
When citizens live in areas with too many layers of government, their ability to participate in the democratic process becomes more difficult, and the public overall isn’t able to actively participate and holy impossible for citizens to organize efforts to reduce the number of local governments in Illinois. For example, to eliminate townships in Illinois voters must get a petition signed by 10 percent of the registered voters in each township of the county. Then, a binding referendum question can go on the ballot. All of this must be done in less than 90 days.
This means it’s more difficult to consolidate local government than it is to amend the Illinois Constitution, which only requires about 4 percent of registered voters to sign a petition over a period of 540 days to get an amendment on the ballot.
THE SOLUTION
Taxpayers shouldn’t be supporting multiple – and often redundant – layers of government through ever-higher property taxes. The state of Illinois must create more reasonable pathways for citizens to consolidate local government.
Increased government consolidation can happen in three different ways:
Citizen-initiated referendum
Legislative-initiated referendum
Elimination of unelected “dependent” government
The process to consolidate or eliminate local governments in Illinois should be no harder than the process to amend the Illinois Constitution via referendum. State laws need to be revised to reflect this.
WHY THIS WORKS
Taxpayers should not be on the hook for multiple layers of government that duplicate services and allow local governments to borrow and spend more. By eliminating redundancies and introducing efficiencies, consolidations of local government can save taxpayers money.
Local government consolidation can also help fight corruption and increase public participation in the democratic process.
When government is complex and convoluted, it is difficult for citizens to actively participate in the decision-making processes that affect their daily lives.
Consolidating and simplifying local government will increase participation in the democratic process and create opportunities for citizens to fight corruption and end wasteful spending.A lot of people are going to judge the Jazz by how many wins they have this season. With the young talent coming into its prime and high level off season acquisitions, people may think the win total is the most important thing this season.
That would be wrong.
Anyone can win, but can you do it with swag?
I know for a fact (I do not) that Dennis Lindsey takes into account each player’s swag. Lindsey has talked about having player profiles he uses when scouting players in the draft and free agency. The list probably looks like this....
I agree with Dennis Lindsey that the Swagometer is a vital part of a player’s performance. But we must take this further. We must!
Some of you may be asking, what is swag? This is a great, and important, question. Here is the definition from Merriam Webster:
What about the other swag? That's a slang word that refers to stylish confidence. It shows up in songs ("Check out my swag, yo / I walk like a ballplayer"—Jay Z) and social media hashtags, but this word derives from swagger, not from stolen goods. And though it sounds newer than the "free stuff" swag, this swag is actually older. We can trace it back to 1640, where it's used to refer to "hansom swag fellowes."
The Jazz are absolutely filled with “hansom swag fellowes” and what I’ve done is created a swag ranking of the Utah Jazz. To do this I’ve created a system.
I present to you Swagonomics. Swagonomics is an incredibly accurate system to measure a player’s swag. It is very, very scientific and it works like this...
Swagonomics asks the important questions that will tell us who on the Jazz has the most Swag. Here we go.
15. Shelvin Mack
Coming in last for the Jazz is Shelvin Mack. Though Shelvin scores points for his ability to get assists, not many of those assists end in Dunks. Dunks being one of the large indicators of swag. If Shelvin dunked more and created sweet oops with his passing he would score higher. Sadly, much of Shelvin’s game involves very low swag floaters.
14. Joel Bolomboy
Joel moves up the swag meter with his dunks. He catches oops with his athleticism and then ferociously finishes them. This accounts for a lot of swag in my laboratory's swagonomics calculations. However, these dunk have happened in summer league and pre-season. To move up in the swagonomics calculations, Joel will need to produce his dunks and swag against higher competition. Also, Joel will be wearing a pink backpack this season which is hard to overcome.
Joel Bolomboy with the dunk! Tonight's @AFCU Instant Rewind ⏮ https://t.co/93xHuE1M8P — Utah Jazz (@utahjazz) October 11, 2016
13. Dante Exum
Dante has an immense amount of swag potential, but he hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Dante has a winning record as a starter and has done it with strong defense. Though defense can have much swag, a lot of swag on defense come from intense blocks. Dante has not done a lot of chase-down blocks, the kind of blocks that get the crowd rocking. Dante scores points from creating oops, many of which happen with swag-heavy Rudy Gobert.
With more of this, Dante’s swag rating will go way up!
12. Joe Ingles
Ingles on court play is not something that scores especially high in swagonomics, although he does score well with his passing. Remember, sharing of swag is important. Even though Joe doesn’t have the typical highlight plays, he doesn’t care. Not caring about swag gives you swag points. I know, it’s science, I don’t always understand it either.
What adds to Joe’s swag is an intense confidence and sense of humor. Joe Ingles is who he is and doesn’t care what others think. This creates a high level of swag, sometimes referenced as swagger, especially in Austrailia (don’t look that up). It’s also well documented that Ingles’ personality helps other players in the locker room to overcome adversity and get through a long season with higher spirits.
11. Raul Neto
Raul Neto is probably the most “hansom swag fellow” on the Jazz by appearance. He makes a bald, 5’8” portly fellow like myself have confidence issues. If you follow twitter or Instagram you will see many likes and retweets from ladies that are not just fans of his game, but his very hansom face. It’s just not fair sometimes.
10. Trey Lyles
Trey Lyles has a smooth game and a smooth personality. It’s rumored that Lyles has a funny personality, but it doesn’t show up much in post game interviews. The thing that makes Lyles swag go up is his ability to take, and make, shots that are usually meant for players much smaller than himself. He also has a dribble drive game that is ridiculous for a player at 6’10”. More smooth than explosive, Lyles lulls opponents to sleep until he does something like this.
Swat Lake City is alive and well! ✋✋ #PHXatUTA https://t.co/LYlw6Ew4uF — Utah Jazz (@utahjazz) October 13, 2016
9. Rodney Hood
Rodney has maybe the smoothest game on the Jazz. He has a stroke that makes even the darkest souled analyst swoon. His passing is high level and there are times where he shows flashes of Harden with his ability to penetrate and either score or dish. To score higher, Rodney would need to show us dunks. If Rodney went up and dunked on someone, I might die. And If you need a reminder of Rodney’s swag, take a look at this shot...
8. George Hill
If you want someone who helps others with their swag, it’s George Hill. His ability to play off guard or take on point guard duties mean he gives everyone the chance to show off their swag. This ability to allow others to shine is an immense ability and he shines in these scientific, very professional, rankings.
George Hill also is incredible at denying opposing players the ball on defense. He also locks up players and keeps them from dunking on ours. Being posterized can hurt a players swag forever and George Hill protects the Jazz from ever allowing the other team huge dunks.
7. Derrick Favors
The thing that stands out to me now more than ever with Favors is his strength. How many times do we see Favors either gather a rebound or pass and then power through the defense to score. Being the most powerful guy on the floor almost always gives Derrick higher swag. He’s willing to dunk on people too which gives him solid marks in the swag department.
Also, Derrick stands up for teammates and shuts down opponents quicker than anyone out there when they think about starting something. This clip was the thing that made me swoon over Favors more than any moment before...
6. Joe Johnson
Being a 6 time all star and having a huge amount of nicknames including “Iso Joe” and “Joe Jesus” puts Joe Johnson high on the list. Joe has that smooth game and ability to score in isolation that gives him huge marks. More than that, Joe has the personality that gets him high marks. He’s just cooler than most guys. The best quote from this preseason came from Joe, from Andy Larsen of KSL...
And Joe Johnson had the best quote about the Jazz's situation: "We've got a few guys banged up, but I'm sure they'll be ready when the popcorn really starts popping."
That type of quote comes from someone with supreme confidence. I’m actually not scared at all that Joe’s lackluster numbers this preseason will continue. When the season starts, Iso Joe will turn it up...
5. Gordon Hayward
People will make jokes about Gordon’s hair, but deep down it’s obvious the haters are jealous. Gordon has a ton of swag. He’s an awesome dad with a beautiful family, he’s an all star caliber player in the NBA and legitimately great E-Gamer. Gordon was willing to smack talk Lebron saying there was no chance he could beat him in League of Legends and also claimed his spot as the best in the world. At gaming that is...
Back to his hair... Gordon has changed a ton from when he came into the league to now, and he looks good doing it. I have three kids at home, I go to work and then write for this site as well as run some podcasts. I look like adrugged up, less attractive, wimpy version of Randy Couture. Gordon gets on the floor and looks like a GQ model. I think I’m gonna stop before I start crying.
4. Rudy Gobert
Rudy plays with a swag that has endeared fans to him for years. He dunks it with ferocity and rejects players at the rim with the same passion. He even talks smack after the block. Not only is Rudy a fantastic player, but he already has two things that set him above other players: a great nickname (Steiffel Tower) and a signature celebration (the salute). Just writing this makes me want to put Rudy higher, but, alas, Rudy has stopped giving us the salute. If he can bring that back... Please bring back the salute, Rudy. Please!
3. Jeff Withey
Jeff Withey? JEFFREE DAVID WITHEY!!!
There was one moment this year that made me put Withey’s swag almost to the top. First, we all saw the drama between Withey and his girlfriend (a model from a magazine that showcases attractive women. This is taken into account for his swag). They were broken up, then back together and then broke up. Right after the break up Withey did this...
Withey took out his frustration on this dunk in such a way that he rocketed up these rankings. “Who needs model girlfriends, anyway!?!” was what he probably yelled as he dunked it.
2. Alec Burks
The original king of swag on the Jazz. If you question Alec’s swag, just remember that his all time starting 5 includes himself. When you are asked this question and you put yourself, you deserve this spot.
Burks doesn’t just talk though, he backs it up with a game all about getting to the rim and getting dunks. This dunk right here show’s why people still think Alec has a chance to become great...
I mean, it’s just silly.
1. Boris Diaw
I mean, come on, look at this...
And this...
Long drive from san antonio to utah, But a lot of good parks along the way, here is white sand national monument. I keep you posted for the other ones. #roadtrip #3daytrip #whatelse A photo posted by Borisdiaw (@diawboris) on Sep 4, 2016 at 7:43pm PDT
Boris is who he is and doesn’t care what people think. First, he’s a fantastic ball player, but his off court swag is what puts him over the top in these rankings. The fact that Boris loves his espresso machine so much that he’ll take it with him on a road trip to SLC. Incredible. And if you ever question Diaw’s swag, this photo as a response to Popovich questioning if Diaw was eating well is amazing...
No worries pop only one glass of wine and daily workouts! A photo posted by Borisdiaw (@diawboris) on Sep 28, 2014 at 11:18am PDT
That face is the definition of swag.Show full PR text
AT&T Launches Cloud-Based Photo and Video Sharing App
DALLAS, Nov. 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/
Never lose a photo again – AT&T Locker, a free and easy-to-use photo and video sharing service for AT&T* customers, is now available in the App Store. AT&T Locker users get 5 GB of storage for free – enough for up to 5,000 average sized photos.
AT&T Locker provides users the ability to upload images and video to secure online storage and quickly share on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or e-mail. Users can create and customize albums for photos and video on the device or online from a laptop or home computer. Customers can also store music and other files in their AT&T Locker storage. The app is compatible back to iPhone 3GS.
Users can make sure they never lose a photo again with Easy Upload feature, which allows you to automatically upload the photos on your device to the AT&T Cloud. With AT&T Locker, users can choose to upload new photos and video via Wi-Fi, wireless or both. Customers can manage those photos and share them through the app on the smartphone or on the AT&T Locker web page. AT&T plans to incorporate additional features in future versions of AT&T Locker.
Quotes
"Customers use smartphones to capture special moments in their lives. That's why we designed AT&T Locker to help you store those memories," said Mark Collins, senior vice president, Data and Voice Products, AT&T Mobility. "With Easy Upload, every photo and video is uploaded directly to AT&T's cloud, which can be accessed safely and securely anytime from a customer's smartphone or the Web."
For more information, visit www.att.com/locker.
*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.
AT&T Locker
Requires compatible iPhone 3GS or higher or Android 2.1 or higher smartphone, or internet access from computer. You must enable the Easy Upload feature in order for your content to be automatically uploaded to the AT&T cloud. Download and usage from wireless device may consume data. Service intended for US based customers only. For terms, see att.com/wirelesslegal.Marijuana businesses and the State of Alaska have something in common: banks won’t help them reap the rewards of the Green Rush.
In the same week that Alaska banks and credit unions closed the business accounts of several licensed marijuana business owners, U.S. Bank told the Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office it can no longer accept credit card payments for licensing fees.
The bank would not give details on its Alaska-based decision.
“Although legalized in many states, marijuana remains illegal under federal law,” according to a statement from U.S. Bank. “As a federally regulated bank, U.S. Bank complies with federal law. We are committed to serving our valued clients while complying with the highest standards of legal and regulatory compliance. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on customer conversations or relationships.”
U.S. Bank’s cancellation of credit card activity came as a surprise to the Department of Revenue. No other industry has the same kind of cash dependence as cannabis, and the department is having to construct a cash room in Anchorage just to allow for tax drops.
Both credit card companies and banks themselves fear federal scrutiny and as a result the marijuana industry remains largely cash only.
Marijuana is still a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law after the Drug Enforcement Agency’s August decision to not take it off the listing alongside heroin. Federal judges and financial regulators have told banks to move ahead in states where it is legal, leaving banks with two options: drown in the compliance paperwork or risk a federal crackdown.
‘We can’t tell them what to do’
Nationwide, more than 300 banks now accept money from marijuana businesses. Alaska’s banks, however, remain cool to the idea.
Kevin Anselm, director of the Division of Banking and Securities in the Department of Commerce, Community & Economic Development, wants to have a more cheery outlook for the industry but has nothing to offer.
“I wish I had better news,” she said. “It’s really tough for an absolutely legitimate business in the state of Alaska. It really is a struggle on all fronts.”
Alaska’s financial institutions simply don’t have the wherewithal to do what others in the Lower 48 can.
“In Washington and Colorado there are a number of banks and institutions that have decided to go into these markets,” she said. “That has not been the decision up here. A lot of it is we don’t have the structure to make it easy for the banks, to move money, cash or otherwise.”
Alaska has three federally chartered banks that fall outside state authority. Anselm said she’s approached each of the remaining state chartered banks and credit unions with no luck convincing them to do business with cannabis.
The Commerce Department puts together informational seminars to support banks looking to get into the industry under federal guidance specified in the Cole Memorandum and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, basically an informal promise to not prosecute banks for taking pot money as long as they keep the business clean: no gangs, no organized crime, no money laundering, and no kids.
Still, the advice meets reluctant ears.
“We’re trying to give them all the support they need, but we can’t tell them what to do,” Anselm said.
Assembling and reporting the background information is daunting. There are three separate suspicious activity reports banks must file for every single marijuana account transaction. The cost and manpower to process them simply isn’t worth the trouble, according to banking leaders.
Steve Lundgren, president of Denali State Bank and of the Alaska Bankers Association, said marijuana in Alaska brings extra costs and extra risk without any real potential for extra profit.
“We have discussed, as a group, and no member bank I’m aware of is planning or proposing to directly bank with marijuana businesses,” he said.
Federal law aside, filing or not filing the right paperwork can result in a stiff fine or even a spike in insurance rates from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Filing the right paperwork means extra staff and fees; Colorado and Washington banks add thousands in service fees to the accounts of marijuana businesses, Lundgren said.
While Washington, Oregon and Colorado banks are slowly coming into the fold, banks in Alaska think the state’s unique characteristics make it a poor investment.
“It’s not going to be a big money maker,” Lundgren said.
Lundgren said Colorado and Washington get millions from marijuana because they are populous and within driving distance of neighboring states. Those are two features Alaska doesn’t have.
Lundgren also takes a long view. He said the Alaska market will fall prey to full national legalization at some point. Once marijuana can be transported across state lines, Alaska marijuana businesses could suffer as product gets shipped in at lower costs from large-scale growers in the Lower 48, much like most of the produce.
“I think there will be so few businesses up here, even if we charged thousands of dollars in services fees it’s probably not going to be enough to mitigate the risk,” he said.
Washington solutions
Other states have had better luck with banking, but the solutions don’t necessarily apply to Alaska.
Rick Riccobono is Washington’s Director of Banks. The notorious “cash only” cannabis stigma, he said, is largely mythical. The reality is more nuanced.
“People say it’s a total cash business in Colorado and Washington,” he said. “Quite the opposite. We’ve actually gotten this thing pretty far along.”
Riccobono said roughly 90 percent of all marijuana-related taxes and fees pour into the state treasury electronically, not with cash. Washington, he said, has at least three credit unions and two banks that accept money from cannabis operations. Recently, one even made a loan to a business, which Riccobono said is a first.
Banks and credit unions at first refused to handle Washington’s marijuana-related monies, including taxes and licensing fees. A cannabis business law firm and the State of Washington had the same response: take all of our money or none of it.
“The state was pretty clear. If you’re going to do any of our business, you’re going to do all of our business. But we did kind of go a round or two with them on that,” Riccobono noted with a laugh.
Still, marijuana businesses can’t pay taxes directly to Washington state with credit cards. Part of the problem is with the credit card companies themselves rather than the actual banks.
Visa, MasterCard and other credit card companies have a strict no marijuana purchases policy. Like other businesses with reputations as less than family friendly — strip clubs, for example — marijuana vendors in Colorado ended up miscoding the transaction as “herbal tea” or “food” to cloak the purchase. Naturally, credit card companies threaten to drop the bank when they find out.
Washington uses workarounds. In both, credit cards are allowed, but the transactions are non-marijuana transaction codes that credit cards companies can accept.
The first, called PayQwick, serves as a closed loop system similar to PayPal.
Retailers stock a prepaid card with money and all transactions take place within that system.
The product might be marijuana, but the prepaid card system meets industry standards for credit card companies who depend on a wide range of similar setups.
“There’s a code for that,” Riccobono said. “It’s totally permissible to load a prepaid card in a loop. They couldn’t cut that out, or then they’d have to cut PayPal. They’d have to cut Target.”
The second electronic system, used by marijuana retailers, has a customer credit card buy the digital currency Bitcoin and accept Bitcoin payments.
Retailers cash their accounts out at the end of the day and deposit the money into their bank.
Banks then make electronic transfers directly into the state treasury for taxes and fees.
Alaska solutions
Alaska, however, isn’t like the Lower 48.
The two private systems that Washington state uses to facilitate electronic marijuana tax payments can’t work here, according to Brandon Spanos, deputy director of the Tax Division of the state Department of Revenue. Either they don’t exist or the tax structure doesn’t allow for them.
PayQwick isn’t registered to work in Alaska. The Bitcoin system relies on retail taxes, which don’t exist at the state level in Alaska. The state will only collect excise taxes of $50 per ounce from cultivators. In the absence of those two closed loop systems, Spanos said the state may switch its credit card processing vendor altogether.
“There are other processors that don’t scrutinize the payments like U.S. Bank does and are willing to process credit card transactions that are legal in that state,” said Spanos. “We are looking into those options.”
Spanos said Alaska hoped for a 50-50 split between cash payments and electronic payments for taxes, but recalibrated that hope after the Alaska banks and U.S. Bank’s actions in recent weeks.
“The further we get down this path the more it looks like we’ll get less than that, just because the banks taking early action in shutting down some of the accounts,” said Spanos.
“We are just a less populated state. In Colorado, they simply change their name and go to another bank. I anticipate that happening less frequently. There are fewer banks, and they’ll figure out quickly who the marijuana players are.”
DJ Summers can be reached at [email protected].Hi, I’m Matt and I’m an atheist and a former Christian. As this sounds a bit like an Alcoholics Anonymous introduction, allow me to shred the nonsensical victim-promoting 12 steps by turning them on their head:
1. I’m not powerless and my life is not unmanageable. I’m responsible for my own actions and I can change my mind and my behavior – though I’ll occasionally need assistance from other humans.
2. I’ve come to recognize that I’m not divorced from sanity and that I don’t require any “Power greater than ourselves” to fix me.
3. I’ve made a decision to base my life decisions on reason and evidence and this lead, inevitably, to the rejection of god-claims…but I wouldn’t turn my life over to a god even if one existed. It’s my life…go live vicariously through someone else.
4. I have made and continue to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. (One of only 3 ‘steps’ that I’ll support, as written.)
5. I’ve admitted to others that I’m wrong…but I see no need to admit this to a god, even if one existed.
6. I won’t be needing any gods to remove defects of character.
7. I won’t be humbly asking any gods to remove shortcomings. (Are there really 12 steps, if so many seem to say the same thing? Is this the ‘let go and let god’ program, or what?)
8. I didn’t make a list of people I’ve harmed, but I’m willing to make amends where they’re needed.
9. I’ve made amends…where possible. This 12-step thing is really tedious.
10. I’ll continue to take personal inventory and admit when I’m wrong.
11. I have no use for prayer and couldn’t care less what “God’s will” is.
12. Nope…no spiritual awakenings here – but I will be carrying a message to others.Toy Story 4 and The Incredibles 2 are switching release dates, due to “an accelerated production schedule for Incredibles 2.”
Toy Story 4 was originally scheduled to come out June 15, 2018, but that date now belongs to the Incredibles sequel. The fourth film in the Toy Story franchise will now premiere June 21, 2019.
This is actually the second time Toy Story 4 has been pushed back; it was previously scheduled for a June 16, 2017 release. The film is being written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and directed by John Lasseter and Josh Cooley. Toy Story 4 follows up the acclaimed Toy Story 3, which debuted in 2010 and earned a record $1.067 billion globally, making it the first animated film to break $1 billion dollars.
The Incredibles 2 is directed by Brad Bird. The original film came out in 2004 and was a box office hit, making $70.4 million domestically and $633 million globally, bringing it the honor of the “second-biggest opening at the time for an animated title.”
News source/photo credit: The Hollywood ReporterUK to send hundreds of troops to Russian border BelfastTelegraph.co.uk The UK will deploy hundreds of troops in response to growing concerns over Russia’s presence on its border with the Baltic states, David Cameron is set to announce. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/uk-to-send-hundreds-of-troops-to-russian-border-34867616.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/article34867613.ece/c62b8/AUTOCROP/h342/british-troops.jpg
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The UK will deploy hundreds of troops in response to growing concerns over Russia’s presence on its border with the Baltic states, David Cameron is set to announce.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon says 650 troops will be sent to eastern Europe to help Nato in its mission to “deter Russia from any further aggression”.
A battalion of 500 soldiers will be sent to Estonia while 150 troops will be based in Poland, Mr Fallon confirmed, with the UK assuming leadership of Nato’s standby force early next year.
He continued: “[Eastern Nato countries] feel enormous pressure from Russia doing large exercises on the border, flying over their airspace and so on.
“I think [President Putin] is flexing his muscles. He wants Russia to be treated as the world power it used to be and that’s why an alliance like Nato is very, very important, that we stand together.”
Mr Fallon added that the UK had a duty to “reassure those countries” of continuing Nato support.
Nato has reiterated its commitment to install four new battalions in eastern Europe, a promise made following |
Player Trades, participating Clubs will be permitted to allocate Cap charges and related salary payment obligations between them, subject to specified parameters. Specifically, Clubs may agree to retain, for each of the remaining years of the Player's SPC, no more than the lesser of: (i) $3 million of a particular SPC's Cap charge or (ii) 50 percent of the SPC's AAV ("Retained Salary Transaction"). In any Retained Salary Transaction, salary obligations as between Clubs would be allocated on the same percentage basis as Cap charges are being allocated. So, for instance, if an assigning Club agrees to retain 30% of an SPC's Cap charge over the balance of its term, it will also retain an obligation to reimburse the acquiring Club 30% of the Player's contractual compensation in each of the remaining years of the contract. A Club may not have more than two (2) contracts as to which Cap charges have been allocated between Clubs in a Player Trade, and no more than $5 million in allocated Cap charges in the aggregate in any one season.
6.System Changes:
•Entry Level System commitment will be limited to two (2) years (covering two full seasons) for all Players who sign their first SPC between the ages of 18 and 24 (i.e., where the first year of the SPC only covers a partial season, SPC must be for three (3) years).
•Maintenance of existing Salary Arbitration System subject to: (i) total mutuality of rights with regard to election as between Player and Club, and (ii) eligibility for election moved to five years of professional experience (from the current four years).
•Group 3 UFA eligibility for Players who are 28 or who have eight (8) Accrued Seasons (continues to allow for early UFA eligibility -- age 26).
•Maximum contract length of five (5) years.
•Limit on year-to-year salary variability on multi-year SPCs -- i.e., maximum increase or decrease in total compensation (salary and bonuses) year-over-year limited to 5% of the value of the first year of the contract. (For example, if a Player earns $10 million in total compensation in Year 1 of his SPC, his compensation (salary and bonuses) cannot increase or decrease by more than $500,000 in any subsequent year of his SPC.)
•Re-Entry waivers will be eliminated, consistent with the Cap Accounting proposal relating to the treatment of Players on NHL SPCs playing in another professional league.
•NHL Clubs who draft European Players obtain four (4) years of exclusive negotiating rights following selection in the Draft. If the four-year period expires, Player will be eligible to enter the League as a Free Agent and will not be subject to re-entering the Draft.
7.Revenue Sharing:
•NHL commits to Revenue Sharing Pool of $200 million for 2012/13 season (based on assumption of $3.303 Billion in actual HRR). Amount will be adjusted upward or downward in proportion to Actual HRR results for 2012/13. Revenue Sharing Pools in future years will be calculated proportionately.
•At least one-half of the total Revenue Sharing Pool (50%) will be raised from the Top 10 Revenue Grossing Clubs in a manner to be determined by the NHL.
•The distribution of the Revenue Sharing Pool will be determined on an annual basis by a Revenue Sharing Committee on which the NHLPA will have representation and input.
•For each of the first two years of the CBA, no Club will receive less in total Revenue Sharing than it received in 2011/12.
•Current "Disqualification" criteria in CBA (for Clubs in Top Half of League revenues and Clubs in large media markets) will be removed.
•Existing performance and "reduction" standards and provisions relating to "non-performers" (i.e., CBA 49.3(d)(i) and 49.3(d)(ii)) will be eliminated and will be adjusted as per the NHL's 7/31 Proposal.
8.Supplemental and Commissioner Discipline:
•Introduction of additional procedural safeguards, including ultimate appeal right to a "neutral" third-party arbitrator with a "clearly erroneous" standard of review.
9.No "Rollback":
•The NHL is not proposing that current SPCs be reduced, re-written or rolled back. Instead, the NHL's proposal retains all current Players' SPCs at their current face value for the duration of their terms, subject to the operation of the escrow mechanism in the same manner as it worked under the expired CBA.
10.Players' Share "Make Whole" Provision:
•The League proposes to make Players "whole" for the absolute reduction in Players' Share dollars (when compared to 2011/12) that is attributable to the economic terms of the new CBA (the "Share Reduction"). Using an assumed year-over-year growth rate of 5% for League-wide revenues, the new CBA could result in shortfalls from the current level of Players' Share dollars ($1.883 Billion in 2011/12) of up to $149 million in Year 1 and up to $62 million in Year 2, for which Players will be "made whole." (By Year 3 of the new CBA, Players' Share dollars should exceed the current level ($1.883 Billion for 2011/12) and no "make whole" will be required.) Any such "shortfalls" in Years 1 and 2 of the new CBA will be computed as a percentage reduction off of the Player's stated contractual compensation, and will be repaid to the Player as a Deferred Compensation benefit spread over the remaining future years of the Player's SPC (or if he has no remaining years, in the year following the expiration of his SPC). Player reimbursement for the Share Reduction will be accrued and paid for by the League, and will be chargeable against Players' Share amounts in future years as Preliminary Benefits. The objective would be to honor all existing SPCs by restoring their "value" on the basis of the now existing level of Players' Share dollars.Critcs say Ginni Thomas's activites may pose a conflict of interest for Justice Clarence Thomas. Ginni Thomas contacts GOP frosh
Tea Party activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is reaching out to the offices of the GOP House freshmen again this week, just months after her lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill sparked outrage among liberal groups alleging her political activity presented a potential conflict of interest for her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
This time, Ginni Thomas is messaging freshmen chiefs of staff in her capacity as a part-time journalist for The Daily Caller, interviewing the new lawmakers and other prominent conservatives for a series the site calls “Leaders with Ginni Thomas.”
Story Continued Below
“Dear Freshmen Chiefs of Staff,” the email begins. “I wanted you to see this new series on emerging leaders I am doing with Daily Caller.”
In February, POLITICO reported on Thomas’ efforts to reach out to all of the members of the freshman class as the head of a tea party inspired lobbying firm. In those emails, Thomas described herself as “a self-appointed ambassador to the freshmen class and an ambassador to the tea party movement,” and noted that she had already met nearly half of the 99 freshmen in both the House and Senate.
Now Thomas is doing a weekly video series with the Daily Caller on their website, which has so far featured her interviews with freshmen Republican lawmakers Utah Senator Mike Lee and Minnesota Rep. Chip Cravaack, as well as radio host Mark Levin.
“The Daily Caller is just a blast to work at. Please know that I am thrilled to be profiling many of freshmen I have been in contact with, as well as others around the country,” Thomas wrote.
While Thomas’ consulting firm relied heavily on Thomas’s “experience and connections” to pitch their lobbying services, she is barely a presence in the video series. They appear under an column header bearing her likeness and byline, but Thomas cannot be seen or heard in any of the recordings.
Liberal critics have alleged that Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases dealing with issues on which his wife has worked because it creates a financial stake in the outcome. And the end of Ginni Thomas’s email included a cryptic disclaimer that seems intended at least partly to address similar concerns: “Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive any compensation from any advertiser.”
This article tagged under: Tea Party
PoliticsA disabled veteran in College Park is seeking a temporary restraining order against Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill because he says the lawman has been harassing him for refusing to take down a basketball goal.
Derick Fisher alleges sheriff’s deputies have continually parked outside his home for the last couple of weeks, shining the blue strobe lights from the patrol cars into his home, aggravating his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Fisher’s attorney William Claxton said. The incident continued even after Fisher told deputies about his condition.
“It’s intimidation and harassment,” Claxton said. “There are nights where he did not sleep. He finally had to leave his house and stay elsewhere because it was too disruptive. It’s had a negative effect on him. He was afraid that they would barge in the doors and arrest him.”
The request for the restraining order, filed in Clayton County Superior Court on March 10, is asking that the sheriff and his deputies stay 500 yards from Fisher’s home. It also seeks an outside law enforcement agency such as the Georgia Bureau of Investigations or another sheriff’s office to enforce the order if it is granted. The order also asks that the sheriff and deputies get remedial instruction into what constitutes excessive intrusion under state and federal laws.
Three of Clayton’s four superior court judges have recused themselves in the case. It’s unclear if the fourth judge will hear the case or whether it will be heard by an outside judge, Claxton said. By law, the issue must be addressed within 30 days of the filing, Claxton said. If granted, the restraining order would be in effect for about a month.
Efforts to get a response from Hill’s office were unsuccessful.
But neighbors on Isleworth Court say Fisher isn’t telling the full story. They say they’ve been in an ongoing dispute with Fisher for the last several years over him allowing kids, most of whom are teenage boys who do not live in the neighborhood, to play basketball in front of his home in the cul-de-sac. It was often noisy and disruptive, neighbors said.
“It’s just gotten worse,” said Karen Triplett who lives across the street from Fisher. “This place was once quiet. There’s cussing and loud music. One day I counted 25 kids out there. This is not a park. We have to listen to this noise and listen to the ball bouncing. There’s paper, trash and soda cans. We’re just sick of it.”
With the weather starting to get warm and hoping to avoid further problems, neighbors said they recently reached out to law enforcement. They first contacted the Clayton police, which said nothing could be done because Fisher hadn’t broken any ordinances, Triplett said.
Clayton Deputy Chief Joseph Woodall said Thursday there isn’t anything his department can do as long as the goal is anchored in the ground and not obstructing the right of way.
Neighbors then contacted Hill’s office. Hill personally came out to the neighborhood and asked Fisher to take down his goal. Fisher refused. Hill responded by placing patrol cars in the cul-de-sac, Triplett said.
“We’re very thankful to Sheriff Hill for addressing it,” Triplett said. “While the sheriff’s cars were out there, the neighborhood was peaceful and quiet and I didn’t have to pick up any trash. It stopped a lot of the traffic.”
According to the county ordinance basketball goals must be attached to the home or erected adjacent to and abutting the driveway but “not within the right-of-way of a public street or sidewalk.” Fisher’s goal is anchored in his front yard, with play focused mostly in the driveway.
On Wednesday, about a half dozen teenagers played basketball in Fisher’s driveway with some of the activity spilling into the street. No sheriff’s patrol cars were in the neighborhood. Neighbors said the patrol cars haven’t been in the neighborhood in about a week.
When asked why Fisher didn’t take down the goal as a neighborly gesture, Claxton responded: “There’s basketball goals throughout (the community). They were just picking on him. Nobody can tell a property owner to take down the goal unless there’s a violation of some ordinance or statute. If he took it down, what happens next? It just becomes a never-ending litany of complaints.”History’s ever-more-epic saga Vikings returns Wednesday night with the premiere of season 5, the cast larger and the global scope wider than ever. The show is set over 1,000 years ago, but for creator and sole writer Michael Hirst, describing the fifth season is its own form of time travel. The lengthy production process means that he’s already deep into writing next season. “I’m ahead of you by two years!” he says with a laugh.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: At the end of the last season, Ragnar’s sons had successfully avenged him — and then Ivar killed his own brother.
MICHAEL HIRST: That’s brothers, isn’t it? It’s a family saga. As soon as things go well, they go badly. The family implodes. You also have such strong personalities pushing in different ways. Ivar becomes this huge driving force. He leads the great army. He’s absolutely intent on destroying the English armies.
How does the addition of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ character, Bishop Heahmund, change the show?
He’s a Christian fundamentalist. We’ve had a lot of insight into Viking fundamentalism, like Floki, his being all the time promoting a vision of the pagan gods. We had people wavering between conversion. The Saxons have been slightly less fundamentalist about their religion. Suddenly, you get this absolutely fundamentalist bishop, the predecessor of the Knights Templar by hundreds of years, someone who gets dressed in armor to fight for Christ. Heahmund will not back down. Here you have someone who will live and die by Christianity. I love teasing out the religious conflicts. Johnny is a wonderful and dangerous spokesman for Christianity — because he’s so mad! You’re dealing with an extreme world.
We left off with Katheryn Winnick’s Lagertha in charge of Kattegat, but with various forces arrayed against her. How does her rule continue in this new season?
I remember talking to Katheryn about the fact that she was going to be the Queen of Kattegat, and what did it mean: “You will be the ruler, but you will be a female ruler, and you will try and rule it in a different way from all the men.” It’s perfectly easy for a woman to step into a man’s shoes, and be ruthless and strong. If you were an intelligent woman, wouldn’t you like to rule in a different way? She wants to believe in people. And she f—s up in certain ways, but I want everyone to understand why she f—s up, and why she’s made these judgements.
Vikings season 5 kicks off Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on History.politics Overlooked Election Issues: TTC Accessibility
Thousands of seniors and people with disabilities rely on the TTC to get around, but it doesn't have the funding to meet its accessibility requirements.
As part of Torontoist’s election coverage, this week we’re focusing on important issues that haven’t received much attention during the campaign. Today, we look at TTC accessibility and the obstacles the transit agency faces in meeting its requirements.
In 2009, council passed an important motion that might have been taken for granted by people who do not face accessibility obstacles in their daily lives.
The motion affirmed the City’s commitment to meeting accessibility requirements and recognized that “diversity our strength” includes people with different abilities. The motion included the following:
The City of Toronto is committed to building an inclusive society and providing an accessible environment in which all individuals have access to the City’s services and programs in a way that respects the dignity and independence of people with disabilities.
Despite the City’s clear statement about providing accessible services, the TTC has a major gap in its budget that will make it unable to meet its requirements under the Accessibility for Ontarians With Disabilities Act by its provincially legislated deadline in 2025.
On its website, the TTC lays out the problem plainly: “The TTC cannot make all subway stations accessible by 2025, unless full funding is made available.”
The projected total cost of TTC accessibility initiatives—including retrofitting stations with elevators, escalators, and curb ramps—is $480 million.
The problem the TTC faces is that half of that $480 million is currently unfunded, and there is no indication of where the remaining $240 million will come from. The TTC and City staff are lobbying Queen’s Park in order to highlight the importance of the issue: as accessibility is a provincially mandated requirement, they argue the City should receive assistance—but considering the provincial government is struggling with its own budget woes, action does not appear imminent.
In the meantime, the TTC says accessibility upgrades scheduled for 2020–2025 can’t be funded as things stand now. That means 17 of 69 stations would fall short of provincial standards: Greenwood, Wellesley, Lansdowne, Keele, College, Spadina, Chester, Christie, Castle Frank, Summerhill, High Park, Museum, Rosedale, Old Mill, Glencairn, Warden, and Islington.
Some of these stations, such as Warden and Islington, have very complex needs. Work on Islington Station is projected to cost $17 million, in large part because the entire bus bay section of the station, in which there are several sets of stairs for different bus routes, will have to be reconstructed. Projects at other stations may require land acquisition in order to make planned alterations work.
In various mayoral forums, John Tory and Olivia Chow have pledged to address this issue: Tory has said he would find savings through better management of other capital projects, and Chow has said she would fund accessibility improvements with the money currently earmarked for the proposed Scarborough subway extension.
Two significant underlying issues inform the question of TTC accessibility. One is that the related financial challenges are part of a larger funding problem involving the TTC’s capital needs: the underfunded transit agency must scramble to choose which priorities it can fund—accessibility, safety, purchasing vehicles—and which it will have to defer. This structural problem is reflected in the TTC’s massive, unfunded, $2.7-billion state-of-good-repair backlog.
The other significant issue is that despite the City’s limited financial capacity, council manages to find money for issues when it feels they’re important enough. After all, it managed to vote to increase property taxes and development fees by $910 million over a 30-year period in order to fund a Scarborough subway extension, despite an existing LRT plan.
Council has previously stated that its commitment to an accessible, equitable city speaks to the values of the city as a whole. It won’t be easy to find the $240 million—the equivalent of a 1 per cent property tax revenue increase for 10 years—needed to fund TTC accessibility.
But mayoral candidates shouldn’t just be talking about what is easy or convenient. They should be speaking about what’s important, and making the City accessible for all Torontonians should be a priority.Sixty-four years have been passed since the biological death ofand, still,They fear his legacy, his name, even his portraits or plaques which refer to him.
According to an Agence France-Presse report (which is full of stereotypical anti-communist references to "Stalin's repression"), everything started when
the Moscow State Law University last month reinstated a Soviet-era plaque marking a speech delivered there by Stalin in 1924. The plaque had been removed in the 1960s. A former student launched an online petition in order to have the plaque removed, while
a defense lawyer called Genri Reznik and professors of another college break their ties with the university in protest.
Apparently, their problem is Socialism and the Soviet Union- would they protest if instead of Stalin the plaque was commemorating Tsar Nikolai II or counter-revolutionary fascists like Solzhenitsyn
Despite the decades-long severe anti-stalinist propaganda, Joseph Stalin remains in the minds and hearts of the Russian working people as the leader who contributed immensely to the aim of Socialism-Communism. It was during Stalin's leadership when the Soviet Union crushed the monster of Nazism and put the foundations for the construction of Socialism in the country.
Слава Сталину!WASHINGTON -- Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is suing five of the nation's biggest banks for deceptive foreclosure and mortgage modification practices, her office announced Thursday. Coakley's suit signals her formal departure from ongoing settlement negotiations between those banks, the Obama administration and a coalition of other state AGs over faulty foreclosure procedures.
"The single most important thing we can do to return to a healthy economy is to address this foreclosure crisis," Coakley said in a statement Thursday. "Our suit alleges that the banks have charted a destructive path by cutting corners and rushing to foreclose on homeowners without following the rule of law. Our action today seeks real accountability for the banks illegal behavior and real relief for homeowners."
The lawsuit, filed against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Ally Financial and the Mortgage Electronic Registration System in Suffolk Superior Court, targets banks' using fraudulent paperwork in the foreclosure process, foreclosing without actually holding the mortgage, corrupting the local land recording system and failing to uphold promises of loan modifications.
Until now, Coakley had participated in settlement negotiations led by Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and the Obama administration. The talks kicked off last fall when it came to light banks were using phony documents and forged signatures -- a process dubbed "robo-signing" -- to foreclose on thousands of borrowers.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden became outspoken critics of the talks this summer, insisting Miller sought too narrow a settlement that would release the banks from liability for too much wrongdoing. Miller's focus has been robo-signing and mistreatment of struggling homeowners seeking modifications, but not potential fraud in the way loans were given to borrowers or sold to investors, or in the way banks use MERS to shuffle mortgage documents. The settlement would not encompass the 50 percent of all home mortgages owned by government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to sources close to the talks.
The deal sought by Miller would force the five banks to reform the way the service mortgages and to fork over $25 billion worth of help for homeowners, mostly in the form of principal reductions and modifications. Some who already lost their homes would be eligible for small restitution payments.
Coakley said in a Thursday conference call with reporters that Miller could still reach an agreement, "but it's taken too long and the signals we have received are that we won't get relief that we seek."
In a Thursday statement, Miller said Coakley had told him of her decision. "She also indicated that she'll evaluate the joint state-federal settlement we're negotiating, which we hope to reach soon," Miller said. "Attorney General Coakley indicates that she is open to joining our settlement effort if the terms adequately address the needs of the people of Massachusetts. We're optimistic that we'll settle on terms that will be in the interests of Massachusetts."
Danny Kanner, a spokesman for Schneiderman, praised Coakley in a statement. "Attorney General Schneiderman is encouraged by Attorney General Coakley's action today, and looks forward to their continued work to hold those responsible for the mortgage crisis accountable and provide meaningful relief to struggling homeowners."
Attorneys general in California and Nevada have also distanced themselves from the settlement talks in recent months. In August sources said Coakley was among the AGs pushing for tougher treatment of the banks.Get the biggest celebs stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Josie Cunningham has been pictured taking her one-year-old daughter shopping in London's Soho.
The shameless mum-of-three has been inundated with criticism after revealing she aborted her unborn child to get a nose job and pursue a career as a porn star.
But far from keeping a low profile, Josie went window shopping for adult material with her youngest child this weekend.
The 25-year-old pushed little Grace in a pram as she browsed what was on offer at an X-rated venue in the area, known for its adult entertainment.
(Image: NOBLE/DRAPER)
(Image: NOBLE/DRAPER)
Josie was dressed in a leopard-print coat, a pair of black skinny jeans and flat shoes.
Her little girl wore a matching animal-print coat with faux-fur lined hood.
Josie, once dubbed Britain's most hated woman, recently revealed how she checked into a clinic to get rid of her unborn child, enabling her to create the face she believes she needs to be a porn and glamour model.
A series of doctors had told her the cosmetic surgery was too risky while she was expecting.
(Image: NOBLE/DRAPER)
Josie, who terminated the unplanned pregnancy at 12 weeks, told the Sunday People: "I'm having this nose job no matter what gets in my way.
"Pregnancy was a major obstacle and an abortion was the answer to it – so that's what I did.
"Anyone who criticises me for putting my looks ahead of an unborn child has no right until they’re the ones putting food on the table for my kids.
"I don't care what anyone thinks. My body, my decision."
(Image: NOBLE/DRAPER)
The mum-of-three from Leeds went on: "I put my life on hold for my other kids. But now is my chance to get the looks I need so I can have the career I always wanted. And I'll love the money."
Twitter exploded after her comments were revealed, with critics hammering her decision to get an abortion to focus on her looks.
One upset user on the social media site wrote: "I don't hate anyone. But she comes very, very close!! I'd give anything for a baba," along with crying emojis.
"There are couples out there that struggle and she goes and gets an abortion for a nose job," another added.
(Image: NOBLE/DRAPER)
Josie appeared on chat show Loose Women last week in an attempt to defend her decision, explaining that the nose job she wanted would have been delayed too long if she had gone ahead with the pregnancy.
Josie said: "You can't have a rhinoplasty at least a year after giving birth so the pregnancy would have delayed the process by 18 months."
But Jane and fellow co-host Gloria Hunniford were quick to question her obsession with fame and her appearance telling her she needed help.
Josie claimed she wanted "acceptance" and that she wanted to pursue a career in the porn industry because she "loved sex" and "enjoys everything associated with it".It was summer in the city. During the long, hot afternoons, high school scientists darted in and out of New York City’s subway stations. At each one, they pulled out cotton swabs and carefully swiped surfaces. They took samples from subway seats, poles, doors, turnstiles, ticket machines — even garbage cans. The students then put each in a plastic container and labeled it. Afterward, they raced back to grow the microbes from those samples in a laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York City.
These teens were not taking part in an episode of CSI. They were collecting data that would be used to create a new type of subway map. But instead of charting station sites, this project mapped microbes. Two of the students didn’t just collect samples. They also showed that while most of the germs living on the subway poles and turnstiles are harmless, a few types can resist the drugs medicine has devised to kill them.
Microbes surround us. Indeed, they are part of us. There are ten times more microbial cells than human cells in the human body. But scientists have only recently started to investigate our microbiota — the microbes that live on us and throughout our environment. By finding out what kinds of microbes we share spaces with, scientists may one day be able to predict or prepare for disease outbreaks.
“I live in Long Island [N.Y.], and I’m always taking the subway,” says Ebrahim Afshinnekoo. He is a college student at City University of New York Queens College. While doing research at Weill Cornell Medical College, also in New York City, he began working with PathoMap. It’s the subway-swapping project. At each stop, a group of scientists took a sample from the poles and seats inside a train car. They also took two samples from the station. Those station samples could come from ticket kiosks, benches, turnstiles, stair railings or anything else.
“An old man said we were the strangest thing he’d ever seen on the subway. And he’d lived in New York City for 50 years,” notes Anya Dunaif, 17. She’s a senior at St. Anne’s School in New York City. She was one of seven high school students that helped collect samples for the project. “We had boys ask us if we were part of Mythbusters or if we were looking for criminal fingerprints,” the teen recalls.
Back in the lab, the scientists used a process to ”read” the specific sequence of building blocks occurring in long spans — known as sequences — of the germs’ DNA. Each species’ genes contain sequences unique to them. Isolating those sequences from the swabs could identify which species left their traces behind in the subway.
In all, the scientists identified genes from 1,688 different organisms. This genetic material came from bacteria, archaea (another type of single-celled organism) and viruses. There was also genetic debris left by other species — from cucumbers to subway rats, and of course, people. The researchers published their findings March 3 in the journal Cell Systems.
Anya was most interested in the bacteria. She was doing summer research with Jeanne Garbarino, who directs the Rockefeller University Summer Science Research Program. Anya and another student, Nell Kirchberger, wanted to find out if any of the subway bacteria displayed antibiotic resistance. That’s an ability to survive exposure to the antibiotics designed to kill them.
“I saw the microbiome studies as a chance to be able to provide high school students with a huge breadth of scientific experience,” says Garbarino.
The students swabbed surfaces at four subway stations. Then they stored the cotton in a broth that provides food to keep microbes alive. Once they had the samples in the lab, they wiped the swabs carefully across plates filled with agar. A gelatinous material from algae, agar is used to feed bacteria living in the lab. Some of the subway bacteria grew into colonies on these plates. The students then tested the ability of those germs’ to withstand four different antibiotics.
The drugs quickly killed most of the bacteria. But 28 percent resisted at least one of the medicines. “Antibiotic resistance is something that’s becoming a lot more dangerous,” Anya says. “If people are being exposed to dangerous bacteria it’s important to know.”
Just because the resistant germs are present does not mean that taking the subway will make riders sick. Most of the identified germs do not cause illness. Only low numbers of disease-causing bacteria turned up, so subway riding likely poses few risks for healthy people. Bottom line, Afshinnekoo says: “No New Yorker needs to be worried.”
But after putting together this first picture of what a “normal” city looks like, now “we need a field guide for microbes,” says Jonathan Eisen. “We need to know what to expect in particular places.” Eisen studies microbes and their diversity at the University of California, Davis. He says that knowing what the microbial population looks like under normal conditions would allow scientists to see how the microscopic ecosystem changes in response to climate change or something like a flu outbreak.
Meanwhile, plenty of mystery remains. The scientists could not even identify close to half of the species — 48.3 percent — that had left their DNA behind. But that’s also not a big surprise. Many of the organisms that could have shed DNA — such as cockroaches — have not had their genes sequenced yet. So no one knows what to look for. There also are many types of microbes surrounding us that scientists have never investigated.
Eisen hopes that with studies like this “people will start thinking about how they are surrounded by a world of microbes.” And most of the time, that’s not a bad thing at all.
Follow Eureka! Lab on Twitter
Power Words
(for more about Power Words, click here)
agar A gelatinous material made from certain marine algae used as a material (and food source) in which to grow bacteria.
antibiotic A germ-killing substance prescribed as a medicine (or sometimes as a feed additive to promote the growth of livestock). It does not work against viruses.
archaeon (plural archaea) A domain of life that includes single-celled organisms. Although archaea superficially resemble bacteria, they are distinct. Archaea inhabit many harsh environments.
bacterium (plural bacteria) A single-celled organism. These dwell nearly everywhere on Earth, from the bottom of the sea to inside animals.
DNA (short for deoxyribonucleic acid) A long, double-stranded and spiral-shaped molecule inside most living cells that carries genetic instructions. In all living things, from plants and animals to microbes, these instructions tell cells which molecules to make.
DNA sequencing The process of determining the exact order of the paired building blocks — called nucleotides — that form each rung of a ladder-like strand of DNA. There are only four nucleotides: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (which are abbreviated A, C, G and T). And adenine always pairs up with thymine; cytosine always pairs with guanine.
ecosystem A group of interacting living organisms — including microorganisms, plants and animals — and their physical environment within a particular climate. Examples include tropical reefs, rainforests, alpine meadows and polar tundra.
gene (adj. genetic) A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for producing a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves.
journal (in science) A publication in which scientists share their research findings with the public. Some journals publish papers from all fields of science, technology, engineering and math, while others are specific to a single subject. The best journals are peer-reviewed: They send out all submitted articles to outside experts to be read and critiqued. The goal, here, is to prevent the publication of mistakes, fraud or sloppy work.
microbe Short for microorganism. (see microorganism)
microbiota The microorganisms that live in a particular place or geological period.
microorganism A living thing that is too small to see with the unaided eye, including bacteria, some fungi and many other organisms such as amoebas. Most consist of a single cell.
outbreak The sudden emergence of disease in a population of people or animals. The term may also be applied to the sudden emergence of devastating natural phenomena, such as earthquakes or tornadoes.
resistance (as in drug resistance) The reduction in the effectiveness of a drug to cure a disease, usually a microbial infection. (as in disease resistance) The ability of an organism to fight off disease. (as in exercise) A type of rather sedentary exercise that relies on the contraction of muscles to build strength in localized tissues.
virus Tiny infectious particles consisting of RNA or DNA surrounded by protein. Viruses can reproduce only by injecting their genetic material into the cells of living creatures. Although scientists frequently refer to viruses as live or dead, in fact no virus is truly alive. It doesn’t eat like animals do, or make its own food the way plants do. It must hijack the cellular machinery of a living cell in order to survive.A FORMER Irish Army Ranger who rescued survivors during the terrorist attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall has told how he was "just doing my job".
A FORMER Irish Army Ranger who rescued survivors during the terrorist attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall has told how he was "just doing my job".
'Just doing my job,' says Irish hero who took on Nairobi mall terrorists
The Kenya-based security consultant (37) and a colleague were hailed as heroes for risking their lives saving trapped shoppers from gunmen who murdered at least 70 men, women and children.
The ex-soldier, who dodged bullets from al-Shabaab terrorists and returned fire, killing one of them, has described for the first time the horrific scenes of carnage he witnessed shortly after the massacre began on September 21.
In an exclusive interview with the Irish Independent, he revealed: "There were bodies littered everywhere. They (the terrorists) cut down everyone in front of them."
The soldier, who did not want to be identified, said he believed that the al-Qa'ida-aligned terror group showed a level of military training that had not seen before in such an incident.
He said: "The media spin coming from Kenya is that this was a small, poorly organised gang but from my first-hand experience that is not the case. They were well-trained, well-prepared and disciplined."
The former Ranger, who said he saw at least 100 dead bodies Kenyan defence forces prepare to retake the Westgate Mall from al-Shabaab terrorists The Westgate Mall in Nairobi at the height of the siege (AP) This photo taken Saturday, Sept. 28, 2013 shows the scene inside the FoneXpress computer shop on the ground floor of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The four-day siege, which included the collapse of part of the mall, left 67 people dead, according to officials. (AP Photo) The ransacked Fone Xpress shop in Westgate mall
The security consultant also claimed that there was still confusion over the actual death toll during the four days that it took Kenyan forces to take back control of the shopping mall.
"Just counting the number of bodies I saw that day, I estimate that at least 100 and probably a lot more people were killed and are not accounted for. I believe there has been a lot of disinformation put out."
The former Ranger, who served on UN missions in Lebanon and East Timor, is the head of security for a major oil company employing 5,500 staff across East Africa.
CARNAGE
He and a colleague were in their office a 10-minute drive away when heavily armed terrorists stormed into the Westgate Mall, which was full of Saturday afternoon shoppers.
The ex-soldier said: "We were notified of the attack immediately and quickly discovered that two of our clients were trapped in a restaurant within the Mall.
"At that stage |
Numbers: 4.35 ERA, 1.35 WHIP,.298 BAA, 4 blown saves, 0.1 WAR
Why he's here: The Giants gave him a monster contract last winter to fix their bullpen woes. It hasn't quite worked out that way, as Melancon has as many blown saves this season as he did in all of 2016 and has found his way to the DL twice. It's not much better than what the Giants got from their bullpen last year, only it's costing them a lot more money this time. In a year when almost nothing has gone right for the Giants, Melancon's performance still manages to stand out.Analysis For IBM, storage value is moving to software, with object storage and flash growing while legacy disk and tape products see revenue falls.
In Big Blue’s fourth 2016 quarter overall revenues dropped nine per cent but storage hardware revenues fared worse, dropping 11.1 per cent, with no end in sight.
This continues a trend seen for the past four years. The only bright spots seem to be flash arrays (FlashSystem) and server-based storage but we don’t know how bright. IBM’s financial reporting singles out storage hardware but not flash hardware within it.
IBM doesn’t report server-based storage separately nor identify storage software revenues as a single reporting category; all of which hampers our ability to know what’s going on.
We can see what’s been happening with the storage hardware category generally and it ain’t pretty. Here's four charts showing what’s what.
Chart number one is a look at IBM’s quarterly revenues from 2010 to the end of 2015, with storage hardware revenues separately tracked.
Click chart for larger view
Chart two is a look at storage hardware revenues on their own to make things clearer.
A trendline has been added to show the downward trend
Our third chart summarises this in an annual view.
Four straight years of decline
Chart four abstracts out each quarter and shows its value year by year.
We see a consistent decline in storage revenues here.
The message here is that IBM storage hardware revenues have seen four straight years of decline and there is no end in sight. IBM management does not identify storage hardware as an area needing attention, despite annual revenues having dropped 35 per cent over four years, from $3.7bn in 2011 to $2.4bn in 2015.
Martin Schroeter, IBM’s CFO, said in prepared remarks: “A couple of years ago we laid out our strategic imperatives around big data and analytics, around cloud, and around mobile and security.” In 2015’s final quarter “Our strategic imperatives continued strong performance, up 26 per cent for the year. This now represents 35 per cent of IBM’s revenue.”
Within that: “With 57 per cent revenue growth over the last year, cloud is now a $10 billion business for us. This made us the largest cloud provider in 2015.”
Cloud is the big thing, in Schroeter's view. “To address opportunities we see in this space, in 2015 we made seven cloud acquisitions including Cleversafe for object storage, Gravitant for cloud brokerage services, and Clearleap for cloud video services. We also invested nearly a billion dollars in capital expanding our global cloud data centre footprint to 46.”
It’s not that hardware, per se, is bad, though. In Schroeter's words: “Our Systems Hardware revenue was up, driven by z Systems and Power. … This was the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in both z Systems and Power. … about half of our systems segment revenue in 2015 was to address analytics workloads, or hybrid and private clouds. … Even though the Unix market is declining, by delivering innovation and repositioning the platform, our Power systems have grown four quarters in a row.“
But that apparent determination to grow the non-x86 server business was not paralleled in the storage hardware business; “The growth in our servers was mitigated by a seven per cent [constant currency] decline in storage hardware, which continues to be impacted by weakness in traditional disk and tape.”
Analysis
IBM could exit the commodity x86 server hardware business and focus on its proprietary z Systems and Power Servers. No such exit strategy appears possible in general disk and tape storage, where commoditisation of disk is affecting IBM.
“Value in the storage market continues to shift to software and offering requirements that are driving demand for flash and object-based storage,” said Schroeter. “We are well-positioned in these new areas, with growth in flash, and our recent acquisition of Cleversafe.”
This implies that IBM is not at all well-positioned in the general SAN and filer hardware area, and products here have been left on their own. We can infer that development budgets for these product areas will not be growing.
Will IBM be looking to build hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) using its Power servers as a base? We think not, as commodity x86 server-based HCIAs could undercut them on price.
Our thinking is that IBM could be doing well in server-based storage, but may be thinking that capacity-focussed SAN and filer storage is heading towards a commoditised on-premises game, which it doesn’t want anything to do with, or to public cloud provision where its storage software, like Cleversafe, has a role.
Therefore, IBM’s storage hardware business could dip to a $2bn annual revenue run rate by the end of 2016 and fall below $2bn in 2017.
In the fourth 2015 quarter, storage hardware accounted for 32 per cent of IBM’s hardware business. We expect that to fall below 30 per cent this year, and head towards a 25 per cent contribution.
This is, it seems to us, a managed decline, with IBM wanting a smaller, but presumably more profitable, storage hardware business to eventually emerge. ®It's well-known that the more adorable and charismatic of the endangered animals get most of the funding. That doesn't mean the cute animals, like the iconic panda, aren't worth saving, but it leaves a lot of the less photogenic but just as important animals out in the cold. Who's interested in saving the Brazilian bald-faced tamarin, which looks like a cross between a rabid monkey and a bat? Or the Komodo dragon, a 10-foot-long murderous lizard that's the embodiment of just about every childhood nightmare you ever had?
That's where the Ugly Animal Preservation Society comes in. It's an awareness campaign that uses comedy to bring attention to animals like the pig-nosed frog, pictured above, which may otherwise have trouble getting funding. The UAPS holds live events, where a combination of London comics and scientists discuss one ugly endangered animal of their choice. At the end of the show, the audience votes to decide which of those animals will become the mascot for each individual chapter of the UAPS. They don't seem to be directly donating money; instead, the aim is to raise awareness, with the hopes that it will eventually lead to donations elsewhere.London is a more “Islamic” city than many in Muslim countries, a leading Islamic scholar has claimed.
Maulana Syed Ali Raza Rizvi, a Shia cleric, said he feels “more Islamic” in Britain due to the country’s multicultural policies and his freedom to practice his faith.
Speaking at the annual Benedict XVI lecture alongside Cardinal Vincent Nichols — the most senior Catholic bishop in England and Wales — and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the cleric claimed Islam was about “love and justice” but Muslim leaders were failing to show this.
The Telegraph quotes him as saying: “I feel that London has more Islamic values than many of the Muslim countries put together.
“There are many different communities living together in peace and harmony, giving respect to the others and loving others and that is what Islam is all about – and unfortunately [much] of the Muslim political leadership has failed to provide that.
“I feel more Islamic living here because I can easily practise my faith and give respect to all other members of the community belonging to different faiths and not even belonging to a faith, to anything.
“Because that is what Islam is all about, respecting and giving to others. If in one line I could say what Islam is all about, it is all about love and justice.”
However, Chief Rabbi Mirvis also said at the lecture that minorities should be required to pass the so-called “Tebbit Test” – the idea floated by former Conservative Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit that the true loyalties of ethnic minorities can be determined by which national cricket team they support.
“Minorities are responsible to maintain their own traditions, to be proud of their background, loyal to their faiths, and at the same time to be proud members of their countries,” he said.
“In a nutshell, minorities need to pass the Norman Tebbit test. This is something which, thankfully, Jewish communities across the globe have almost always done, and we’re proud of the fact that we can pass that test within British society today.”
Earlier this year, figures showed that London’s population had reached a record high, despite large numbers of people moving away from the city.
The UK capital’s population is growing by around 100,000 a year, mainly due to immigration, with the city’s demographics changing rapidly as white Britons move out.
According to the 2011 Census, 620,000 white Britons moved out of London over the previous decade, including a third of all white residents in the borough of Barking and Dagenham.After months of controversy, Spike Lee’s new film Chi-Raq finally hits theaters today. It’s a dud. A squandered opportunity. There’s a reckoning to be had in Chicago, and a serious examination to be done about the pervasiveness of gun violence here, but this movie is not it. Billed as a satire and based on the Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Chi-Raq is a brazenly opportunistic film, glomming onto current events with sickening desperation, simultaneously overwrought and underwhelming.
The plot summary in brief: After a series of escalating violent acts between two rival gangs—the Spartans and the Trojans—result in the shooting of a little girl, a young woman named Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), girlfriend of Spartan gang leader Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), initiates a sex strike in the hopes that it will curb the city’s violence. In the film, Lysistrata’s strike is marked with a motto: “I will deny all rights of access or entrance,"which she repeats to her legion of women. The film’s posters, however, put it more succinctly: “No Peace, No Piece.”
Chi-Raq is both a satire and late period Spike Lee and, ultimately, a mess. There are glimpses of that signature Lee stamp—direct camera addresses, gorgeous cinematography (Wicker Park has never looked so good), and moving performances from Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, and (surprisingly!) John Cusack. But there is so much more that doesn’t work, from the haphazardly enforced rhyming verse throughout to the jarring nods at every hot button black subject du jour (mass incarceration! Sandra Bland! The Prison-Industrial Complex!). It’s a well-known fact—one trumpeted by Lee himself—that the film was shot in six weeks and Lee scrambled to release it in time for Oscar consideration. The rushing shows.
It’s hard not to come away from the movie feeling as though it’s a gross oversimplification of Chicago’s ails. Both Lee and his co-writer, Kevin Willmott, who originally came up with the concept of a modern revamping of Lysistrata, freely admit that the film was not originally supposed to be set in Chicago. That changed because of social media (read more about that here).
In Chicago’s Q&A with Lee, he claims to have done his research. And sure, he frontloads the movie with grim stats about the violence in the city. The 500 murders in 2012, the contested claim that there have been more murders in Chicago than in Iraq. But from then on, the depictions of gang culture appear to stem directly from bad, outdated movies and TV shows about gang life. They resemble nothing of the overwhelmingly young, decentralized nature of the gangs that proliferate in Chicago today. The fact that the film’s two central gang leaders (itself a dated concept in Chicago, when there are hundreds of splintered gangs who rule over one block or one street) are played by Nick Cannon, age 35, and Wesley Snipes, age 53, is just wildly inaccurate. (Let’s ignore, forever, the utter absurdity of Snipes’s Cyclops, from his bizarre, staccato laugh, to his bejeweled eye patch, to any character context whatsoever.) As Chicago has reported, the average age of both victims and perpetrators in Chicago is really young—a shocking number are under the age of 30.
What’s been so surprising—if not infuriating— about early critical reactions to the film is just how laudatory so many reviews have been. The cream of that strange crop: New York Times film critic Mahnola Dargis’s critic’s pick review. She not only calls Chi-Raq the best work Lee has done in years, but writes this travesty promptly circulated around local Internet circles and rightly mocked: “Set in contemporary Chicago, where sidewalks are washed with blood, and human hearts beat to the rhythm of gunfire…” Why is there such reticence on the part of critics to really address the film’s awfulness? As if taking on Chicago gun violence means Lee should be offered a carte blanche. The tropes the film traffics in means it could have been set anywhere. That Lee chose Chicago seems like a desperate attempt on his part to cash in on the city’s unflattering national spotlight.
Lee says he wants this movie to save lives. But if it has no basis in the reality of the city, how can it?
ShareThe Wall Street Journal editorial board published a furious tirade Tuesday in response to President Trump’s “America First” immigration proposals, arguing that the proposals do not do enough to make open-borders Democrats happy and would lead to a “humanitarian calamity” if illegal immigrants are sent home.
“Does President Trump want a bipartisan deal on immigration, or is his talk merely for cable-TV show?” the outlet, which caters to a big business readership, wrote.
Trump’s proposal, believed to have been drafted by nationalist adviser Stephen Miller, would shield illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in return for a host of measures demanded by conservatives. Those include funding for the wall on the southern border, mandated use of E-Verify by employers, an increase in immigration agents, greater restrictions on which family members immigrants can bring, and a stripping of funds from so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Trump had cozied up to the Democrats shortly after announcing the repeal of the Obama-era DACA program in September — setting a six-month time limit for its expiration and urging Congress to make a deal. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) indicated that Trump had suggested funding for the wall had been jettisoned by Trump as a firm term, replaced instead by a vague “border security.” But the proposals announced late Sunday indicate a return to Trump’s “America First” campaign stance that helped him win the election in 2016.
However, the Journal described the demands as “everything that the restrictionist right has ever sought” and making an agreement “well-nigh impossible.”
The article pivots to its concern for cheap labor for big business, claiming that “tight visa caps” are sending high-tech jobs abroad and agricultural production to Mexico. Oddly, it claims that limiting chain migration for family members would encourage more illegal immigration — the argument apparently being that America should just let in potential illegal immigrants before they break the law.
As Breitbart News reported, this argument from the center-right outfit is in line with that being pushed by a number of left-wing media and advocacy groups claiming that such demands are “poison pills” because they will upset Democrats.
“It’s hard to know if Mr. Trump intends all this as a serious negotiating offer, or merely as poison pills,” the editorial board writes. The case for the latter is that he is demanding money for the wall, which he knows is a nonstarter with Democrats.”
The board essentially is arguing that Trump should give up on a central campaign promise because Democrats do not like it. However, it later says that he would be much better off going for the old talking point of a “virtual wall”:
If Mr. Trump feels he needs a symbolic wall victory, he’d be smarter to settle for a virtual wall with drones, aerostat blimps and towers with infrared sensors to fill gaps in fencing where the border patrol has difficulty accessing. Newer technology has facial recognition features that can capture biometric data. A virtual wall could be installed within months, not years, and it can be continually improved.
If such a wall is a real possibility and would actually work better than a real wall, it is unclear why the Journal thinks Democrats would fund this, either.
But after claiming for much of the article that Democrats would scupper the deal, the board admits that such demands would “have no chance of passing no matter which party controls Congress” — essentially conceding that the problem is not just the Democrats.
It finishes with the warning that if illegal immigrants are not granted amnesty via a DACA replacement, Democrats will “blame” Republicans for their deportation — despite this being a campaign promise from the president.
“This would be a humanitarian calamity, and a monumental lost political opportunity. Mr. Trump needs legislative victories to show he can govern, but his immigration bait and switch may guarantee another failure.”
The WSJ article is the latest in a broad attack from pro-big business interests. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lobbying group has reportedly been lobbying top Republicans to prevent President Trump from including pro-American reforms as part of the amnesty for DACA recipients.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.Garry Monk took over Middlesbrough after parting ways with Leeds United
New Middlesbrough manager Garry Monk has announced a new five-man backroom team.
Ex-England striker James Beattie and former Swansea City coach David Adams have been hired as first-team coaches while Darryl Flahavan has been named goalkeeping coach, having worked alongside Monk at Leeds United last season.
In addition, Sean Rush joins the club as head of physical performance, while Ryan Needs comes in as head of performance analysis.
All five new members of the coaching staff have previously worked with Monk at Swansea City and Leeds United.
"It's important as a manager that you build staff around you to work with you to deliver what is needed to be delivered," said Monk.
"We have great experience together as a group - we've worked together for a good period - and they have a good understanding of what I expect and how we work together.
"As you go through your career, you're consistently looking to refine and improve things and we're all on that journey together.
"The guys have the skill sets that we need to be able to cover all bases and there's also the importance of being able to rely on them with the responsibilities they will have."10 ESSENTIAL RULES FOR BEING A GENTLEMAN IN 2015 Connor Doyle and Alice Gregg
Man was not intended to live like a bear or a hermit; being a gentleman is about etiquette and decorum. What hasn’t changed in over a century is that a gentleman knows how to behave toward other people.
We, the people of gentlemanliness, have collaborated to bring you the ultimate guide for being a modern gentleman in the year 2015. We’ve analyzed past works, such as A Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette by Cecil B. Hartley, studied the cultures of our modern society, and taken into account the views and opinions of both women and men. This is the result.
1. IT’S NOT RUDE TO PAY FOR FOOD
As part of modern etiquette when dining with a lady, you are both expected to do the “check dance” (regardless of who invited who), even if she doesn’t want to dance. But only accept her offer to pay for half if you sense she’d be genuinely uncomfortable otherwise. A gentleman respects women’s equality, but wishes to pay for the meal as a sign of appreciation.
2. PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE
True, pretty much our entire lives are on our phones - but when you’re with someone else, devote your time and energy to being present and engaged with them, instead of with your device. All of your feeds can wait to hear about how your friend was chased down the street by someone dressed as a horse.
3. SAVE YOUR INNER LAWYER FOR THE COURTROOM
A gentleman understands the freedom of expression and thought, allowing others the entitlement of their own ideas. Even if convinced that your opponent is utterly wrong, graciously decline further engagement or dexterously turn the conversation - do not obstinately defend your own opinion until you become angry. You don’t see The Hulk invited to soirees.
4. DRESS LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING
Dressing well is a form of good manners. Don’t settle for shirts with baggy waists, too short sleeves, or too tight collars. From a hiking trip to a keynote speech, a true gent always knows how to look good. Unless you actually find a store with clothes that actually fit off the rack, go custom. People will notice. Life’s too short for bad shirts: awesome shirts here and special offer here.
5. SO YOU THINK YOU CAN’T DANCE?
A true gent doesn’t stand idle, observing from a corner: you can probably already see the problem with this… creepy. Take a class and embrace your inner Fred Astaire. Dancing, much like life, is about courage and hopefully having fun - and remember, elaborate flamboyant arm movements disguise a lack of footwork.
6. LEARN HOW TO CONVERSE
Two year olds can have one word conversations. A gentleman should be engaged, thoughtful, and captivating. But do not steal the spotlight from others. Many people enjoy talking about themselves, so stay engaged, yet do more of the listening - and when they tell you some grandiose anecdote, let them have their moment. Don’t be a one-upper.
7. TO COFFEE OR NOT TO COFFEE
If the date has gone well, she might invite you up for coffee - or down; dating women who live in basement apartments is perfectly acceptable. The rule is if you’re not planning on calling her again or think that you might view her differently for having coffee on the first date, then do politely turn down the invitation. Do the right thing.
8. WATCH YOUR (DAMN) MOUTH
Endeavour to find words that express your ideas eloquently. A gentleman does not require offensive language to speak; for those who use words such as “gay”, “retarded”, or “ghetto” to describe something in a negative light not only adhere to stereotypes, but also show a lack of vocabulary and intellect. Cut back on that Hatorade. It’s a resentful beverage that too many fools drink.
9. KEEP THE CLASSICS
Chivalry is dead. Common courtesy is not. Some rules to being a gentleman will never change and should always be followed. The two biggest of which are opening/holding the door for other people and giving up your seat when there are no more seats, both in this order: an older lady, an older man, a lady.
10. BE A GOOD PERSON
This is everything else and it should be self explanatory, but we’ll go ahead and help you a bit more anyway. Be compassionate and show respect towards everyone. Don’t belittle or take advantage of others, ignore stereotypes, and understand that people from all walks of life are equal. It’s what we do that defines us. That, and really nice shirts.Examples For Using io.Pipe in Go
Much has been written and said about the work of art that are the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces. Simple, yet powerful - just as Go itself.
In this post I want to showcase another part of the Go standard library that I find to be both simple and powerful - io.Pipe.
pr, pw := io. Pipe ( )
According to the docs, io.Pipe creates a synchronous in-memory pipe, which can be used to connect code expecting io.Reader with code expecting io.Writer.
Upon invocation, io.Pipe() returns a PipeReader and a PipeWriter. They are connected (hence the pipe), so that everything written to the PipeWriter can be read from the PipeReader.
The following three examples show use-cases of io.Pipe, its versatility and the way of thinking and composing I/O it enables us to do.
Let’s get started!
Example 1: JSON to HTTP Request
This is the go-to example one usually sees when it comes to io.Pipe. We encode some data as JSON and want to send it to a web endpoint via http.Post. Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), the JSON encoder takes an io.Writer and the http request methods expect an io.Reader as input, so we can’t just plug them together.
Of course we could always create intermediate []byte representations, but that is neither memory efficient nor particularly elegant. This is where io.Pipe comes in:
pr, pw := io. Pipe ( ) go func ( ) { // close the writer, so the reader knows there's no more data defer pw. Close ( ) // write json data to the PipeReader through the PipeWriter if err := json. NewEncoder ( pw ). Encode ( & PayLoad { Content : "Hello Pipe!" } ) ; err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) // JSON from the PipeWriter lands in the PipeReader //...and we send it off... if _, err := http. Post ( "http://example.com", "application/json", pr ) ; err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) }
First, we encode some struct PayLoad to JSON and write the data to the PipeWriter created by invoking io.Pipe. Afterwards, we create a http POST request, which gets its data from the PipeReader. That PipeReader gets filled with the data written to the PipeWriter.
Important to note here is that we have to encode asynchronously to prevent a deadlock, because we would write without a reader if we didn’t.
This practical example showcases the versatility of io.Pipe very well. It really incentivizes gophers to build components using io.Reader and io.Writer, without having to worry about them being used together.
Example 2: Split up Data with TeeReader
I found another very cool way of using io.Pipe together with TeeReader (read: T-Reader) in @rodaine’s great blog post about asynchronously splitting an io.Reader.
In Solution #4, he describes the use-case of using a video-file and simultaneously transcode it to another format and uploading that, while also uploading the original file. All with minimal overhead and completely in parallel.
Based on this solution, I tried to capture the gist of it with the following example:
pr, pw := io. Pipe ( ) // we need to wait for everything to be done wg := sync. WaitGroup { } wg. Add ( 2 ) // we get some file as input f, err := os. Open ( "./fruit.txt" ) if err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) } // TeeReader gets the data from the file and also writes it to the PipeWriter tr := io. TeeReader ( f, pw ) go func ( ) { defer wg. Done ( ) defer pw. Close ( ) // get data from the TeeReader, which feeds the PipeReader through the PipeWriter _, err := http. Post ( "https://example.com", "text/html", tr ) if err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) go func ( ) { defer wg. Done ( ) // read from the PipeReader to stdout if _, err := io. Copy ( os. Stdout, pr ) ; err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) wg. Wait ( )
My example is of course simplified in that it doesn’t use channels for propagating errors and results, but the underlying concept is quite similar - we have some kind of input io.Reader, a file in this case and create a TeeReader, which returns a Reader that writes to the Writer you provide it everything it reads from the Reader you provide it.
Now we start two goroutines, one which just prints the data to stdout and another one which sends it to an HTTP endpoint. The TeeReader uses the io.Pipe to split up the given input. When the TeeReader is consumed, those same bytes are also received by the PipeReader.
Pretty cool, ha?
Example 3: Piping the output of Shell commands
I stumbled over this gist recently, which combines io.Pipe with os.Exec in a nice way. Basically, it does what most task runners in CI services like Jenkins or Travis CI do, which is execute some shell command and show its output on some website.
I tried to encapsulate the general pattern behind it in this short snippet here:
pr, pw := io. Pipe ( ) defer pw. Close ( ) // tell the command to write to our pipe cmd := exec. Command ( "cat", "fruit.txt" ) cmd. Stdout = pw go func ( ) { defer pr. Close ( ) // copy the data written to the PipeReader via the cmd to stdout if _, err := io. Copy ( os. Stdout, pr ) ; err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) // run the command, which writes all output to the PipeWriter // which then ends up in the PipeReader if err := cmd. Run ( ) ; err!= nil { log. Fatal ( err ) }
First, we define our command - in this case, we just cat a file called fruit.txt, which will just spit out the contents of the file on stdout. Then, and this is important, we set the command’s stdout to our PipeWriter.
So we redirect the output of the Command to our pipe, which, as before, will make it possible to read it through our PipeReader at another point. In this rather contrived case, that point is just a goroutine where we dump the results of cat to stdout (which it would have done anyways), but I think it’s easy to imagine doing something nifty here like exporting the results of the command somewhere or flushing it to a webpage as seen in this gist, where we’d need an io.Writer as input.
Conclusion
I hope these examples helped to convince you of the many opportunities opened by using io.Pipe together with nice abstractions which expect either io.Reader or io.Writer. Not only does io.Pipe enable seamless composition of components based on best practices, it’s also quite flexible with the use of TeeReader, which points the vast possibilities of using io.Pipe in custom-made I/O handling pipelines in both a readable and scalable way.
Of course this post only scratched the surface on this topic, as it didn’t handle the inherent gotchas with this approach nor error handling, but I plan to remedy this by a post or two on these and some more advanced topics in the future.
Have fun pipin’! :)
ResourcesOne of the most common sights following any major storm is a large number of houses with blue tarps pinned to their roofs. That was certainly true in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and in Florida after Irma rolled through. But images from Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria are almost blue-roof-free. That’s not because the hurricane didn’t leave plenty of damaged homes — with winds speeds over 150 mph when it made landfall, Maria was a monster storm that ripped shingles from homes that met even the most stringent hurricane standards.
So why are images from Puerto Rico so lacking in that post-disaster blue?
After Hurricane Maria damaged tens of thousands of homes in Puerto Rico, a newly created Florida company with an unproven record won more than $30 million in contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency tarps and plastic sheeting for repairs.
Just as the contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid was awarded to a two-man firm in Montana that didn’t even have an office, FEMA awarded the contract for supplying tarps and similar post-disaster materials to the Florida firm Bronze Star.
Only neither of the brothers behind the company had the supplies they were selling, or experience in acquiring them, or knowledge of delivering them. And if the name has you wondering, neither of them actually has a Bronze Star.
“My brother and I, we are both veterans, so we just came up with a name to do business,” Kayon Jones said. “We’re not saying we have a Bronze Star or anything.”
Somehow the proposal from Bronze Star beat out eight other bids for tarps and plastic sheeting. But not a single item was delivered before FEMA finally cancelled the contracts on November 6. Which means that since September 20, homes on Puerto Rico have been picking up even more rain damage as they waited for these supplies.Kaboom! Controlled explosions in the legs of this silicone'soft robot' make it leap higher than 30 times its own height.
Researchers led by George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have engineered a three-legged silicone device that is powered by combustion — previously used only in hard systems such as diesel engines.
The soft robot has in each of its legs a channel with a soft valve at the end. Methane and oxygen gases are fed into this channel in a ratio of one part methane to two parts oxygen. The computer that controls how much gas is let in also controls a high-voltage cable connected to electrodes in each leg.
When the computer sparks the electrodes, the methane and oxygen explode, turning into carbon dioxide and water — and releasing a lot of energy. The downward force from the explosion makes the robot jump — higher than 30 centimetres so far, although the researchers say the range has been limited by the height of the testing chamber. The soft valve is crucial, says Robert Shepherd, a study co-author and engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It closes in response to high pressure, thus making the pressure even higher, and then it opens after the explosion to let the exhaust gases out.
Soft robots are lighter and simpler than hard systems, and they are relatively inexpensive to produce — but they have previously been limited to compressed-air power, owing to the high heat generated in combustion reactions. “The key discovery is that this material can work at these high temperatures,” says Shepherd. The robot has withstood more than 30 consecutive explosive jumps so far. The results were published this week in Angewandte Chemie1.
The researchers hope that a developed version of their device could be used for search-and-rescue operations, leaping and cartwheeling its way over any obstacles that might block its path.How can you keep an eye on that slow SQL query? Is it taking up too much time nowadays? How about that call to the 3rd party API? Is it actually slow during the weekends? Being able to answer such questions quickly, to track these numbers in real-time, is a bit like driving at night with headlights on!
Imagine adding a new feature that you’ve tested well enough, but want to roll it out slowly in production, while keeping an eye on the time taken for a few crucial operations. Having a system where it is easy to add in these few metrics quickly, have it graphed and alerted on in real-time, provides the scaffolding for smooth, solid ops. And less weekend on-call duties.
So how do you get yourself such a system? Read on!
Measuring
This is the easiest part. Measuring the time taken to execute a piece of code typically goes like:
func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time. Now () //... do stuff... elapsed := time. Since ( t ) // report elapsed } // or, a little more cleanly, like this: func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time. Now () defer func () { elapsed := time. Since ( t ) // report elapsed }() //... do stuff... }
If you want to count the number of times an event occurred, you’d use something like this:
var parseFailures uint64 func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo. Parse (); err!= nil { // count the number of times this happens atomic. AddUint64 ( & parseFailures, 1 ) //... } //... }
There are better ways to count and to report that count, though. Read on.
Reporting Metrics (push) vs. Collecting Metrics (pull)
How do you get the measurements out of your app and into something which can graph them? There are two approaches:
Push : After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or “pushes” the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it’s work.
: After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or “pushes” the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it’s work. Pull: Your app exposes these metrics in a standard format at a predefined endpoint. A collection service “pulls” these metrics.
There are enough examples of these in the wild. The proc filesystem mounted at /proc and an SNMP agent that can be queried are examples of the pull model. Google Analytics is an example of the push model.
So which one should you pick for your app? There’s no correct answer. In both cases, apart from your app, you need a service that can accept metrics or pull metrics. You should choose an approach that suits your app, scale and team.
The expvar package
Within Google, the pull approach is used, which perhaps explains why the expvar package exists in the Go standard library.
This library provides a way to expose your app metrics so that a service can collect them. Rewriting the above using the expvar package makes it look like this:
import "expvar" var elapsed = expvar. NewFloat ( "parseTotalTime" ) // nanoseconds func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time. Now () defer func () { elapsed. Add ( time. Since ( t )) }() //... do stuff... } var parseFailures = expvar. NewInt ( "parseFailures" ) func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo. Parse (); err!= nil { // count the number of times this happens parseFailures. Add ( 1 ) //... } //... }
Importing the package sets up an HTTP handler for the default HTTP server to handle the URL path /debug/vars, and serves up your metrics as a JSON object. You’ll need to start the default HTTP server explicitly.
Although it is convenient that this package exists in the standard library, there is not much of an (open source) ecosystem around it. Neither are there schema or conventions around the JSON format that is exposed.
If the pull approach suits you best, you might also |
it."
"I would just hope that they would admit that this has been a policy of theirs. They keep denying it and it's really offended a whole lot of people in Prince George."
Park told CBC News the hotel will investigate claims staff are telling the public of a no-local policy, and he insists locals are welcome to stay at Esther's Inn.
"We are all P.G. people. That includes myself, and the employees," he said.
To hear more, click the audio labelled: Mother and her two turned refused service at hotel because she was a 'local.'India has blossomed into one of the most important renewable energy markets in the world.
It currently has the fourth-most cumulative wind capacity installed, and will become the third-biggest solar market globally by 2022. The country also has plans to sell only electric vehicles by 2030.
With immense growth comes new businesses and economic opportunity -- but also political and economic risk.
This week, we'll talk with the CEO of India's top independent renewable energy developers about navigating that risk.
Sumant Sinha is the founder and CEO of ReNew Power. He's overseen 2 gigawatts' worth of completed wind and solar projects, and has plans to build 10 gigawatts more in the coming years.
In this show, we interview Sinha about the many forces that are changing India’s energy markets. We address:
The solar boom: Can India meet its 100-gigawatt solar target?
Grid planning: Can central and state governments better coordinate market expansion?
Quality: The importance of maintaining quality standards for projects
The rise of auctions: Are record-low prices sustainable?
India's EV target: Will it tangentially help?
ReNew Power's expansion: What will it take to hit 10 gigawatts of projects?
This podcast is sponsored by Mission Solar Energy, a solar module manufacturer based in San Antonio, Texas. You can find out more about Mission’s American-made, high-power modules at missionsolar.com.
Recommended reading:At the InterContinental hotel, the American Action Network — an outside group that intends to spend tens of millions of dollars to help the Republicans keep control of the House — set up an office down the hall from the National Republican Congressional Committee. In a ballroom one floor down, the network hosted speeches by Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House whip, and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, whose vehement attacks against the 2010 health care law echoed the group’s attack ads.
“I’m not coordinating anything,” Mr. Barrasso said later. “I’m giving the message I’ve been giving since before this thing was passed. I’m happy to go anywhere and talk about what I think is wrong.”
There was David H. Koch, the billionaire industrialist and founder of Americans for Prosperity, dining on New American cuisine at SideBern’s in Tampa with Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Mr. Koch, a delegate from New York, stood with his party’s state chairman as Mr. Romney was formally nominated from the convention floor on Tuesday. On Thursday, Mr. Koch was honored at an Americans for Prosperity reception.
There was Karl Rove, adviser to American Crossroads, which will spend at least $300 million this year on the presidential and Senate races, mingling with party officials and conventiongoers, then briefing the group’s donors at a breakfast on Thursday where Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, had been invited.
There was the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson joining Republican congressmen munching on brisket and pigs in a blanket at an event hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Mr. Adelson, the group’s top donor, has provided millions of dollars for pro-Romney appeals to Jewish voters in Ohio and Florida, both swing states.
Near the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the site of the convention, workers erected tents on Monday for the Liberty Pavilion, an event space for conservative research groups, businesses and activist groups. David Bossie, whose group, Citizens United, brought the federal lawsuit that helped pave the way for super PACs, was preparing to screen documentaries by two of the losing Republican primary candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, and was expecting a visit from Reince Priebus, the Republican Party chairman.
“We have a great venue,” Mr. Bossie said, “and these are their people.”
An air of common purpose and celebration permeated the events, with far less of the careful distancing that marked the rise of super PACs two years ago.
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“Sheldon and Miriam Adelson — they gave $500,000 to my super PAC!” boasted Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the self-help author and television host, who is running for Congress in New Jersey. (The super PAC in question, the Patriot Prosperity Political Action Committee, is in theory an independent entity that happens to support Rabbi Boteach.)
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Party officials and donors, some Republicans said, have grown more sophisticated about the rules governing super PAC coordination. Republicans have been eager to benefit from the outside conservative groups from the start of the campaign season, but Mr. Obama’s more recent decision to embrace super PACs — and even to send his own aides on the road to raise cash for Democratic-leaning groups — has made some groups more bold. So has the light touch of the Federal Election Commission, Republican strategists and lawyers said, which in past years would have kept a closer eye on discussions between elected officials and independent spenders.
“Super PACs on both sides of the aisle are more aggressively exercising the latitude that they already had under existing law but had not yet fully exploited,” said Robert Kelner, a prominent Republican election lawyer. “If there’s been any shift, I would say it is more with respect to providing policy briefings either to members or to major donors.”
Mr. Kelner added that he was surprised that federal regulators had taken so little interest in such activities.
“Twenty years ago, there would have been much more aggressive F.E.C. investigations about what was said at those briefings,” he said. “So far we’re not just seeing much interest from F.E.C. enforcers.”
On Wednesday morning, Restore Our Future set up shop at the Vinoy Renaissance resort in St. Petersburg, the same hotel booked by Mr. Romney’s campaign and by the Republican National Committee to house top “bundlers” and donors.
Mr. Forti and his Restore Our Future colleagues — Larry McCarthy, a Republican veteran who created ads for Mr. Romney and now does the same for the super PAC, and Charles Spies, the group’s lawyer and a former Republican National Committee counsel — held forth for two hours to a crowd of current and potential donors in a ballroom not far from the Romney campaign’s donor welcome suite.
Mr. Forti led a PowerPoint presentation and took questions about polls and swing-state politics. Those listening included William F. Hagerty IV, a Tennessee executive and a senior adviser to Mr. Romney’s campaign in that state; William Simmons, a lobbyist who is among Mr. Romney’s top bundlers; and Mark Speers, a medical consulting executive and a friend of Mr. Romney.
“We were looking for a way to contribute in a bigger way,” Mr. Speers said in an interview, adding, “They’re very thoughtful, these PAC guys.”
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Several prominent Republican elected officials also attended, reflecting the super PAC’s growing clout in party politics and the presence of the kind of six- and seven-figure givers who have become more important to aspiring candidates than ever before.
“Obviously, these groups have legal restrictions on how they can coordinate and what we can, and you have to lawyer up to make sure you’re not violating any laws,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said in an interview after addressing the Restore Our Future donors. “On the other hand, they’re an important voice now in American politics. They’re a vehicle through which we can inform voters of who we are.”
As donors exited, a Restore Our Future aide, mindful of a reporter taking notes outside, encouraged guests to hide their name tags under their jackets. Outside the room, Mr. McCarthy, pressed by one potential donor about coordination rules, gave a quick pep talk about the rules of the road and noted that the group worked closely with American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by Mr. Rove, for which Mr. Forti also consults.
“You can’t coordinate with the R.N.C., and you can’t coordinate with Mitt,” Mr. McCarthy explained to the guest. “But we coordinate very closely with Karl.”"Tyrannosaur" redirects here. For the film, see Tyrannosaur (film)
Tyrannosauroidea (meaning 'tyrant lizard forms') is a superfamily (or clade) of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaurs that includes the family Tyrannosauridae as well as more basal relatives. Tyrannosauroids lived on the Laurasian supercontinent beginning in the Jurassic Period. By the end of the Cretaceous Period, tyrannosauroids were the dominant large predators in the Northern Hemisphere, culminating in the gigantic Tyrannosaurus. Fossils of tyrannosauroids have been recovered on what are now the continents of North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.
Tyrannosauroids were bipedal carnivores, as were most theropods, and were characterized by numerous skeletal features, especially of the skull and pelvis. Early in their existence, tyrannosauroids were small predators with long, three-fingered forelimbs. Late Cretaceous genera became much larger, including some of the largest land-based predators ever to exist, but most of these later genera had proportionately small forelimbs with only two digits. Primitive feathers have been identified in fossils of two species, and may have been present in other tyrannosauroids as well. Prominent bony crests in a variety of shapes and sizes on the skulls of many tyrannosauroids may have served display functions.
Description [ edit ]
Size of some small genera, compared to a human.
Tyrannosauroids varied widely in size, although there was a general trend towards increasing size over time. Early tyrannosauroids were small animals.[1] One specimen of Dilong, almost fully grown, measured 1.6 meters (5.3 ft) in length,[2] and a fully-grown Guanlong measured 3 meters (10 ft long).[3] Teeth from lower Lower Cretaceous rocks (140 to 136 million years old) of Hyogo, Japan, appear to have come from an approximately 5 metres (16 ft) long animal, possibly indicating an early size increase in the lineage.[4] An immature Eotyrannus was over 4 meters (13 ft) in length,[5] and a subadult Appalachiosaurus was estimated at more than 6 meters (20 ft) long,[1] indicating that both genera reached larger sizes. The Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurids ranged from the 9 meter (30 ft) Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus to Tyrannosaurus, which exceeded 12 meters (39 ft) in length and may have weighed more than 6400 kilograms (7 short tons).[1] A 2010 review of the literature concluded that tyrannosaurs were "small- to mid-sized" for their first 80 million years but were "some of the largest terrestrial carnivores to ever live" in their last 20 million years.[6][7]
Skulls of early tyrannosauroids were long, low and lightly constructed, similar to other coelurosaurs, while later forms had taller and more massive skulls. Despite the differences in form, certain skull features are found in all known tyrannosauroids. The premaxillary bone is very tall, blunting the front of the snout, a feature which evolved convergently in abelisaurids. The nasal bones are characteristically fused together, arched slightly upwards and often very roughly textured on their upper surface. The premaxillary teeth at the front of the upper jaw are shaped differently from the rest of the teeth, smaller in size and with a D-shaped cross section. In the lower jaw, a prominent ridge on the surangular bone extends sideways from just below the jaw joint, except in the basal Guanlong.[1][2][3]
Tyrannosauroids had S-shaped necks and long tails, as did most other theropods. Early genera had long forelimbs, about 60% the length of the hindlimb in Guanlong, with the typical three digits of coelurosaurs.[3] The long forelimb persisted at least through the Early Cretaceous Eotyrannus,[5] but is unknown in Appalachiosaurus.[8] Derived tyrannosaurids have forelimbs strongly reduced in size, the most extreme example being Tarbosaurus from Mongolia, where the humerus was only one-quarter the length of the femur.[1] The third digit of the forelimb was also reduced over time. This digit was unreduced in the basal Guanlong,[3] while in Dilong it was more slender than the other two digits.[2] Eotyrannus also had three functional digits on each hand.[5] Tyrannosaurids had only two, although the vestigial metacarpal of the third are preserved in some well-preserved specimens.[9] As in most coelurosaurs, the second digit of the hand is the largest, even when the third digit is not present.
Characteristic features of the tyrannosauroid pelvis include a concave notch at the upper front end of the ilium, a sharply defined vertical ridge on the outside surface of the ilium, extending upwards from the acetabulum (hip socket), and a huge "boot" on the end of the pubis, more than half as long as the shaft of the pubis itself.[1] These features are found in all known tyrannosauroids, including basal members Guanlong[3] and Dilong.[2] The pubis is not known in Aviatyrannis or Stokesosaurus but both show typical tyrannosauroid characters in the ilium.[10] The hindlimbs of all tyrannosauroids, like most theropods, had four toes, although the first toe (the hallux) did not contact the ground. Tyrannosauroid hindlimbs are longer relative to body size than almost any other theropods, and show proportions characteristic of fast-running animals, including elongated tibiae and metatarsals.[1] These proportions persist even in the largest adult Tyrannosaurus,[11] despite its probable inability to run.[12] The third metatarsal of tyrannosaurids was pinched at the top between the second and fourth, forming a structure known as the arctometatarsus.[1] The arctometatarsus was also present in Appalachiosaurus[8] but it is unclear whether it was found in Eotyrannus[5] or Dryptosaurus.[13] This structure was shared by derived ornithomimids, troodontids and caenagnathids,[14] but was not present in basal tyrannosauroids like Dilong, indicating convergent evolution.[2]
Classification [ edit ]
Tyrannosaurus was named by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1905, along with the family Tyrannosauridae.[15] The name is derived from the Ancient Greek words τυραννος/tyrannos ('tyrant') and σαυρος/sauros ('lizard'). The superfamily name Tyrannosauroidea was first published in a 1964 paper by the British paleontologist Alick Walker.[16] The suffix -oidea, commonly used in the name of animal superfamilies, is derived from the Greek ειδος/eidos ('form').[17]
Proceratosaurus, a proceratosaurid from the Middle Jurassic of England. Skull of, a proceratosaurid from the Middle Jurassic of England.
Appalachiosaurus, a non-tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroid from the Late Cretaceous of Eastern North America. Skeleton of, a non-tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroid from the Late Cretaceous of Eastern North America.
Scientists have commonly understood Tyrannosauroidea to include the tyrannosaurids and their immediate ancestors.[16][18] With the advent of phylogenetic taxonomy in vertebrate paleontology, however, the clade has received several more explicit definitions. The first was by Paul Sereno in 1998, where Tyrannosauroidea was defined as a stem-based taxon including all species sharing a more recent common ancestor with Tyrannosaurus rex than with neornithean birds.[19] To make the family more exclusive, Thomas Holtz redefined it in 2004 to include all species more closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex than to Ornithomimus velox, Deinonychus antirrhopus or Allosaurus fragilis.[1] Sereno published a new definition in 2005, using Ornithomimus edmontonicus, Velociraptor mongoliensis and Troodon formosus as external specifiers.[20] The Sereno definition was adopted in a 2010 review.[6]
Some studies have suggested that the clade Megaraptora, usually considered to be allosauroids, are basal tyrannosauroids.[21][22] However, other authors disputed the placement of megaraptorans within Tyrannosauroidea,[23][24] and a study of megaraptoran hand anatomy published in 2016 caused even the original scientists suggesting their tyrannosauroid relationships to at least partly reject their prior conclusion.[25]
Phylogeny [ edit ]
While paleontologists have long recognized the family Tyrannosauridae, its ancestry has been the subject of much debate. For most of the twentieth century, tyrannosaurids were commonly accepted as members of the Carnosauria, which included almost all large theropods.[26][27] Within this group, the allosaurids were often considered to be ancestral to tyrannosaurids.[18][28] In the early 1990s, cladistic analyses instead began to place tyrannosaurids into the Coelurosauria,[14][29] echoing suggestions first published in the 1920s.[30][31] Tyrannosaurids are now universally considered to be large coelurosaurs.[1][3][32][33][34][35][36]
In 1994, Holtz grouped tyrannosauroids with elmisaurids, ornithomimosaurs and troodonts into a coelurosaurian clade called Arctometatarsalia based on a common ankle structure where the second and fourth metatarsals meet near the tarsal bones, covering the third metatarsal when viewed from the front.[14] Basal tyrannosauroids like Dilong, however, were found with non-arctometatarsalian ankles, indicating that this feature evolved convergently.[2] Arctometatarsalia has been dismantled and is no longer used by most paleontologists, with tyrannosauroids usually considered to be basal coelurosaurs outside Maniraptoriformes.[1][34][36] One recent analysis found the family Coeluridae, including the Late Jurassic North American genera Coelurus and Tanycolagreus, to be the sister group of Tyrannosauroidea.[32]
The most basal tyrannosauroid known from complete skeletal remains is Guanlong, a representative of the family Proceratosauridae.[3][37] Other early taxa include Stokesosaurus and Aviatyrannis, known from far less complete material.[10] The better-known Dilong is considered slightly more derived than Guanlong and Stokesosaurus.[2][3] Dryptosaurus, long a difficult genus to classify, has turned up in several recent analyses as a basal tyrannosauroid as well, slightly more distantly related to Tyrannosauridae than Eotyrannus and Appalachiosaurus.[1][8][38] Alectrosaurus, a poorly known genus from Mongolia, is definitely a tyrannosauroid but its exact relationships are unclear.[1] Other taxa have been considered possible tyrannosauroids by various authors, including Bagaraatan and Labocania.[1] Siamotyrannus from the Early Cretaceous of Thailand was originally described as an early tyrannosaurid,[39] but is usually considered a carnosaur today.[34][40] Iliosuchus has a vertical ridge on the ilium reminiscent of tyrannosauroids and may in fact be the earliest known member of the superfamily, but not enough material is known to be sure.[10][40]
Below is a cladogram by Loewen et al. in 2013 that included most tyrannosauroid species known at the time of its publication.[41]
Distribution [ edit ]
The tyrannosauroids lived on the supercontinent Laurasia, which split from Gondwana in the Middle Jurassic, as well as on the northern continents, which separated from Laurasia later in the Mesozoic era. The earliest recognized tyrannosauroids lived in the Middle-Late Jurassic, including Guanlong and Kileskus from the Far East, Stokesosaurus from the western United States and Aviatyrannis, Juratyrant, and Proceratosaurus from Europe.
Confirmed tyrannosauroid fossils have only been discovered in the northern continents, with possible basal tyrannosauroid fossils reported from Australia. Late Cretaceous tyrannosauroids are known only from North America and Asia.
Early Cretaceous tyrannosauroids are known from Laurasia, being represented by Eotyrannus from England[5] and Dilong, Sinotyrannus, and Yutyrannus from northeastern China. Early Cretaceous tyrannosauroid premaxillary teeth are known from the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah[42] and the Tetori Group of Japan.[43]
The Middle Cretaceous record of Tyrannosauroidea is rather patchy. Teeth and indeterminate postcrania of this interval are known from the Cenomanian-age Dakota Formation of western North America and Potomac Formation of New Jersey,[42][44] as well as formations in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan;[45] two genera, Timurlengia and Xiongguanlong, have been found in Asia, while the Brazilian Santanaraptor may belong to this group.[46] An as-yet-undescribed and unnamed tyrannosauroid (informally named "Zunityrannus") has been found in the Moreno Hill Formation of the Zuni Basin of western New Mexico.[47] The first unquestionable remains of tyrannosaurids occur in the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous in North America and Asia. Two subfamilies are recognized. The albertosaurines are only known from North America, while the tyrannosaurines are found on both continents.[1] Tyrannosaurid fossils have been found in Alaska, which may have served as a land bridge allowing dispersal between the two continents.[48] Non-tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroids like Alectrosaurus and possibly Bagaraatan were contemporaneous with tyrannosaurids in Asia, while they are absent from western North America.[1] Eastern North America was divided by the Western Interior Seaway in the middle of the Cretaceous and isolated from the western portion of the continent. The absence of tyrannosaurids from the eastern part of the continent suggests that the family evolved after the appearance of the seaway, allowing basal tyrannosauroids like Dryptosaurus and Appalachiosaurus to survive in the east as a relict population until the end of the Cretaceous.[8]
Basal tyrannosauroids may have also been present in what is now southeastern Australia during the Aptian of the Early Cretaceous. NMV P186069, a partial pubis (a hip bone) with a distinctive tyrannosauroid-like form, was discovered in Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, indicating that tyrannosauroids were not limited to the northern continents as previously thought.[49]
Paleobiology [ edit ]
Feathers [ edit ]
Long filamentous structures have been preserved along with skeletal remains of numerous coelurosaurs from the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation and other nearby geological formations from Liaoning, China.[50] These filaments have usually been interpreted as "protofeathers," homologous with the branched feathers found in birds and some non-avian theropods,[51][52] although other hypotheses have been proposed.[53] A skeleton of Dilong was described in 2004 that included the first example of feathers in a tyrannosauroid. Similarly to down feathers of modern birds, the feathers found in Dilong were branched but not pennaceous, and may have been used for insulation.[2] Even large tyrannosauroids have been found with evidence of feathers. Yutyrannus huali, also from the Yixian Formation, is known from three specimens, each preserving traces of feathers on various parts of the body. While not all areas of the body preserve impressions across all three specimens, these fossils demonstrate that even in this medium-sized species, most of the body was covered in feathers.[54]
The presence of feathers in basal tyrannosauroids is not surprising, since they are now known to be characteristic of coelurosaurs, found in other basal genera like Sinosauropteryx,[51] as well as all more derived groups.[50] Rare fossilized skin impressions of some Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurids lack feathers, however, instead showing skin covered in fine, non-overlapping scales.[55] It is possible that feathers were present on other areas of the body: Preserved skin impressions are very small and come primarily from the legs, pelvic region, and underside of the tail, which either lack feathers or only covered in a light down in some modern larger ground-dwelling birds. Alternatively, secondary loss of feathers in large tyrannosaurids may be analogous with the similar loss of hair in the largest modern mammals like elephants, where a low surface area-to-volume ratio slows down heat transfer, making insulation by a coat of hair unnecessary or even detrimental.[2] A precedent can be seen in other dinosaur groups such as ornithischians, in which filamentous structures were lost and scales reappeared.[56]
Head crests [ edit ]
Guanlong, a basal tyrannosauroid from The elaborate head crest of, a basal tyrannosauroid from China
Bony crests are found on the skulls of many theropods, including numerous tyrannosauroids. The most elaborate is found in Guanlong, where the nasal bones support a single, large crest which runs along the midline of the skull from front to back. This crest was penetrated by several large foramina (openings) which reduced its weight.[3] A less prominent crest is found in Dilong, where low, parallel ridges run along each side of the skull, supported by the nasal and lacrimal bones. These ridges curve inwards and meet just behind the nostrils, making the crest Y-shaped.[2] The fused nasals of tyrannosaurids are often very rough-textured. Alioramus, a possible tyrannosaurid from Mongolia, bears a single row of five prominent bony bumps on the nasal bones; a similar row of much lower bumps is present on the skull of Appalachiosaurus, as well as some specimens of Daspletosaurus, Albertosaurus, and Tarbosaurus.[8] In Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus, there is a prominent horn in front of each eye on the lacrimal bone. The lacrimal horn is absent in Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, which instead have a crescent-shaped crest behind each eye on the postorbital bone.[1]
These head crests may have been used for display, perhaps for species recognition or courtship behavior.[1] An example of the handicap principle may be the case of Guanlong, where the large, delicate crest may have been a hindrance to hunting in what was presumably an active predator. If an individual was healthy and successful at hunting despite the fragile crest, it would indicate the superior quality of the individual over others with smaller crests. Similarly to the unwieldy tail of a male peacock or the outsized antlers of an Irish elk, the crest of Guanlong may have evolved via sexual selection, providing an advantage in courtship that outweighed any decrease in hunting ability.[3]
Reproduction [ edit ]
Neonate sized tyrannosaur fossils have been documented in the scientific literature.[57]
References [ edit ]
Media related to Tyrannosauroidea at Wikimedia CommonsThe Tea Party Patriots group has accused Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Sheldon WhitehouseSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks MORE (D-R.I.) in a formal complaint of breaking ethics rules by pressuring the administration to target conservative groups engaged in political activities.
Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, sent a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee Monday urging an investigation of Whitehouse’s activities.
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She argues the senator's “inflammatory attacks” against conservative groups appear to constitute “improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate,” citing the Senate’s ethics manual.
She claims Whitehouse “publicly berated” the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice for not prosecuting conservative groups classified under tax law as social welfare organizations for engaging in electioneering activity.
Martin says the Senate’s Select Committee on Ethics should review an April 2013 hearing of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, which Whitehouse chaired. The senator told representatives from the IRS and Justice Department that conservative groups had violated federal tax law by stating on tax status applications that they would not engage in political activity, according to the complaint.
Martin said Whitehouse’s pressure prompted the agencies to act. The complaint states that about a month after the hearing, Justice Department officials contacted Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s exempt organizations division, to determine whether tax-exempt groups could be prosecuted for lying about political activity.
“Sen. Whitehouse’s conduct — which is pervaded by his unlawful and unethical use of his power to pressure federal agencies to target conservative groups — appears to violate Senate rules,” Martin wrote. “The committee should investigate these potential violations promptly.”
She addressed the letter to Sens. Barbara Boxer Barbara Levy BoxerHispanic civil rights icon endorses Harris for president California AG Becerra included in Bloomberg 50 list Climate debate comes full circle MORE (D-Calif.) and Johnny Isakson John (Johnny) Hardy IsaksonWhip List: Where Republicans stand on emergency declaration vote On The Money: Lawmakers wait for Trump verdict on border deal | Trump touts deal as offering B for security | McConnell presses Trump to sign off | National debt tops T | Watchdog details IRS shutdown woes Trump criticizes border wall deal: 'Can't say I'm happy' MORE (R-Ga.), the chairwoman and ranking Republican, respectively, on the Senate Ethics Committee.
A spokesman for Whitehouse said his boss’s conduct was proper.
“As a former [state] Attorney General and U.S. Attorney, Sen. Whitehouse noticed that certain legal declarations appear to have violated 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001, making false statements a crime,” said Seth Larson. “Bringing those potential crimes to the attention of the relevant federal authorities is perfectly appropriate for a Senator, indeed any citizen who thinks they may be witness to a crime.”
This story was updated on June 3 at 10:09 a.m.Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The Isle of Skye was placed third in TripAdvisor's UK top 10 islands
Scottish isles have made it on to a TripAdvisor list of the UK's best islands for travellers compiled from tourists' reviews.
Skye has been placed third, Arran seventh, mainland Orkney eighth and isles of Lewis and Harris joint ninth.
Jersey, a British Crown Dependency, was rated by TripAdvisor as the UK's top island followed by the Isle of Wight.
The list is compiled annually and suggests the best islands in the UK, Europe and other regions and the world.
Jersey has also made it on to the European top 10, but the Scottish islands have not.
Last year, Arran was fourth on the UK list, Skye fifth, mainland Orkney sixth and Lewis and Harris were joint eighth.
This year's UK top 10 have been listed as:
Jersey Isle of Wight Skye Anglesey Isle of Man Guernsey Arran Orkney Lewis St Mary's, Isles of Scilly
The various lists are based on the millions of reviews and opinions from TripAdvisor travellers across the world.
The company said the winners were determined by using an algorithm that takes into account 12 months' worth of reviews and ratings for hotels, restaurants and attractions.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The Isle of Arran
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Orkney also made it on to the listI felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species – “Narrator”, Fight Club
Though Edward Norton’s unnamed movie character was no conservation biologist he was actually pretty close to the solution. Giant pandas don’t choose not to “screw” out of spite, of course, or because they have no natural urge to reproduce – in the wild they have perfectly good sex drives.
However, just as Tyler Durden and co felt they needed to turn to violence in order to find meaning in their lives, so it is becoming apparent that male pandas also need to fight – in order to mate. To save their species, captive pandas may need a fight club of their own.
The breeding problems are particularly apparent in Edinburgh, where the zoo has announced once again that its female giant panda Tian Tian has conceived through artificial insemination, but is not yet pregnant. That is, a sperm has entered an egg, which has been placed inside her; but crucially this fertilised egg has not yet implanted. Unfortunately, these attempts at artificial reproduction often don’t work.
Some scientists say giant pandas are so hard to breed that they shouldn’t even exist in nature. Females often don’t accept males, and even if a female is interested in a male this sexual interest is not reciprocated.
None of this makes sense. The meaning of life, as all biologists know, is passing your genes on to the future and to do this you need to mate. But we have arrived at our conclusions on panda reproduction based on our observations of zoo-housed giant pandas and not from data on wild individuals. I suspect herein lies the problem – zoos don’t offer the same sexual opportunities as life in the wild.
Danny Lawson/PA
The panda situation reminds me of another species, which despite being held in captivity for thousands of years had only bred once before the 1950s: the cheetah. Now the captive cheetah population is growing rapidly. To understand how zoos have solved this problem with cheetahs and where the problem with giant pandas comes from we need to look back in time.
Nuclear animal families?
The first modern zoo, in London, was founded in the Victorian era, a time when animal collectors had no qualms about going around the world to gather new species by any means necessary. The animals were housed in a monogamous family unit, in accordance with Victorian standards of morality. Even today zoo visitors explain to their children which animal is the mummy or the daddy and any inconvenient other adults are explained away as aunties or uncles. This situation has been reinforced by zoos describing themselves as modern arks, creating the image of animals entering two-by-two.
But once scientists started to study animals in the wild it quickly became obvious that monogamy is not the norm. And even in species that are monogamous there is considerable mate choice or, to be more accurate, reproductive partners are chosen by females. Just like humans, most animals chose their reproductive partners according to their strength and good looks, or the resources they control, as these characteristics affect the perpetuation of their genes.
Captive female cheetahs finally started breeding once they were offered a range of suitors rather than being housed with just one male. This replicated their behaviour in the wild, where female cheetahs like to give several males the once over before choosing who to breed with. It may be that the first male that caught the female’s eye will be the one that she will eventually choose, but confirming he is the best available in the breeding pool seems to be crucial. Zoos who imitate this situation are successful at breeding cheetahs.
Giant pandas are no longer housed in pairs. Instead, males and females are typically kept in adjacent enclosures and the male is introduced to the female during the one to three days a year when she is fertile. But it is just one male. What if he is ugly? Or maybe the female panda wishes suitors would strut their stuff on a mating catwalk, like cheetahs do.
Perhaps males need to impress females with shows of strength, by beating up or chasing off other males. It could also be that males need some competition to put them in the mood – studies of wild pandas show their testosterone levels are low except at mating time.
Female giant pandas advertise their readiness to breed by scent marking around the edges of their territory, leading to the simultaneous arrival of several males who will chase off or beat-up their competition until only the strongest remains. So, the victor gets the opportunity to propagate its genes.
If all of this is correct it suggests zoos wanting to move away from artificial reproduction might be better off instead focusing on panda fight clubs. Alternatively, it may be possible to dupe females into believing certain males are worthy suitors as has been done with pygmy lorises by making them appear to be winners of fights.0
Recent news of the untitled Han Solo movie losing directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller towards the tail end of its production has brought to mind another recent high-profile “creative difference” between filmmaker and studio: Ant-Man and Edgar Wright. The Scott Pilgrim vs. the World writer-director had been working on the script for the Marvel Studios film with Joe Cornish off and on for several years until, after completing his brilliant |
back that we collectively rock. Thanks again for the response... you really made my morning! Happy Gaming,
Kate
Subject: "Dragons"
Date: 10/19/97 Dear Kate,
I have but one question: are there full grown dragons in Daggerfall? There are several references to them, both in the game and in the game's instruction booklet (stating them to most likely be living in the Alik'r Desert). But ultimately, are the big mommys and daddys of all the dragonlings around or not?
Dear Paul- To my knowledge, no, there are no full grown dragons to interact with in Daggerfall. They may very well exist, but no, you won't be able to find them. Sorry to dissappoint you. --Kate
Hello!! Yes, there will be a German version, which will be for release in January. -Kate
Subject: "System Requirements"
Date: 10/21/97 What will the system requirements be for Battlespire? I have a K5-10 with 16 MB RAM, and it's starting to die on me. I need to decide whether to prolong its life or move to a more powerful system. If Battlespire won't run with what I've got, I may have to consider the more powerful system... Thanks!
Dear Sir- The real deal about Battlespire is that we have managed a way to make it hard-core playable and pretty at the same time. You can shrink your screen, and put it in low-res, and the game will run on a P133 nice and smoothly. Then when you want to see the pretty scenery, you can pull up your options screen, turn on the high res, and look around for a while, all without every exiting the playing screen. The system requirements we're putting on the box are as follows: IBM and 100% Compatibles
DOS 5.0 or higher
P133 MHz or better
SVGA with VESA 2.0
4x CDROM, MPC Level 2 or better
16 MB of RAM
150 MB of Hard Drive Space
Sound Cards Supported: Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16, Awe32, Pro Audio Spectrum, Ensoniq Soundscape, Gravis Ultrasound and 100% compatibles.
The game runs in WIN95 in MSDOS mode with a 16-bit CDROM, in MSDOS box with sufficient free RAM. So, now if you want to get that new system, you know exactly what will work the best. Good luck shopping, and happy gaming! --Kate
Subject: "Ethical/Moral Alignments"
Date: 9/25/97 Your (whoever wrote the descriptions of the alignments) assessment of some of the alignments misses the spirit of "law." While your example of a Chaotic Good person was apt (That being someone who is motivated entirely by fun), I disagree with what I presume must be your position on a "lawful" character. In role-playing games, or in real life, a law-breaker is not necessarily "chaotic", nor is a rule-follower "lawful." Your use of Tim Curry was good, although I hesitate to say he would not break the law to achieve his own ends.....Your using the example of Robin Hood as "Chaotic" is flat wrong. "Chaotic" is, in part, a characters Ethical predictability. Robin Hood would not go back on his word, nor were his acts of violence aimless. His motivations were not personal, but National. Are you saying that a revolt against an unjust government is a "chaotic" act by nature?! Were the ravaging hordes of Atilla the Hun or Genghis Khan "lawful?" An absurd concept, I would think. It is possible to act with Paladin-like purity against an existing system, and not be "chaotic," just as it is possible to work "correctly" within a system that legalizes atrocity, and not be "Lawful." Those poor women in Bosnia who were raped assembly-line fashion; do you view their rapists as "Lawful Evil" because their crimes were government sanctioned? The Mores/Ethics of Role-Playing games are about personal codes, not responses to existing ethical systems.
Dear Sir, Let me first say how much we appreciate you visiting our website, and taking the time to let us know what you think of it. Your response to the ALIGNMENTS section of the RPG primer is an interesting topic, yet, makes me wonder if you are A) a role-player, and if so, do you B) play AD&D.; I pose these two questions to you because, while your argument is valid in the generally accepted use of the WORDS "chaotic" and "lawful", if you reference the descriptions of alignment found in the AD&D; Players' Handbook, you would understand that they are given slightly different connotations. According to the Players', Lawful and chaotic are used to describe whether or not a character abides by laws. Though I may agree with you entirely that Robin Hood was not Chaotic as we know it, I would disagree with this same statement when set in terms of the definitions set forth by TSR, in which chaotic means one who does not abide by the law. Admittedly the Laws of the land surrounding Sherwood forest were cruel and unfair, but since the definition of chaotic is, in this case, used solely to describe LAW, and not ETHICS, then Robin Hood was, in fact, chaotic. TSR broke the alignments down into two sections: the first meaning whether or not the character abides by the local law, and the second a measure of the character's ethical standings. Thus, imposing ethics onto the first adjective is neither fair nor correct. And yes, the rapists WOULD be considered Lawful Evil, as would Hitler. The first describes ONLY abiding by the current system of government (regardless of how unfair it may be), and the second describes moral and ethical character. If you'd like more information regarding these definitions, feel free to check out a copy of the AD&D; Players' Handbook. I realize that these descriptions can not be made to cover all types of people, and one of the main debates between role-players is on this exact subject. Many players do not USE alignment types for this reason. They feel it is unfair to restrict the possible characteristics and morals of a person to a set number of "categories", as there are so many levels of moral and ethical beliefs. Many who DO use the alignments often use them loosely, as GUIDES to their character's possible reactions, rather than as Strict Gospel. In describing them for a role-playing primer, I was only trying to shed some light on the many different aspects of role-playing for those who are unfamiliar with it. Please feel free to respond with any further questions or comments, and thanks again for taking the time to give us your input. Sincerely,
Kate
Subject: A slight bit of misinformation
Date: 10/11/97 In your RPG primer, you refer to AD&D; as the original role playing game. As I was there at the beginning, I can safely say that is not the case, though few people will remember. RPG's began as a fantasy supplement to a midevil war miniatures game called Chainmail. The first D&D; books (which predated AD&D; for many years) were a trilogy of small fifty page pamphlets entitled; Men and Magic, Monsters and Treasure, Underworld and Wilderness adventures. There were only four character classes (fighter, magic-user, priest, and monk) and only six spell levels. Then came the supplements which I believe appeared in this order; Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and finally Gods, Demigods and Heros. Only after those seven books did AD&D; come out. I was on a waiting list for the first players handbook, long before it was available. Even at the time, I had been playing for years, not just D&D; but also Chivalry and Sorcery, The Arduin Grimoire and especially Rune Quest. Not that I expect you to do anything about adjusting the primer's accuracy, but rather I am expressing my frustration at the fact that AD&D; had become such a monster than many other games are completely forgotten in its shadow. Without many of those forerunners of modern RPG's, even AD&D; might not be what it is today. Thanks for your time.Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has strong ties to Utah, where his mother grew up and where he now resides. | Getty McConnell: I've talked to Romney about replacing Hatch
Mitch McConnell said Friday that he has talked with Mitt Romney about running for the Utah Senate seat now held by Orrin Hatch. But the Senate majority leader made clear that Hatch would have his full support for any reelection bid.
Hatch is leaving only the tiniest window to opt out of running for a new six-year term in 2018 at the age of 84. And Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is said to be interested in a Senate run only if Hatch, a personal friend, decides to step aside.
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"I've had some conversations with Mitt Romney" about a Utah Senate run, McConnell told reporters Friday. "Obviously, I'm an Orrin Hatch supporter. And Orrin has to decide what he wants to do. If he wants to run again, I'm for him."
Hatch later told POLITICO that his decision — for now — is to stay in the Senate, where he is the longest-serving Republican.
"Right now, I intend to run, but it's two years away," Hatch said. "So we'll see."
Romney is "not going to run as long as I am," Hatch added. "He's a very close friend. But if I were to withdraw or decide not to run, I couldn't think of a better person."
While Hatch has previously suggested that he might forgo reelection if Romney could be his successor, he sounded more committed to a run on Friday.
"I've basically decided that I am" running for reelection, Hatch said.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has strong ties to Utah, where his mother grew up and where he now resides.Pierrick Fédrigo scored his first victory of the 2013 season at Paris-Camembert, but he didn't seem to enjoy it as much as he might have during the rain-soaked day when many racers suffered. The 74th edition of the "race of the cheese" was decided at the very end when Fédrigo followed an attack by Pierre Rolland (Europcar) atop the mur des Champeaux, 10 kilometers before the finish line in Vimoutiers. Fédrigo crossed the line ahead of Sylvain Georges (AG2R-La Mondiale), Rolland and Julien Antomarchi (La Pomme Marseille) while Bryan Coquard (Europcar) won the bunch sprint for fifth 21 seconds later. Related Articles Sagan back in action at Brabantse Pijl
"I'm from the southwest," Fédrigo said. "I like the sun but not the rain and the cold. Several times, I thought of pulling out. Along the way, good sensations came back and I used as much courage as I could. My experience helped as well. Everyone was tired at the end."
A nine-man breakaway made its way to the centre of Normandy with Guillaume Bonnafond (AG2R-La Mondiale), Pierrick Quéméneur (Europcar), Fabien Schmidt (Sojasun), Alexandre Blain and Rob Britton (Raleigh), Kevin Lalouette (Roubaix), Tim de Clercq (TopSport-Vlaanderen), Romain Hardy (Cofidis) and Cédric Pineau (FDJ). Pineau, De Clercq and Britton were the last three to surrender in the final 20 kilometers. They were caught by Mikaël Chérel (AG2R-La Mondiale), Bryan Coquard (Europcar), Julien El Farès (Sojasun), Mike Terpstra (3M) and Antomarchi. Inspired by his brother's third place at Paris-Roubaix, Terpstra tried to finish solo, but he was overtaken by the winning quartet.
"Since the Circuit de la Sarthe, I knew that the wheel to follow was Rolland's," Fédrigo said. "It came down to a sprint between four solid riders. This race course suits me. I'm obviously happy to win here for the first time. Two years ago, I was able to win it, but I was racing with Sandy [Casar] who was close to home, so I raced for him to win. Paris-Camembert is a race that counts in the record book."
"It's not a shame to be beaten by Fédrigo," Georges said. "It's his revenge since I finished ahead of him two years at GP Plumelec. I told my teammates that I'd be up there today in the finale. It feels good to race at the front. I'm building up my form for the Giro."
Rolland had another race in mind. "With those meteorological conditions, it was hard to focus today," he said. "My mind was on Liège-Bastogne-Liège."
Fédrigo and Rolland will both tackle the oldest of the Classics but through a very different program. The FDJ rider will keep racing the French Cup at Tour du Finistère and Tro Bro Leon while the climber from Europcar will ride the Giro del Trentino. "So far, it's been difficult to find the motivation for racing because of the rain," Fédrigo said. "I'm strongly hoping for better weather in the weeks to come."
Full ResultsThe military ceremony honouring Corporal John Unrau was bittersweet for his family.
After working in the army for two decades and deploying to Bosnia and Afghanistan, Cpl. Unrau, 42, was in chronic pain and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when he ended his life on Canada Day in 2015. On Oct. 26, before the soldier's family, friends and co-workers, the Canadian Armed Forces recognized that his suicide was connected to his military service, presenting the Memorial Cross medals to his mother, Dorothy, and his brothers, Eddy and Dan, at the Sudbury Armoury in northern Ontario.
The Sacrifice Medal was also posthumously bestowed on Cpl. Unrau, who was part of the Lord Strathcona's Horse armoured regiment in Edmonton.
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The Memorial Cross is presented on behalf of Her Majesty's Canadian Government in memory of one who died in the service of Canada. Courtesy of Canadian Armed Forces
The Memorial Cross and ribbons are awards given to the loved ones of Canadian Armed Forces personnel who died in service or whose death was attributed to their service, and the Sacrifice Medal recognizes those who die as a result of military service or are wounded by hostile action.
For his family, the official acknowledgment meant that Cpl. Unrau would be recognized as a casualty of the Afghanistan war, along with the 158 soldiers who died during the mission.
"They've accepted it. That's all we wanted," Eddy Unrau said. "Just don't say [the suicide] had nothing to do with being in the military, because that's why Johnny did this – entirely because of the military."
Cpl. Unrau is one of more than 70 Canadian soldiers and veterans who served in the Afghanistan operation and later took their own lives, a continuing Globe and Mail investigation has revealed. The newspaper told the stories of 31 of these fallen soldiers last fall, examining the factors that may have contributed to their deaths, including battlefield trauma, mental illness, relationship strife and financial troubles.
Lisa McBain places a candle for her late brother Corp. John Unrau during a candlelight ceremony to honour the memory of Soldiers of Suicide (S.O.S.) at the National Military Cemetery of the Canadian Forces at Beechwood Cemetery Feb. 21, 2017 in Ottawa. DAVE CHAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Many were severely affected by their experiences in the war. But The Globe's investigation found that only eight of their families had been awarded the Memorial Cross and Sacrifice Medal, even though a death by suicide is supposed to be treated no differently than a death on deployment or in domestic operations.
The Forces began a review as a result of the newspaper's inquiries. Fifteen families have now been given the recognition, while another dozen are expected to receive the honours soon, military spokesman Derek Abma said.
Four of the 31 cases remain under review.
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The father and sisters of Sergeant Doug McLoughlin are still waiting to hear whether the long-time Edmonton infantry soldier will be honoured. Diagnosed with PTSD after deploying twice to Bosnia and twice to Afghanistan, Sgt. McLoughlin, 37, was going to be medically released from the Forces when he took his life in March, 2013.
A military board of inquiry determined in 2014 that his suicide was connected to his army service, according to a partly redacted report The Globe obtained under access-to-information legislation. The report noted that Sgt. McLoughlin went on three overseas tours from February, 2000, to April, 2002, with only short breaks between the difficult deployments.
His father, Brendan McLoughlin, who served in the British Army, said the wait for his son's honours has been difficult. His son was a member of the 1st Battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
"It's disappointing for me a little bit that we haven't received anything yet," Mr. McLoughlin said. "The medals would be recognition from the military that he did serve his country well."
Anita Cenerini and her family waited 13 years for her son, Private Thomas Welch, to be recognized. The young trooper was the first Canadian soldier to take his own life after returning from the Afghanistan war.
A 22-year-old rifleman with the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment in Petawawa, Ont., Pte. Welch had been back from Afghanistan for less than three months when he ended his life on May 8, 2004, just hours before he was supposed to board a flight for Thunder Bay, Ont., to be with his family on Mother's Day.
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Anita Cenerini holds a portrait of her son, Private Thomas Welch, at her Winnipeg home in October 2016, with Pte. Welch’s stepfather, Grant Palmer, left, and brother, Jacob Cenerini-Palmer, right. In 2004, Pte. Welch, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, died by suicide three months after returning from Afghanistan. LYLE STAFFORD/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Yet no military board of inquiry was held to examine the circumstances that may have contributed to his suicide and whether his death was connected to his Afghanistan tour.
After The Globe published a report on the troubling case in the spring, military officials met with Ms. Cenerini. She told them about her son's mental-health struggles during and after his deployment. She suspected he was grappling with PTSD.
Soon after the meeting, Pte. Welch's death was reclassified. The Department of Veterans Affairs affirmed that the soldier's suicide was linked to his Afghanistan tour.
Ms. Cenerini said she finally felt at peace. Her fight was over.
"It meant closure for me because it gave me peace that Thomas's death was not in vain," she said. "There is recognition and acknowledgment that he died as an honourable member of the military and his death was attributable to his service in Afghanistan, which is something that I always knew in my heart. That was never a question for me."
A private memorial service was held on Sept. 18 at the military base in Petawawa to honour Pte. Welch. Brigadier-General Stephen Cadden, commander of 4th Canadian Division, presented Ms. Cenerini with her son's Sacrifice Medal. Ms. Cenerini also received the Memorial Cross, and her husband, Grant Palmer, and their son, Jacob, were given Memorial ribbons.
After the medal ceremony, Brig.-Gen. Cadden spoke for some time with Ms. Cenerini.
"The love and pride which she still so evidently feels for Thomas made me very glad that this recognition, although delayed, has been made, so that her country is just as proud of him," Brig.-Gen. Cadden said in an e-mail. "To those of us in uniform, we have a duty to remember the fallen, to acknowledge their sacrifice, and to honour their memory."Joe Girardi can be high strung. Joe Girardi can be controlling. He can have a quick hook as Dellin Betances has learned, but the Joe Girardi the Yankees have seen this season is a much different manager than in the past.
Girardi has let the Yankees play. He has stayed out of the way and has let them have fun. He’s loosened up a bit and as a result these Yankees are a blast to watch. They lead the majors in smiles. Thumbs Down is their thing.
The clubhouse is looser and Girardi has allowed personalities to emerge. He has shown tremendous patience with young Yankees such as Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez. He has let them grow and has learned to look past their mistakes.
He is focused on their success. In his 10th season as Yankees manager, he has fostered a winning environment where young players can shine and for all that he deserves more credit than he has been given.
The Binder has loosened up a bit this season, and as a result, the Yankees head into Tuesday night’s AL wild-card game against the Twins a confident, fun-loving group that is exciting to watch, a team that has brought a buzz back to Yankee Stadium.
When I asked Girardi what is the best thing he can do to prepare the Yankees for this must-win game Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium, his answer did not come out of his binder. That is progress, too.
“I really think giving the guys an atmosphere that’s the same as playing a normal game, that’s somewhat of a big game during the course of the season,’’ Girardi said. “I want our guys loose. I want our guys to have fun. I want our guys energetic. I want them aggressive. To me, it’s being the same person that I am every day.’’
In other words, don’t tighten up.
If Girardi tightens up, his young players will see that and they might be too tight for such a monster game. One key mistake can lead to another.
Elimination games are what it’s all about. That’s when players have to bring their best game to the field. If a mistake is made, move on quickly. Understand what got you here will win the game against an inferior opponent. Stay the course, and with Luis Severino starting and Girardi having nine other pitchers at his disposal, use the bullpen wisely.
The young players need to produce and have fun doing it.
This is about today, but it’s also about the future and Girardi has earned a new contract. One postseason can be a tremendous learning experience for young players so much more than games in regular season and Girardi is aware of all that.
“I think they’ve come a long way,’’ he said of his Baby Bombers. “I feel really good about them and the way they have played all year.’’
Girardi wears No. 28. That is a constant reminder to his players that these Yankees are in search of tomorrow. They are in search of their 28th World Series title.
This is only the first step but it’s a big step. Having been around these Yankees since spring training, you know that they have believed all this is possible. They look around and see the talent in the room and smile.
Veterans Brett Gardner, Todd Frazier and CC Sabathia have taken over the leadership role in the clubhouse this season. They provide a valuable service to Girardi. With such accountable young stars as Judge, Severino and even Sanchez, despite some of his defensive woes, this is team focused on the bigger picture.
Judge said he has never been around a team where the players care so much for each other and where winning is the focus.
That has been the feeling in Yankee Stadium all year where the Yankees’ 51-30 record is the best home record in the AL. Only the Dodgers (57 wins) and the Diamondbacks (52 wins) have won more games at home this season.
One more win will come if Girardi once again lets these Yankees play their game.The superlatives in China continue -- the latest symbol of China's "bigger is much, much better" ethos is open for business.
Located in Chengdu (population 14 million), capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China, the New Century Global Center is the "largest freestanding building in the world," Chinese officials say.
Though the words "world's largest" usually bring to mind an image of a towering skyscraper, this project actually isn't all that tall. But it's certainly big.
At 500 meters long, 400 meters wide and 100 meters high, the 1.7-million-square-meter mega-structure is capable of housing 20 Sydney Opera Houses and almost three times the size of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
The Global Center, which opened June 28, is home to business offices, hotels, movie theaters, shopping malls, a faux Mediterranean village and family-themed attractions such as a water park called Paradise Island.
The New Century Global Center is located in an entirely new planned area of Chengdu called Tainfu New District.
Chengdu is also currently expanding its subway line and plans to construct a new airport by 2020, further suggesting official ambitions to make the city an economic and cultural capital of western China.
From June 6-8, Chengdu hosted this year's Fortune Global Forum, an annual invite-only event featuring chairs, presidents, and CEOs of the world's largest companies.Updated below
Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security is believed to employ more than 30,000 intelligence officers and support personnel, making it “one of the largest and most active intelligence agencies in the Middle East,” according to a new report from the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress.
“The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) uses all means at its disposal to protect the Islamic Revolution of Iran, utilizing such methods as infiltrating internal opposition groups, monitoring domestic threats and expatriate dissent, arresting alleged spies and dissidents, exposing conspiracies deemed threatening, and maintaining liaison with other foreign intelligence agencies as well as with organizations that protect the Islamic Republic’s interests around the world,” the report states.
See “Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security: A Profile,” December 2012.
The report was first obtained and reported by Bill Gertz in “Iran Spy Network 30,000 Strong,” Washington Free Beacon, January 3, 2013.
The new report provides an informative account of the Ministry’s history, organizational structure, and recruitment practices, as far as these can be discerned from published sources.
“The information in this report was collected mainly from Farsi and English journals, online news Web sites, and Iranian blogs,” the Preface states. (Some older information from the FAS web site is cited at a couple of points.)
“Needless to say, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security does not publish information about its activities on Iranian Web sites. Consequently, in the absence of official government information, this report occasionally relies on social media, in particular blogs, as a source of information more than might ordinarily be warranted. The reliability of blog-based information may be questionable at times, but it seems prudent to evaluate and present it in the absence of alternatives.”
“Every minister of intelligence must hold a degree in ijtihad (the ability to interpret Islamic sources such as the Quran and the words of the Prophet and imams) from a religious school, abstain from membership in any political party or group, have a reputation for personal integrity, and possess a strong political and management background,” the report says.
A newly disclosed U.S. Army intelligence document explains how to determine whether weapons that were captured in Iraq were manufactured in Iran.
Iranian weapons systems “have several distinctive visual identification markings that identify their source” which are described in the Army publication. The document was partially declassified last month and was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Matthew Schroeder of the FAS Arms Sales Monitoring Project.
See “Identifying Small Arms and RPGs Produced in Iran,” U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center, 2004..@TezlynFigaro: "The only thing that @HillaryClinton is'resisting' is the ability to sit down… This is nothing but a money-grab." pic.twitter.com/AVfOVyKK4F — Fox News (@FoxNews) May 6, 2017
Earlier this week, it was reported that former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was getting ready to launch a new political group. The political action committee — set to be called Onward Together in a play on her ‘Stronger Together’ campaign slogan — will “fund organizations working on the resistance to President Donald Trump’s agenda.”
Well, one person who used to work for Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent thinks this is all about the cash for the former Secretary of State.
Appearing on Fox News today, ex-Bernie Sanders staffer Tezlyn Figaro took issue with the one-time First Lady stating that she was part of the Resistance.
“The only thing that Hillary Clinton is resisting is the ability to sit down — refusing to sit down,” she said. “This is nothing but a money-grab to continue to get donors to donate money to a PAC that’s ineffective.”
She went on to note that voters delivered a message in both 2008 and last year that they’re ready to move on from Clinton.
“They have simply regifted an old gift that no one wanted at Christmas and decided to put a new bow on it,” Figaro stated.
Besides the reports of Clinton’s upcoming PAC, she’s also been in the news lately over an interview she gave earlier this week where she placed much of the blame for her election loss on FBI Director James Comey and Russian interference.
Watch the clip above, via Fox News.
[image via screengrab]
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Follow Justin Baragona on Twitter: @justinbaragona
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comThe stripping of all power of the local government in Benton Harbor, Michigan has brought the national spotlight to the tiny town on the shores of Lake Michigan. The first city to be declared in a "financial emergency" by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, CMD reported that Emergency Financial Manager (EFM) Joseph Harris was assigned to the city back in 2010 by then-Governor Jennifer Granholm. But it wasn't until March of this year that Harris essentially disbanded the local government and boards.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. responded to this takeover while on a tour of the state, calling for a rainbow coalition to organize against the EFM bill and others that Snyder and the Republican-led Senate has passed. At a protest in Benton Harbor, Jackson said that he, along with Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero and Benton Harbor Mayor Wilce Cook will file a lawsuit to challenge the law's constitutionality.
Governor "Decimates Democracy"
WNDU in South Bend reported on Jackson's speech to members of Benton Harbor: "It simply decimates democracy and gives dictatory powers in someone who does not live here, but has the power to sit down officials and cancel contracts, but have power over assets selling off the properties of the city and its assets, that's un-American" says Jackson.
Jackson also wrote an op-ed piece for the Chicago Sun-Times calling for an "uprising" in Benton Harbor and around Michigan. The town's poor, mostly African-American population has been highlighted by Jackson and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
"Benton Harbor, Mich., is a town of nearly 11,000 people, about 90 percent of whom are African American. It is a catalogue of the misery of the industrial Midwest," said Jackson in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It was the headquarters and manufacturing center of Whirlpool, but the last Whirlpool plant closed years ago. Now Benton Harbor has a per capita income of about $10,000 a year. And it is plagued by the ills that accompany poverty in today's America: high unemployment, broke government, failing schools, crime, drugs and despair."
Community activist Rev. Edward Pinkney in his blog, Blanco, notes: "There is nothing to stop the state from abolishing democratic governance in any of Michigan's cities, if an emergency can be declared or created. On April 15, the mostly black city of Benton Harbor, the poorest jurisdiction in the state, was placed under total financial martial law, its citizens suddenly made more powerless than blacks in Selma, Alabama, prior to the civil rights movement."
A Developer's Dream -- A Corporate Coup?
The take over of Benton Harbor has been linked to a commercial development plan, backed by Whirlpool and the very legislator who introduced the EFM bill, Rep. Al Pscholka. Pscholka is a former aide to the grandson of Whirlpool's founder, Rep. Fred Upton, and former vice president of one of the companies involved with the Harbor Shores development and also on the Board of Directors of a non-profit involved with the development. The plan is to build a high-end lakeshore housing development and golf course, taking over the city's sprawling public park and beach, Jean Klock Park, gifted to the city in 1917.
The latest protest on April 27th saw hundreds of people march through the streets of Benton Harbor with signs and chants decrying the takeover.
Business Insider, however, wrote that "Benton Harbor's finances are indeed a mess -- the result of mismanagement, poor accounting and too much spending."
But Rev. Jackson doesn't see it that way. He holds fast to the belief that the problems in Benton Harbor, as in other previously-industrialized cities in the Rust Belt, are a symptom of the resulting poverty that followed the end to factory jobs in these areas. The solution, he says, is to invest in the very people that have all but been forgotten by the Governor Snyder's office.
"They've shut down the jobs, and taken over the schools. Now they want to shut down the democracy and turn the public parks into a rich man's playground," said Jackson. "But in Benton Harbor, as in Selma and Montgomery, they forget even the poorest people have a sense of dignity.... In Benton Harbor, it is time for the good people to make themselves heard."
Watch Rachel Maddow's coverage of this issue:Four Vancouver taxi companies that were collectively seeking an injunction to prevent car service Uber from starting up operations in the city have dropped their lawsuit.
In a statement Monday, the Vancouver Taxi Association said the lawsuit, which was launched last November, is no longer necessary "as Uber has since stated it is not operating in the city."
The association represents Black Top & Checker Cabs, Yellow Cabs, MacLure's Cabs and Vancouver Taxi and said if Uber does try to operate in Vancouver it will refile the lawsuit.
"We hope that will not be necessary and that if Uber decides to operate in the city, it will do so in compliance with the legal requirements," said the association.
Uber's smart phone app allows non-regulated drivers to pick up fares in their own personal vehicles, and already operates in more than 200 cities worldwide.
Uber calls lawsuit 'without merit'
Uber responded Monday by saying the taxi association's arguments were "without merit."
"Vancouver and British Columbia need 21st century regulation and business models, and we're proud to be advocates for change," said spokesman Xavier Van Chau in a statement.
"We're still eager to find our way back to Vancouver!" wrote Chau.
City moratorium in place
The app company has more hurdles than the lawsuit to make that happen, however.
Last fall, when Uber appeared to be entering the Vancouver market, the B.C. government announced plainclothes enforcement officers would pose as customers to bust anyone providing a "taxi-like service" without a license.
In October, the city of Vancouver also put a six-month moratorium on new taxi licenses to review the impact of changes including "ride sharing" technologies like Uber's app.
Uber is participating in that review and currently hiring for a public policy manager based in Vancouver, whose job it would be to "develop strategies for keeping markets open, and opening new ones."
The city is considering extending its moratorium and review until October 31, 2015.With the loss of Obafemi Martins, the main theme of the Seattle Sounders off-season was called into question. From utilizing a three-man frontline in their previous preseason matches to varying degrees of success, it was possible that the loss of their best striker and reduction in depth would make the three-man front line untenable. Sigi Schmid has instead doubled down using Clint Dempsey and Andreas Ivanschitz as his lynch pins.
And if Wednesday's 4-0 thrashing of the LA Galaxy is anything to go by, this iteration of the Seattle Sounders could be extremely good.
Offensive Structure
The biggest change was to the roles of Dempsey and Ivanschitz. In previous iterations, Dempsey had occupied a wide left role that dropped into the middle to support Martins while Ivanschitz dictated play moving from a much deeper position on the pitch. In this new, post-Martins setup, both players occupy the central role alternating spells as the support striker and the third midfielder.
Nelson Valdez moved from the wide right role he'd played to occupy the central striker role. This was entirely expected as no one else in the attacking corps really has the aerial or physical prowess to go body-to-body with opposition centerbacks with success.
However, the real fundamental key to this structure and the way the Sounders play is Joevin Jones. The young Trinidadian has speed to burn, passes extremely well, crosses well and in many ways fills the same role and skillset that DeAndre Yedlin occupied before he left. The main benefit is that Jones can occupy much of the left flank on his own, keeping opposition defenses stretched to deal with his two-step explosiveness and crossing ability. This gives Dempsey the freedom in the middle to interplay with Ivanschitz in a setup that's designed to stretch the middle of the park. This may be one of the hallmarks of how the Sounders play this year.
Defensive Structure
On the defensive side of the ball, the Sounders fundamentally use a 3-man press but just like their offensive setup it comes with a lopsided structure. Utilizing Morris, Valdez and Dempsey as the front three, Ivanschitz moves into positions under the main strikers to occupy the opposition in a primary or secondary presser role. The main intent is to supplement the winger - in this case Dempsey or Morris -- who drops deep into the midfield band as the opposition attacks. In conjunction with that drop |
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TIP #1: To fake a fresh-faced look, make sure you really massage your cleanser, serum and moisturiser into the skin. It gets the circulation flowing and the blood comes to the surface of the skin — Natasha Severino
Keep reading...TIP #2: To avoid cakey foundation, "take a dab of moisturiser and warm it in your hands, then pat it over your foundation for a more natural look" — Val Garland
TIP #3: To get the perfect winged liner, "apply slightly tacky sticky tape under each eye as a guide for where you want your liner to follow" — Rae Morris
TIP #4: When you're trying to do a bright or red lipstick look, don't use a similarly coloured liner. "Instead line your lips with a shade just slightly darker than your own lip colour" — Angela Levin
TIP #5: To avoid the tragic lippy-on-the-teeth look, simply stick a finger in your mouth, then slowly pull it out to remove any excess — Dick Page
TIP #6: When applying mascara, "Turn your head to the side, now look at the mirror with just your eye — leave your head turned to the side. Instead of pulling lashes up, you're pulling them out into that fan effect" Gina Brooks
TIP #7: "Bronzer should be applied before blush where the sun naturally hits your face: the tops of your cheekbones, tip of your chin, bridge of your nose, and on your forehead at the temples and the hairline" — Laura Mercier
TIP #8: It takes a serious pro to be able to do an entire line of false eyelashes at once so "cut them in half and treat each eye as two pairs" — Nicole Thompson
TIP #9: Apply some YSL Touche Éclat Radiant Touche around the outside of the natural lip line. It reflects the light and creates an "optical illusion" of a bigger pout — Natasha Severino
TIP #10: If you look a little shiny and don't have any blotting papers on you, "take a Kleenex and separate the facial tissue; the absorption of a single ply is much more proficient at taking down the excess oil" — Bruce Grayson
Photo courtesy of YSLThe Fight City is proud to be the home of Lee Wylie and as part of our special coverage in advance of an historic clash of champions, Cotto vs Canelo, we feature here an exclusive analysis and prediction by one of boxing’s most respected analysts. Check it out:
The Champion: The more experienced of the two, Miguel Cotto probably holds the advantage in ring IQ and generalship. While he’s not known for having exceptional footwork, his ability to control the destination of a fight through superior positioning is vastly underrated and looks to have improved under the guidance of offensive specialist Freddie Roach. And though he might not be blessed with bedeviling hand or foot speed (though he’s notably more nimble on his feet than Canelo), Junito compensates by frequently changing up his rhythm which makes it difficult to time his attacks.
Cotto is a converted southpaw and as a result possesses one of the better jabs in the sport, which he employs forcefully to manage distance, disrupt rhythm, or just plain hurt his opponent. Likewise, his powerful left hook easily ranks among the most dangerous weapons in all of boxing. But what makes that hook truly special, at least to my eyes, is he can use it effectively in many different ways. His opponents know Cotto will be throwing his left hook, but it is difficult to anticipate precisely how or when he will do so.
For example, against southpaw Sergio Martinez, Cotto set up his hook by disguising it as a jab. Stepping inside Martinez’s lead foot, Cotto telegraphed a jab, only to then shrewdly sling a hook over the Argentine’s extended lead hand. Conversely, during the final moments of his last outing, Cotto sent Daniel Geale crashing to the canvas with a more conventional hook. Rotating his hips clockwise and transferring his weight from left to right, he ruthlessly exploited Geale’s defensively irresponsible rear hand to land his signature punch.
Canelo has been visibly stunned once or twice during his career by lesser punchers than Cotto (Miguel’s brother, Jose, immediately springs to mind), so rest assured, if Cotto can find a way to land his vaunted hook with any kind of consistency, then Canelo, facing arguably the biggest puncher he’s ever shared a ring with, may find himself in uncharted territory.
The Challenger: Like Cotto, Canelo Alvarez owns a formidable jab which he uses regularly to, among other things, control range, coax return jabs for countering opportunities, keep opponents off-balance, and create openings. An example of Canelo using his jab as an effective set-up occurred in his last fight when, having primed Kirkland with a body jab to bring down his guard, he quickly came over the top with a thudding right hand, rendering his opponent unconscious.
As well as hand speed and punching power, Canelo also holds a significant edge over Cotto in size and physical strength. Alvarez might be untested at “middleweight,” but it’s hard to argue that he won’t be the more physically imposing fighter here. He is also more imaginative offensively, particularly in regards to combination punching, and his transitions between defense and attack — especially when countering and flowing into combinations off of slips, blocks and parries — are much more fluid than Cotto’s.
Furthermore, the punch that might well be Canelo’s best, the uppercut, happens to be the one that Cotto — because of his forward leaning posture and conventional high guard — is most susceptible to. Zab Judah, Antonio Margarito, Joshua Clottey, Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather, Austin Trout: with the exception of all but one of these fighters, none were really known for having an outstanding uppercut, yet they all managed to have at least moderate success with it against Cotto. No doubt Canelo — who throws vicious uppercuts with both hands, either in combination with hooks or to take advantage of an opponent who is leaning forward — will be aware of this.
Prediction: Because of Canelo’s superior physicality and punching power, I don’t think Cotto can afford to be the hunter in this match as he has been for the most part during his tenure with Freddie Roach. Rather, I suspect Cotto will come out boxing behind his jab: feinting, sticking and moving, bouncing around the ring and then flurrying before quickly pivoting away at angles. In other words, doing all he can to score consistently while at the same time working to keep Canelo off-balance, frustrated, and unable to set up an effective attack. Because Alvarez is a notoriously slow starter, and Cotto is a much better boxer in the classical sense than he’s generally given credit for, the champion will enjoy some early success and may even sweep the first few rounds.
However, once Canelo finds his rhythm and begins effectively cutting off the ring — something he showed great improvement in against the more elusive Erislandy Lara — I don’t think it will be long before he seizes control and the Puerto Rican starts to wilt under the Mexican’s pressure.
Whenever he’s in range to do so, Canelo will likely be targeting Cotto’s body to slow him down and rob him of the stamina needed to remain effective in the later rounds. Ironically, I believe Canelo’s left hook to the body, even more so than Cotto’s, could be a determining factor in this fight. Once his quarry has been contained, Canelo will look to create and exploit holes in Cotto’s defense through an array of straights, hooks and uppercuts thrown to both head and body, each punch serving to manipulate Junito’s guard and create an opening for the next. For instance, both Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather had some success against Cotto by narrowing Miguel’s gloves with the jab and then landing sweeping right hands around his guard.
Later in the fight I expect Cotto won’t be moving so much to offset Canelo’s positioning and create angles of attack, as much as to keep the fresher, stronger and heavier-handed Canelo at bay. Cotto will surrender the initiative in the middle rounds and the fight’s end, courtesy of some relentless combination punching from Canelo, will come a few rounds later.
Canelo by late round TKO. — Lee WylieWhen a black student tells a white principal in a predominantly white school that another student’s behavior is racist, how should the principal respond?
That question came into focus at Kirkwood High School last week, when a white student left a chemistry class with charcoal covering his face.
Principal Michael Havener said the student meant to mimic a beard. But because the student had smeared his entire face, it looked more blackface to Kirkwood freshman Kiden Smith and her friends.
The use of blackface in the United States began in the 19th century with minstrel shows. White entertainers would paint their faces with burnt cork to perform racist stereotypes of black people. Much to the dismay of many, the offensive caricatures still occur in contemporary society, during the Halloween season and on mainstream television.
The 15-year-old and her classmates saw the student with black smudged on his face in the high school’s common area on the way to lunch. Upset, they told their grade-level principal, who is white.
“Our principal did not know what blackface was," Smith said. "So we tried to explain it to him."
He responded by checking with the drama department to see if the student was wearing makeup for a play. Meanwhile, a white school counselor approached Smith and her friends, told them to calm down and not to assume the student was being racist.
“I said, 'I know for a fact this school has a lot of racist students,'" Smith recalled. "And she said, ‘No this school doesn’t. Nothing like that happens here.’ And of course, since we were tired of talking about it and trying to convince her that these things happen, we just walked away. We were like, 'Okay, fine.'”
Smith and her friends later talked to a coach and an assistant principal about the incident. Everyone involved had a meeting with the head principal the following morning.
Havener said the student shouldn’t have been allowed to leave the chemistry classroom with charcoal on his face, and the school needed to have a conversation about it. The student who put the charcoal on his face apologized to Smith and the other students who were offended.
“We had an adult who was not familiar with blackface who asked other adults to provide some information for him,” Havener said. “I want to really emphasize it was a learning experience for everybody in that room, adults included.”
Smith expressed relief at the principal’s response, adding that she thinks the student who put charcoal on his face now understands why it was wrong.
“A few other people in the meeting don’t really believe it, but I think, for the most part, he won’t do it again,” Smith said.
Despite last week’s incident Smith said she likes going to school in Kirkwood.
“Sometimes, it is hard because, like I said, there aren’t very many teachers of color. The only teacher of color I have is my orchestra teacher. I have her in the morning and then she leaves because she works at the middle school also,” Smith said. “Sometimes it’s hard because for situations like this we may not have many teachers to turn to. But, for the most part, it’s great.”
Smith plans attend Monday night's School Board meeting with her mom to bring the matter to the board’s attention.
“There’s already been many situations at the high school," Smith said. "Sometimes the administrators don’t really believe us because they need proof for it, or that it’s someone else’s word against ours. They always say if you need help go to a teacher, but if your teacher doesn’t believe you, then what do you do after that?”
Follow Camille and Jenny on Twitter: @cmpcamille & @jnnsmnThe Bleriot XI airplane is one result of the rapid innovation in the French aviation industry in the early 20th century, enabled by competition and government support, allowing it to surpass the US. (credit: Kogo/ Wikipedia Achieving cheap access to space: the foundation of commercialization (part 2)
The French aviation miracle France had many aviation enthusiasts who were contemporaries to the Wright Brothers. Where America had two serious aviation entrepreneurial teams, composed of the Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss, France had many more, and was an intense hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. The large majority of aviation activity in France from 1900 to 1909 was privately financed. In parallel, there was an active public movement to promote investments in aviation in France, most notably by the Aero-Club De France and Ferdinand Ferber. The Wrights were not used to competition, while the French aviation entrepreneurs were highly competitive. French aviation was an intense competition between teams and companies led by entrepreneurs such as Alberto Santos-Dumont, Gabriel and Charles Voisin, Robert Esnault-Pelteri, Louis Breguet, Adolphe Clément-Bayard, Jules Gastambide, and Louis Blériot. Alberto Santos-Dumont was the son of a wealthy coffee-plantation owner, and would spend part of his inheritance developing and flying airplanes. Robert Esnault-Pelteri would invent the joystick and independently invent the aileron. He almost bankrupted his industrialist father, but recovered somewhat based on his joystick patents. Adolphe Clément-Bayard made his initial money building automobiles, which he then invested in aircraft, including the world’s first aircraft assembly line in 1908. Jules Gastambide was another industrialist who made his initial fortune building powerful lightweight engines for automobiles and boats, which were then sold as the advanced Antoinnette V8 aircraft engine. The Antoinnette company would then start building innovative and highly competitive aircraft. Ernest Archdeacon and Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe would fund a series of aviation prizes using their private wealth. The Voisin brothers inherited their grandfather’s wealth, and raised additional private investment. Gustav Eiffel invested part of his private fortune by turning his famous tower into an aeronautical research platform in 1905, where he proved that air resistance was proportional to velocity squared. The story of Louis Blériot, as documented by Tom Crouch of the National Air and Space Musuem in Bleriot XI: The Story of a Classic Aircraft, 1 illustrates the French aviation miracle well. In 1895, at the age of 23, Blériot founded a company to build headlamps and accessories for automobiles, which was an emerging transportation revolution. He was fresh out of college, and the classic entrepreneur. By the beginning of the 20th Century he was earning an average of 60,000 francs a year, which he used “to endulge in his first aeronautical experiments” starting in 1900. In 1905 he watched Gabriel Voisin test fly an experimental float glider that was produced for Archdeacon. Blériot ordered a new and revised version on the spot, which Voisin built and tested in a month, with a boat using the advanced Antoinette V8 engine. This second float glider was unstable and crashed into the water, but instead of despairing from the failure, Blériot decided to get serious. He then financed the Blériot-Voisin company, which became the first company in the world founded solely to produce airplanes. A year later, in 1906, they would test fly the Blériot IV in attempt to win the Aero-Club de France prize of 1,500 francs for the first flight of over 100 meters. They would lose to Santos-Dumont, who won the prize in November 1906. The Blériot-Voisin partnership dissolved, but they each continued independently. Blériot intensified his efforts again by setting up multiple independent teams that would construct prototypes in parallel. Starting in 1907, he was testing two new prototypes a year based using an empirical process with rapid do-learn loops. In 1907, both Robert Esnault-Pelteri and Blériot would file for a patent on versions of the modern stick and rudder control within a month of each other. When Wilbur Wright showed up in Paris in 1908 to fly, he clearly demonstrated world leadership, primarily based on their fundamental insights of dynamic stability. All of France acknowledged this, from French aviator Leon Delagrange who remarked “Nous sommes battus” (“We are beaten”) 2 to Bleriot, who was quoted in the New York Herald as saying “It is Marvelous.” However, the three years from 1905 to 1908 that the Wright Brothers spent trying to sell their Wright Flyer, and making zero progress in aeronautical research, had a huge opportunity cost. The best use of their time would have been designing the next generation of airplane. During this period the French independently developed and flight-tested the aileron, and invented the stick-and-rudder control system, the fuselage, the wheeled landing gear, and implemented the tractor-pulling monoplane. More importantly, the Wrights were not used to competition, while the French aviation entrepreneurs were highly competitive. They quickly borrowed, adopted, and adapted ideas from each other: reading about their innovations is eerily familiar to anybody who follows modern day Silicon Valley. They also borrowed from the Wright Brothers. Within a year, they would catch the Wright Brothers, and then quickly leap ahead. The French government began to aggressively stimulate their entrepreneurial industry by purchasing large numbers of airplanes from their commercial firms. Blériot was re-energized by the Wright demonstration even though he was almost broke. At the close of 1908, he had spent 760,000 francs (roughly $150,000) to date, and the two planes that he had developed in 1908 (before the Wright Brothers demonstration) were failures. Blériot refused to quit, deciding to build what he called his “last chance monoplanes.” In 1909, his fortune changed when he won several prizes. On July 25, 1909, Louis Blériot became the first person to across the English Channel, visibly demonstrating the strategic implications of airpower. Demand took off and Blériot Aéronautique produced well over 1,000 Blériot XI planes, which became the world’s first mass produced airplane. While early French aviation was primarily driven by private financiers, a phase shift began to take hold in Europe after the 1908 Wright demonstration. This shift accelerated in 1909 after Blériot crossed the English Channel. The French government began to aggressively stimulate their entrepreneurial industry by purchasing large numbers of airplanes from their commercial firms. In April 1910, the French government purchased 35 aircraft 3 from just one company, Voisin. Tom Crouch, from the Department of Aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution, writes: 4 In 1910–1911, a period during which the U.S. Army took delivery of 14 airplanes, the French government ordered over 200 flying machines. Across the face of an increasingly troubled Europe, success in the air symbolized the courage and strength of the nation. But it was more than just government funding. The environment and culture for aviation across Europe was more competitive than in the United States. There were more and larger privately-funded prizes, and more intense competitive pressure driven by more firms. Crouch explains: 5 Europe not only offered more contests and richer prizes, it provided a much higher level of competition. With little incentive for change, American builders like Glenn Curtiss and Glenn Martin remained largely committed to the original configuration of the Wright airplane—a pusher biplane with a canard elevator—until 1910–1911. Strenuous competition between a relatively large number of designers and aviators in Europe led to the exploration of a wide range of configurations, the use of new materials, and improved control systems and power plants. Even thought the US government started appropriating funds to buy airplanes in 1911, other countries were now leaping further ahead of the United States in their commitment to dominating this strategically critical technology. Crouch reports that other countries were spending an order of magnitude more than the US: 6 As early as 1912, the Secretary of the Navy pointed out that the U.S. lagged far behind other leading nations of the world in expenditures for aeronautics. France, he estimated, had spent $7,400,000 on flight to date. Russia was in second place, with an expenditure of $5,000,000, followed by: Germany, $2,250,000; and Great Britain and Italy, $2,100,000 each. Even Japan ($600,000) had out spent the U.S. ($140,000). …By 1914, France was, by almost any measure, the world's leading aeronautical power. While French government policy was neither entirely consistent nor completely rational, political decisions were, as historians Emmanuel Chadeau and John Morrow have noted, primarily responsible for creating the strongest aviation industry in Europe. It was not only the amount of money that France, was spending, it was also how they spent the money. France’s strategy was to amplify the entrepreneurial forces in their country, to maximize competition, and to stimulate new entrants. Lessons learned from early French aviation The conclusion is clear. Yes, the Wright Brothers were the quintessential American entrepreneurs. Yes, they clearly triumphed over Sam Langley and the centrally planned program approach. However, a public-private partnership that was designed to stimulate and accelerate market-based entrepreneurial innovation trumped laissez faire. The French aviation miracle was founded upon the innovation of the French aviation entrepreneurs, amplified by a national strategy to stimulate and reinforce market forces, and honed in a highly competitive market environment. Public private partnerships (PPPs) represent a third way. Lessons learned from the early years of the NACA From the outset, the NACA’s core mission was to solve “practical problems” related to flight. Conventional wisdom is that the NACA produced ground-breaking research with its wind tunnels, producing significant drag reduction in all vehicles, the low drag engine cowling, de-icing technology, new airfoil designs, and the variable pitch propeller. With CATS, we will put humans back on the Moon, settle permanently on Mars, and travel throughout the Solar System. Most importantly, CATS is critical to US national security throughout the 21st century and beyond. But history forgets the early years. The NACA would not have a wind tunnel until five years after its creation. It had very little money during its first decade, but what it accomplished with little money is amazing. The NACA solved many critical industry problems in its first decade of existence. The key was that it saw its unofficial mission as stimulating and energizing a new industry. What was the end result of all this public-private partnership activity in American aviation? Starting from a position that was far behind the world in 1915, America had clearly caught up within a decade of the creation of the NACA. When Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927, America had demonstrably caught the rest of the world. By the early 1930s with the creation of Douglas DC-2 and the Boeing 247, America had become the clear global leader in long-range aviation, which provided critical capabilities and advantages to the United States in World War II. Since that time, America has never relinquished the title of world leader in aviation. At the start of this essay, I asserted that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. A public-private partnership similar in important ways to the NACA model is already emerging, but most people have not noticed. This paradigm shift began in the Reagan Administration, and continues to this day. Conclusion Cheap access to space (CATS) is the most important near-term strategic objective the United States could, and should, pursue in space. CATS is the key to opening up the space frontier, and to fulfilling the many unrealized promises of space. With CATS, we will put humans back on the Moon, settle permanently on Mars, and travel throughout the Solar System. Most importantly, CATS is critical to US national security throughout the 21st century and beyond. NACA helped America recapture leadership for the last 100 years. With CATS as our goal, and the NACA model as our means, American leadership in aerospace will be assured for the next 100. Footnotes 1 Thomas Crouch, Bleriot XI: The Story of a Classic Aircraft, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982 2 Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, The Rebirth of European Aviation, 1902-1908: A Study of the Wright Brothers Influence, page 288 3 John Morrow, The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909-1921, Smithsonian Institution, 1993, p. 33 4 Tom Crouch, “Blaming Wilbur and Orville: The Wright Patent Suits and the Growth of American Aeronautics”, Smithsonian Institution 5 Crouch, ibid. 6 Crouch, ibid. HomeThe commissioning of research in order to support a policy which has already been decided upon
"Policy-based evidence making" is a pejorative term which refers to the commissioning of research in order to support a policy which has already been decided upon. The name has been suggested as the converse of evidence-based policy making.
As the name suggests, policy-based evidence making means working back from a predefined policy to produce underpinning evidence. Working from a conclusion to provide only supporting evidence is an approach which contradicts most interpretations of the scientific method; however, it should be distinguished from research into the effects of a policy where such research may provide either supporting or opposing evidence.
In July 2006, Rebecca Boden and Debbie Epstein published a paper in which they wrote:
This need [for evidence] has been reified in the UK and elsewhere, as routines of "evidence-based policy"-making have been hardwired into the business of Government. Intuitively, basing policies that affect people's lives and the economy on rigorous academic research sounds rational and desirable. However, such approaches are fundamentally flawed by virtue of the fact that Government, in its broadest sense, seeks to capture and control the knowledge producing processes to the point where this type of "research" might best be described as "policy-based evidence".[1]
The term "policy-based evidence making" was later referred to in a report of the United Kingdom House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology into Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making issued in October 2006. The committee stated:
[Ministers] should certainly not seek selectively to pick pieces of evidence which support an already agreed policy, or even commission research in order to produce a justification for policy: so-called "policy-based evidence making" (see paragraphs 95–6). Where there is an absence of evidence, or even when the Government is knowingly contradicting the evidence—maybe for very good reason—this should be openly acknowledged. [emphasis in original][2]
The term has also been applied outside the strictly scientific arena, for example in a position paper for the Arts and Humanities Research Council.[3]
See also [ edit ]
Inverse benefit law – The ratio of benefits to harms among patients taking new drugs tends to vary inversely with how extensively a drug is marketed
Politicization of science – The manipulation of science for political gain
Woozle effect – Frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups, and the public into thinking or believing there is evidenceAfter Tough Mudder 2012 I went to Keyhole Hot Springs to relax, and liked it. So I took one of my hiking buddies, Stephen, and his friend, Jen, back there for another trip in late September.
The road was just as dusty, no snow to be seen. Seemed to still be graded. Dusty as ever. The fjord that you cross is a lot lower.
First thing I noticed was that most of the flagging tape I had put up had been taken down. The route was still passable of course, and as steep as ever. Remember there is no access to drinking water at the campground or the hot springs, so carry extra with you (it’s a short hike in anyway).
You’ll be treated to some spectacular views on the way down.
Down the valley Can’t remember the mountain name Better down the valley
Remember though, it’s steep. Be ready for careful footwork and slidy, dusty dirt on the way down.
Once you get there though, the camp ground is pretty good (but it doesn’t look it). Flat, lots of trees to keep the wind down and out of the sun so you’re tent doesn’t get too hot.
Bear cache (you know you’re at the campground when you see it) The picnic table The view of the river
Then head north west (right if facing the river) to the pathway that takes you to the hot springs.
The path from the camp to the log stairs. Some funky log stairs Once you have descended a bit, follow this rocky river shore Keep going along the shore, the springs will eventually come into view
Once you see them, it’s more careful footing and hope you brought a towel along to get changed under. There is nothing private down there to say the least.
At this later point in the year, the lower pool was open. Warm, but not as hot as the upper one, and larger too. It’s great!
Remember, the original post has lots of links etc on how to get to Keyhole Hot Springs and the area.
50.580621 -123.294754In recent years, Chile has invested so much in its solar power industry that the country is now generating more electricity from the sun than it knows what to do with. A new report reveals that spot prices on solar electricity dropped to zero for 113 days of the year through April, and many more days of free solar power are expected to come. Taking advantage of free solar power is a huge benefit for residents, but analysts are concerned about how this will impact the market, since investors and owners of solar power plants may lose money.
Solar power fed to Chile’s central grid has quadrupled in capacity since 2013. The grid is now fed by 29 solar farms, and another 15 are planned for construction in the future. But Chile has two power networks in play: a central grid and a northern grid, which are not connected. Infrastructure in some areas of each grid is poor, so there are places where the grids simply cannot transmit as much electricity. Due to the age-old principle of supply and demand, some areas have more electricity than they need, driving prices down, while other areas are under-served. In areas served by the northern part of the central grid, power surpluses have driven the price to zero, and this year’s figures are on target to meet or exceed last year’s number of free solar power days, which was 192. Simultaneously, areas under-served by the grid are experiencing higher than normal prices.
Critics are concerned about the long-term effects of the massive solar industry growth, without the necessary infrastructure updates to handle the increased capacity. As Carlos Barria, former chief of the government’s renewable energy division and a professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, in Santiago, told Bloomberg: “[President] Michelle Bachelet’s government has set the energy sector as a priority,” said Carlos Finat, president of the country’s renewable association, known as Acera. “But planning has been focused in the short term when it is necessary to have long term plans to solve these type of issues.”
Related: Chile introduces world’s first metro to be powered largely by renewables
Chile is responding to the need for better energy infrastructure, though. Construction is underway on a 3,000 kilometer (1,865 mile) transmission line to link the two grids by 2017. A separate 753km (468 mile) line is also in development, designed to alleviate congestion in the northern parts of the central grid, where excess electricity is driving prices down to zero.
Via Bloomberg
Images via Wikimedia and Taiyang News"Jackrock" redirects here. For the anti-personnel device sometimes called a "jackrock" in the U.S., see caltrop
Knucklebones, also known as Tali, Fivestones, or Jacks, is a game of ancient origin, usually played with five small objects, or ten in the case of jacks. Originally the "knucklebones" (actually the astragalus, a bone in the ankle, or hock[1]) were those of a sheep, which were thrown up and caught in various manners. Modern knucklebones consist of six points, or knobs, projecting from a common base, and are usually made of metal or plastic. The winner is the first player to successfully complete a prescribed series of throws, which, though similar, differ widely in detail. The simplest throw consists in either tossing up one stone, the jack, or bouncing a ball, and picking up one or more stones or knucklebones from the table while it is in the air. This continues until all five stones or knucklebones have been picked up. Another throw consists in tossing up first one stone, then two, then three and so on, and catching them on the back of the hand. Different throws have received distinctive names, such as "riding the elephant", "peas in the pod", "horses in the stable",[2] and "frogs in the well".
History [ edit ]
The origin of knucklebones is closely connected with that of dice, of which knucklebones is probably a more primitive form. Sophocles, in a written fragment of one of his works, ascribed the invention of knucklebones to the mythical figure Palamedes, who taught it to his Greek countrymen during the Trojan War. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain allusions to games similar in character to knucklebones. Pausanius in his Description of Greece (2.20.3) tells of a temple of Fortune in Corinth in which Palamedes made an offering of his newly invented game.[2] Children's games were a common temple offering at some temples.
According to a still more ancient tradition, Zeus, perceiving that Ganymede longed for his playmates upon Mount Ida, gave him Eros for a companion and golden dibs with which to play. He even condescended to sometimes join in the game (Apollonius). It is significant, however, that both Herodotus and Plato ascribe a foreign origin to the game. Plato, in Phaedrus, names the Egyptian god Thoth as its inventor, while Herodotus relates that the Lydians, during a period of famine in the days of King Atys, originated this game and indeed almost all other games,[2] with the exception of draughts.[3]
There were two methods of playing in ancient times. The first, and probably the primitive method, consisted in tossing up and catching the bones on the back of the hand, very much as the game is played today. In ancient Rome, it was called tali (knucklebones): a painting excavated from Pompeii, currently housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, depicts the goddesses Latona, Niobe, Phoebe, Aglaia and Hileaera, with the last two being engaged in playing a game of knucklebones. According to an epigram of Asclepiodotus, astragali were given as prizes to schoolchildren. This simple form of the game was generally only played by women and children, and was called penta litha or five-stones. There were several varieties of this game besides the usual toss and catch; one being called tropa, or hole-game, the object of which was to toss the bones into a hole in the earth. Another was the simple game of odd or even.[2]
A 1734 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin painting depicting a girl playing knucklebones
The second, probably derivative, form of the game was one of pure chance, the stones being thrown upon a table, either from the hand or from a cup, and the values of the sides upon which they fell were counted. The shape of the pastern bones used for astragaloi as well as for the tali of the Romans, with whom knucklebones was also popular, determined the manner of counting.[2]
Pastern bones
The pastern bone of a sheep, goat, or calf has two rounded ends upon which it cannot stand and two broad and two narrow sides, one of each pair being concave and one convex. The convex narrow side, called chios or "the dog", was counted as 1, the convex broad side as 3, the concave broad side as 4, and the concave narrow side as 6.[2]
Four astragali were used and 35 different scores were possible in a single throw. Many of these throws received distinctive names such as: Aphrodite, Midas, Solon, and Alexander. Among the Romans, some of the names were: Venus, King, and Vulture. The highest throw in Greece counted 40, and was called the Euripides. It was probably a combination throw, since more than four sixes could not be thrown at a single time. The lowest throw, both in Greece and Rome, was the Dog.[2]
Modern game [ edit ]
The modern game may use a rubber ball, and the knucklebones (jacks), typically a set of ten, are made of metal or plastic. There are variants of how the players decide who goes first: it is usually through "flipping," (the set of jacks is placed in cupped hands, flipped to the back of the hands, and then back to cupped hands again; the player who keeps the most from falling goes first), but may be via ip dip, or eeny, meeny, miny, moe, or a variant thereof. To set up the game, the jacks are scattered loosely into the play area. The players in turn bounce the ball off the ground, pick up jacks, and then catch the ball before it bounces for a second time.
The number of jacks to be picked up is pre-ordained and sequential; at first one must be picked up ("onesies"), next two ("twosies"), and so on, depending on the total number of jacks included. The number may not divide evenly, and there may be jacks left over. If the player chooses to pick up the leftover jacks first, one variation is to announce this by saying "horse before carriage" or "queens before kings." The playing area should be decided between the players since there is no official game rule regarding that.
The winning player is the one to pick up the largest |
, there aren't any of these 527 conservative groups to speak of with any money.
If George W. Bush had done this, blown off public financing, as he considered doing during the 2004 campaign, there would be howls in the media about one candidate trying to buy an election.Officers were called to the scene just after 10 p.m. after getting multiple reports of gunshots being fired. (KBOI Photo. Mugshot courtesy Canyon County Jail).
A girl was hit by a stray bullet during a shooting at a Nampa area Walmart late Wednesday night.
Nampa Police are investigating a shooting in the area of the Walmart on Franklin Road Wednesday night.
Officers were called to the scene just after 10 p.m. after getting multiple reports of gunshots being fired. Nampa Police says 21-year-old Ezri Garcia and another man got into a fight and started shooting at each other in front of the store.
Both Garcia and the man exchanged gunfire. The 21-year-old Nampa resident suffered a head injury, however, it's unknown how that injury occurred.
The other suspect, described as a Hispanic man with a small build and who was wearing a black shirt, is on the run. He was seen leaving in a dark colored vehicle.
Nampa PD says a girl in an adjacent parking lot was hit by a gunshot in the shoulder. She was taken to the hospital with injuries that are not considered to be life-threatening.
The shooting occurred near the annual God and Country Festival at the Idaho Center, which was preparing to wrap up the night's events with a fireworks show.
"This is a very unfortunate event to take place where families are gathered for a fun event," said Capt. Curt Shankel. "Officers were quick to the scene and were able to take control quickly and apprehend a suspect without any further incident. We are continuing to investigate this shooting and looking for the other suspect involved."
More information will be reported as it becomes available.Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, speaking publicly for the first time about concerns she brought to the Trump White House on Russia, told Congress on Monday she warned that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn "essentially could be blackmailed" because he apparently had lied to his bosses about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
The statements from Yates, an Obama administration holdover, offered by far the most detailed account of the chain of events that led to Flynn's ouster from government in the first weeks of the Trump administration.
Yates, appearing before a Senate panel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, described discussions with Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn in late January in which she warned that Flynn apparently had misled the administration about his communications with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
White House officials had insisted that Flynn had not discussed U.S.-imposed sanctions with Kislyak during the presidential transition period, but asked Flynn to resign after news reports indicated he had misled them about the nature of the calls.
"We felt like it was critical that we get this information to the White House, in part because the vice president was making false statements to the public and because we believed that Gen. Flynn was possibly compromised," Yates said.
"We knew that was not a good situation, which is why we wanted to let the White House know about it."
Yates was joined by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who suggested to lawmakers that the U.S. must do more to educate the electorate as to what Russia's objective is and the tactics they used to interfere in the election.
Clapper said any further interference "will be against all parties" and that "more can be done in the way of sanctions" for any government who attempts to interfere.
See our live blog below of the hearing from earlier.
By Rebecca Shabad, Emily Tillett/CBS News
5:40 p.m. The hearing comes to a close as Sen. Graham says that there appears to be a "bipartisan consensus" that Russians did interfere in the elections and asks for further information to be provided by Clapper on specific cases of "un-masking" in the future.
5:32 p.m. Clapper suggests greater counter-messaging efforts against the Russians to "give them some of their own medicine" should be implemented, but that it "should not be tagged onto the intelligence community" but rather as a separate entity.
5:27 p.m. When asked what more can be done to deter interference, Yates says of the Russians "they're coming back and we must do more to harden our election systems to ensure folks out there that when they look at news feeds it may not be real news." Yates adds that "we must do more to deter the Russians and it wouldn't hurt to prosecute a few folks."
Clapper echoes Yates comments saying that the "most important thing is to educate the electorate as to what the Russian's objective is and the tactics and procedures they employed and continue to employ." Clapper says any further interference "will be against all parties" and that "more can be done in the way of sanctions" for any government to attempt to interfere.
5:15 p.m. Sen. Graham asks Clapper if he found any of Mr. Trump's business interests gave him concern, Clapper replies "not in the course of the preparation of the intelligence communities assessment, adding that "it wasn't enough to include" in the overall report.
Yates tells Graham that someone had to have information from the Flynn conversations and gave it to the Washington Post, but said it was neither herself or Clapper that supplied the information.
5:10 p.m. Clapper says that it "wasn't good practice" that Flynn was still able to participate in high-level conversations with various leaders after Yates had provided information on Flynn's security concerns to the White House.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, asks if Mr. Trump's previous tweets calling for Flynn's immunity should have any influence on the FBI investigation into Russian interference, Clapper replies, "it shouldn't and I'm confident it won't."
5:01 p.m. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, urges a special prosecutor be involved in the investigation of any Russian interference. Yates says Flynn faces criminal penalties if he did in fact lie to the FBI during his interview on his dealings with the Russian government.
Blumenthal reiterates the need for a special prosecutor in the investigation "because officials at highest level are all potentially witnesses and even potentially targets." Yates would not say if she agreed with Blumenthal that a special prosecutor should be assigned to the investigation.
4:53 p.m. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, asks Clapper if he had appeared ever appeared on the Russian propaganda network RT, Clapper laughs and replies "not wittingly."
Franken surmises that Flynn perhaps wasn't immediately fired because there were others within the administration who met secretly with Russians and never revealed it until they were caught, Franken asks Yates for a comment and Yates replies "I'm not going to touch that."
4:48 p.m. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, asks Yates about concerns about any Trump officials' vulnerability to blackmail, she said she did and expressed those feelings to the White House.
Clapper tells Leahy Russia was "absolutely" responsible for any interference saying "the evidence was overwhelming that Russians did this." Clapper adds that Mr. Trump's claims China could have had a hand in any interference only helped Russia.
4:40 p.m. Clapper tells Kennedy that Russia's interference is "nothing new" and that the "this is unprecedented in terms of its aggressiveness and multi-faceted campaign."
Yates says that she's never provided classified information to reporters, Clapper echoes her statements.
4:37 p.m. "Who appointed you to the U.S. Supreme Court?", asked Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, of Yates in regards to her opinions that she felt Trump's travel ban was "unconstitutional."
4:31 p.m. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware asked Yates about news reports that sanctions were not discussed in conversations with Flynn and the Russian ambassador, Yates said that she can't confirm those conversations did or did not occur.
4:23 p.m. Clapper said he agrees with CIA Director Mike Pompeo's characterization that WikiLeaks acts as a non-nation intelligence service.
4:12 p.m. During an exchange with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, Yates said that the Department of Justice wasn't consulted on the initial travel ban imposed by the Trump administration. She said she wasn't informed about it by the administration, but instead learned about it "through media reports."
4:07 p.m. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asked Clapper if he had forwarded classified information to a non-government individual who wasn't authorized to see that information.
"Not to my recollection. No, sir," he said.
Yates said that she's not aware of any intercepted communications of the Trump campaign or any other 2016 presidential campaigns.
3:50 p.m. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is now asking Yates why she refused to defend the president's travel ban.
"All arguments have to be based on truth," she said. "We're not a law firm. We're the Department of Justice."
3:43 p.m. Feinstein asked Yates if Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence.
"That's certainly how it appeared," Yates said.
3:40 p.m. During an exchange with Feinstein, Clapper said that the British review of Russian interference in the U.S. election, that was provided to U.S. is accurate, but he said that he couldn't reveal any details.
"It's quite sensitive," he said. Clapper said he doesn't know about the accuracy of The Guardian's story.
3:34 p.m. Yates said that leading up to the notification to the White House, it was a topic of discussion among officials at the Justice Department and national security community. She said she consulted with other career prosecutors about the situation involving Flynn.
3:30 p.m. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked both witnesses if they had ever served as anonymous sources to reporters. They both said they haven't.
They said they don't know whether the Justice Department has authorized a criminal investigation of the leaks.
Grassley asked if either of them had requested the unmasking of President Trump, his associates or any member of Congress.
"Yes, in one case I did," Clapper said, adding that he can't discuss the details in public.
"No," Yates said.
3:21 p.m. Yates said she went back to the White House and she said they talked through "four to five more issues." Asked why she didn't wait for a "302" about Flynn, Yates said this was a matter of "urgency" and that it was critical that the White House know that the vice president was unknowingly conveying false information.
Yates said she believes the FBI interviewed Flynn at the White House and she said she doesn't believe he was represented by counsel.
She said that one of the issues that McGahn raised with her at the second meeting was his concern that taking action might intefere with the FBI investigation. Yates said that she and another official told them that it wouldn't interfere with the probe.
"We wanted to tell the White House as quickly as possible," she said.
3:12 p.m. Yates said she met with White House counsel Don McGahn at a SCIF to discuss classified information. She said that there had been press accounts about Flynn's comments that the Justice Department knew to be untrue. She said that they walked through Flynn's "underlying conduct," but she said she can't reveal details because that's classified information.
Yates said she wanted to make it very clear to Vice President Mike Pence that he wasn't knowingly misleading the American public and that whatever he shared was based on what Flynn had told him.
Clapper and Yates said they don't know how the conversation that Flynn had with the Russian ambassador made it to The Washington Post.
Yates said that "the Russians knew about what Gen. Flynn had done." She said it emerged into a situation where she said essentially, Flynn, national security adviser at the time "could be blackmailed by the Russians."
Yates said she was asked whether Flynn should be fired, but she said that wasn't her place to say.
3:07 p.m. Graham asked Clapper if the claim that he made on "Meet the Press" a few months ago that the intelligence community concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Graham then asked Yates if there was any evidence that would point toward collusion. Yates said that she couldn't answer that question because she said she would be revealing classified information.
Graham said he doesn't understand how Clapper could be unaware of a counter-intelligence investigation being led by the FBI.
3:04 p.m. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, the top Democrat on the full committee, said that it's a "foregone conclusion" of Russia's involvement in the election. She's now speaking about the timeline that led to Gen. Michael Flynn's resignation as President Trump's national security adviser.
"What role did Flynn play in high-level national security decisions?" Feinstein said about the transition period and after.
3:00 p.m. Yates is now delivering her opening statement. She said she worked for 27 years in the Department of Justice, working through five Democratic and Republican administrations. She said she served as deputy attorney general for a little over two years and then was asked by the Trump administration to serve as acting attorney general.
"The efforts by a foreign adversary to interfere with and undermine our democratic processes—and those of our allies—pose a serious threat to all Americans," she said.
She suggested that she might not be able to reveal certain information.
"I also want to note that in my answers today, I intend to be as fulsome and comprehensive as possible while respecting my legal and ethical boundaries," she said. "As the Subcommittee understands, many of the topics of interest today concern classified information that I cannot address in this public setting, either directly or indirectly. My duty to protect classified information applies just as much to me as a former official as it did when I led the Department."
"In addition, I'm no longer at the Department of Justice, and I'm not authorized generally to discuss deliberations within DOJ or more broadly in the Executive Branch, particularly on matters that may be the subject of ongoing investigations," she said.
2:57 p.m. Clapper said that leaks are not the same thing as unmasking.
"An unmasking is a legitimate process that consists of a request and approval by proper authorities. A leak is an unauthorized disclosure of classified or sensitive information that is improper under any circumstance," he said.
2:53 p.m. Clapper is now explaining what unmasking means.
"It frequently happens that, in the course of conducting lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance on validated foreign intelligence targets, the collecting agency picks up communications involving U.S. persons," he said. "Under IC minimization procedures, the identities of these U.S. persons are typically "masked" in reports that go out to intelligence consumers, and are referred to as "U.S. Person 1", etc."
Clapper said that in some cases, to fully understand a communication, the person who's looking at the intelligence can request that the identity of the U.S. person "be revealed."
He said it is up to the agency that collected the intelligence "whether to approve the request and to provide the identity. And, if a U.S. person's identity is revealed, that identity is provided only to the person who properly requested it, not to a wider audience."
He said he never used the unmasking process for political purposes.
"On several occasions during my six-and-a-half years as DNI, I requested the identity of U.S. persons to be revealed," he said. "In each such instance, I made these requests so I could fully understand the context of the communication and the potential threat being posed. At no time did I ever submit a request for personal or political purposes, or to voyeuristically look at raw intelligence, nor am I aware of any instance of such abuse by anyone else."
2:48 p.m. In his opening statement, Clapper said that he will try to convey as much information as he can as a private citizen.
"Last year, the Intelligence Community conducted an exhaustive review of Russian interference into our presidential election process, resulting in a special Intelligence Community Assessment, or ICA," Clapper said. "I'm here today to provide whatever information I can – now as a private citizen – on how the Intelligence Community conducted its analysis, came up with its findings, and communicated them to the Obama administration, to the Trump transition team, to Congress, and – in an unclassified form – to the public. Additionally, I will briefly address four related topics that have emerged since the ICA was produced."
Clapper said that because of classification and executive priviledge strictures requested by the White House, "There are limits to what I can discuss."
He said that the intelligence community found that Russia used cyber operations "against both political parties."
In addition to hacking into the DNC and releasing information, he said, "Russia also collected on certain Republican party-affiliated targets, but did not release any Republican-related data."
2:38 p.m. Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, is delivering his opening statement. He said that the purpose of their probe is to ensure that public learns about what happened, that lawmakers can address unanswered questions and to know how to properly protect the government from future interference. Whitehouse said that the president and administration has failed to take responsibility and have dismissed facts as "fake news."
2:34 p.m. ET The hearing has begun and Graham is delivering his opening statement. Graham alluded to the intelligence community report from January that concluded that Russians hacked John Podesta's emails, that Russians launched a cyberattack against the Democratic National Committee and that they helped empower WikiLeaks, he said. Graham said that every American should be "concerned" about what the Russians did.The Genographic Project has announced the most comprehensive analysis to date of Basque genetic patterns, showing that Basque genetic uniqueness predates the arrival of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula some 7,000 years ago. Through detailed DNA analysis of samples from the French and Spanish Basque regions, the Genographic team found that Basques share unique genetic patterns that distinguish them from the surrounding non-Basque populations.
Published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the study was led by Lluis Quintana-Murci, principal investigator of Genographic's Western European regional center. "Our study mirrors European history and could certainly extend to other European peoples. We found that Basques share common genetic features with other European populations, but at the same time present some autochthonous (local) lineages that make them unique," said Quintana-Murci. "This is reflected in their language, Euskara, a non-Indo-European language, which altogether contributes to the cultural richness of this European population."
The genetic finding parallels previous studies of the Basque language, which has been found to be a linguistic isolate, unrelated to any other language in the world. It is the ancestral language of the Basque people who inhabit a region spanning northeastern Spain and southwestern France and has long been thought to trace back to the languages spoken in Europe prior to the arrival of the Indo-European languages more than 4,000 years ago. (English, Spanish, French and most other European languages are Indo-European.)
Genographic Project researchers studied mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which has been widely applied to the study of human history and is perhaps best known as the tool used to reveal 'Mitchondrial Eve,' the female common ancestor of all modern humans who lived in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago. It has also been used to study regional variation both within and outside Africa, providing detailed insights into more recent migration patterns.
The Genographic Project, launched in 2005, enters its eighth year this spring. Nearly 75,000 participants from over 1,000 indigenous populations around the world have joined the initiative, along with more than 440,000 members of the general public who have purchased a testing kit online, swabbed their cheeks and sent their samples to the Genographic lab for processing. This unprecedented collection of samples and data is a scientific resource that the project plans to leverage moving forward.
Genographic Project Director and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Spencer Wells noted, "The Basque research is a wonderful example of how we are studying the extensive Genographic sample collection using the most advanced genetic methods. In some cases, the most appropriate tool may be mtDNA, while in others the Y-chromosome or autosomal markers may be more informative. Ultimately, the goal of the project is to use the latest genetic technology to understand how our ancestors populated the planet."Governor Rick Perry of Texas and President Barack Obama, strangest of bedfellows, are making similar discoveries about the scope of prosecutorial discretion. In short, it’s very broad.
Perry’s education on the subject is an unhappy one. Late Friday, the Texas Governor, who has about five months left in his term, was indicted on two counts: abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant. What those charges mean, though, is hard to say. The indictment itself is just two pages and, to put it charitably, unelaborated.
The case has its origins in Perry’s long-running feud with Rosemary Lehmberg, a district attorney in Travis County, which includes Austin and represents an island of blue in the deep-red sea of Texas. Last year, Lehmberg was charged with drunken driving. She promptly pleaded guilty, which, in light of the YouTube videos of her sobriety test and her booking at the police station, was no surprise.
Lehmberg served several days in jail but declined to resign, so Perry decided to make the most of her difficulties. He said that, unless she resigned, he would use his power as Governor to veto $7.5 million in state money for her Public Integrity Unit, which had been hard at work prosecuting Texas pols, many of them Republicans. He could not, he said, support “continued state funding for an office with statewide jurisdiction at a time when the person charged with ultimate responsibility of that unit has lost the public’s confidence.”
What Perry did was obvious. The Governor was using his leverage to jam a political adversary—not exactly novel behavior in Texas, or most other states. But Democrats succeeded in winning the appointment of a special prosecutor, Michael McCrum, to investigate Perry’s behavior, and on Friday McCrum brought the hammer down. The threat to veto the money for the D.A. amounted to, according to the prosecutor, two different kinds of felonies: a “misuse” of government property, and a corrupt attempt to influence a public official in “a specific exercise of his official power or a specific performance of his official duty” or “to violate the public servants known legal duty.” (In the charmingly archaic view of Texas statutes, every public official is a “him.”)
Perry’s indictment has been widely panned, including by many liberals, as an attempt to criminalize hardball politics. (Vetoing things is, generally, part of a governor’s job.) Perry himself is all wounded innocence. “I intend to fight against those who would erode our state’s constitution and laws purely for political purposes, and I intend to win,” he said at a news conference. (It would be easier to feel sorry for Perry if he expressed similar concern about, say, the constitutional rights of those who were executed on his watch and with his support.)
So Perry may have a point, but he also has a problem. Prosecutors have wide, almost unlimited, latitude to decide which cases to bring. The reason is obvious: there is simply no way that the government could prosecute every violation of law it sees. Think about tax evasion, marijuana use, speeding, jay-walking—we’d live in a police state if the government went after every one of these cases. (Indeed, virtually all plea bargaining, which is an ubiquitous practice, amounts to an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.) As a result, courts give prosecutors virtual carte blanche to bring some cases and ignore others. But, once they do bring them, courts respond to the argument that “everyone does it” more or less the same way that your mother did. It’s no excuse. So if Perry’s behavior fits within the technical definition of the two statutes under which he’s charged, which it well might, he’s probably out of luck.
The President is relying on the same concept of discretion to push immigration reform, even though Congress has refused to pass a law to do so. The legislative branch writes the laws, which define the classes of people who are subject to deportation. But it is the executive branch that decides which actual individuals it will pursue and deport. Over the past several years, the Obama Administration has used its discretion to allow more immigrants to stay. During the 2012 campaign, the President announced his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which amounted to a kind of administrative DREAM Act. It limited the number of deportations of people who had been children when they were brought illegally to this country, provided they meet certain other conditions. The legality of DACA has not been successfully challenged.
Prosecutorial discretion is not unlimited. The executive branch can refrain from prosecuting certain individuals, but it cannot, in theory, offer immunity to entire classes of law-breakers. Nor can a prosecutor only charge people of a certain race, or, for that matter, political party. But it’s hard to know who would have standing to challenge a failure to bring a criminal case or a deportation. The rules of standing are usually limited to individuals who have suffered a specific harm, and there’s no harm in not being prosecuted. (The New Republic has a useful primer on the subject. )
That sort of limitation on prosecutorial discretion is unlikely to help Rick Perry. His complaint is that the prosecutor is bringing one case too many, not too few. That claim, almost invariably, is a loser. So, it turns out, may be the soon-to-be-former governor.Tim Wilson, a comic who incorporated country music into his act, died Wednesday after suffering a heart attack, his manager Chris Dipetta said. He was 52.
According to Dipetta, Wilson died in Columbus, Georgia, where he'd traveled after finishing a gig in Bay City, Michigan. He'd reportedly been scheduled to headline a show at The Comedy Club Stardome near Birmingham, Alabama, on Friday and Saturday.
Wilson was known for his Southern humor, which included penning and performing songs like "Jeff Gordon's Gay" and "Garth Brooks Ruined My Life" as a part of his act.
He is probably best known for his comedy tune "The NASCAR song" which you can listen to here:
Actor and comedian Daniel "Larry" Whitney, who performs under the moniker "Larry the Cable Guy," tweeted his sadness about the news.
"Comedian Tim Wilson passed away tonight," Whitney tweeted. "I hope you were one of the lucky ones that got to see him preform. One of the best."
Wilson was a regular on the syndicated radio program "The Bob & Tom Show," and a tribute to the comic was posted on their website Thursday.
"It is a very difficult day, and we couldn't be more saddened by the passing of a comedy legend," the posting said in part. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Tim's loved ones."
Wilson's manger, Dipetta, said the performer is survived by his wife, and two children, a 15-year-old son and 24-year-old daughter.Astronauts are all smiles on spacewalk but budget cuts could end Nasa's hope of returning to the Moon
Hanging on the edge of the International Space Station 250miles above Earth, astronaut Nicole Stott does well to concentrate on her work despite the gloriously distracting view of our blue planet below.
She was snapped by fellow mission specialist Danny Olivas on the first spacewalk of their mission.
The pair successfully moved a cumbersome and thankfully empty ammonia tank, which will be returned to our planet. A new fully loaded tank, which plays a crucial role in keeping the orbiter cool, will be installed on a second spacewalk.
Both astronauts clearly enjoyed their six and a half hour celestial walkabout, waving and posing for pictures, despite losing contact with ground control for half an hour. Communications were knocked out due to a storm at a satellite relay station in Guam.
Astronaut Niclole Stott works in the Space Shuttle Discovery's payload bay with the dizzying sight of Earth in the background
Out on a limb: Astronaut Nicole Stott was outside of the space station for six hours and 35 minutes
Back on Earth a gathering political storm could mean the days of such shuttle adventures are numbered as the U.S. government decides if it can afford a new space exploration programme. Nasa is scheduled to retire their 30-year-old space shuttles next year and rely on Russia to hitch rides to the Space Station until it is decommissioned in 2015. But the replacement Constellation mission that is due to take man back to the Moon by 2020 may fall at the first hurdle due to budget cuts. Failure to launch While the Orion capsule spacecraft has just passed an early design review, there is uncertainty whether the Ares 1 rocket slated to launch it into orbit will ever fly. In August an independent committee reviewed Nasa's human space exploration plans and came up with four options for President Obama's consideration. Only one option included the Ares 1 rocket, while the others replaced it with alternatives. If Ares 1 is cancelled it would add years and huge expense to Orion's development. Just another day on the job: Danny Olivas perches on the European Space Agency's Columbus module Back inside the station, Nicole Stott and European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne, both Expedition 20 flight engineers, work in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station
Manager of NASA's Constellation program, Jeff Hanley, said: 'It's important for folks to understand that the rocket and the spacecraft fly as an integrated system.
'So whatever we do with respect to the launcher, we would have to go back and redo, to some extent, work that is already done.'
President Obama faces the difficult decision of whether or not to plough billions more dollars into the programme as the country struggles with the world-wide recession.
So far Nasa has spent £1.9billion developing Orion, which has been designed to deliver crew to the space station and the Moon. The Constellation programme has cost £4.7billion and Nasa will need at least another £21billion for the mission to succeed.
Many experts including Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, have wondered what America hopes to gain from a return visit to our natural satellite.
'Why do we want to go to go back to the Moon?' he asked a British audience recently to mark the Apollo anniversary.
'There's no reason for us to go back. We can look at the effects of long-term missions in space by flying around comets, rather than setting up a base on the Moon. We're not going to launch any missions from there.'
Astronauts install a new freezer (l) and Canadian Robert Thirsk checks the storage containers
A gibbous Moon above the Earth's atmosphere as seen from the Discovery shuttle. Nasa hopes to return to the Moon with its Constellation mission
Astronaut Danny Olivas is captured in close-up during the spacewalk
Away from politics the rest of the crew on board the International Space Station unpacked their new exercise machine - the Colbert treadmill.
Nasa named it after Stephen Colbert (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill) known for his Comedy Central program 'The Colbert Report,' as a consolation prize. The comedian won an online vote earlier this year for naming rights to a new space station room but Nasa called it Tranquility instead.
Mr Colbert said:'My treadmill will... help trim down those famously fat astronauts. Lay off the Tang, Chubby!'
The treadmill is in more than 100 pieces. The bags containing all those parts will remain in a corner of the space station until September, when Nicole Stott has time to put together the running machine.
Stott, the space station's newest resident, hitched a ride up aboard Discovery. She will spend the next three months in orbit.
Meanwhile it has emerged that the International Space Station may fire its thrusters to avoid a piece of space junk that could pass within two miles of the orbiting complex.
The U.S. space agency is tracking debris from a portion of a European rocket, the Ariane 5, that was launched more than three years ago.
The debris could pass close enough to require astronauts to fire thrusters to move the station and shuttle Discovery that is docked there out of the way, NASA officials said. There are currently 13 astronauts living in space together.
Smile you're on camera! Astronaut John 'Danny' Olivas, STS-128 mission specialist during the mission's first spacewalkDr. William Bernstein : Well, I try not to talk too much about what we do with clients--it's just a confidentiality and a privacy matter. But I've always felt that people should be taking risks on the stock side and not on the bond side. At the end of the day, there are really only two assets. There are risky assets and there are riskless assets, and then there is an exchange rate between them.
Christine Benz : Bill, I want to talk about fixed income. This has been a vexing area for a lot of investors. I think they look back on the past couple of decades and see that returns have been genuinely very good, in part because we've had this tailwind of declining interest rates, but maybe the next couple of decades won't be so profitable. How would you think about positioning client portfolios at this juncture? What do they look like? What do your client portfolios look like--fixed income?
And when the exchange rate rises, when stocks get to be cheap, you want to make sure that you don't have to take a haircut on your bonds. So, for example, during '08-'09, if you owned corporate bonds or muni bonds, you took a haircut, because those tanked, to a lesser extent than stocks did, but they still lost money--or even a short-term corporate bond fund probably declined 8% or 10% on a capital value basis. A muni bond fund, even a short muni bond fund, 4% or 5%; the longer funds much worse than that.
So, I've always been a believer in holding a large amount of Treasuries and money markets and CDs because those don't decline in value. What did the best, of course, during the last decline and during the past year, have been long Treasuries.
Benz: Long, yes.
Bernstein: But that doesn't always happen, and I can easily envision a scenario in which they are not a riskless asset anymore. And in a rapidly rising interest rate environment, stocks won't do well at least in the short term, and long Treasuries won't do well, either. So, I've always been a believer in short high-quality fixed-income assets as the riskless part of your asset allocation.
Benz: Because you need that ballast. So how about TIPS? What do you think about TIPS right now and also just long-term as a component of strategic asset allocation?
Bernstein: TIPS are an interesting asset class. TIPS are very risky in the short term. As we found out in '08-'09, the longest TIPS I think lost in the vicinity of around 25%-28% during the crisis. And that was simply because of liquidity factors. Hedge fund managers were dumping whatever they could, and that was part of what they were doing to gain liquidity.
Benz: So that was a buying opportunity actually in TIPS, though, at that point? For a short window.
Bernstein: It was definitely a buying opportunity, but it also illustrates that it is not part of your riskless asset class. They are interesting because they become riskless on a real basis only in the long term. So, they are short-run risky, they are long-run very safe.
So, I see TIPS as a defeasing asset class. In other words, you use it to pay for your living expenses, or offset living expenses at some future date. So I'm not a big believer in buying a TIPS fund. I believe if you're going to buy them, you use them just for that purpose, and you use a ladder. Buy them at 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years as long as you think your retirement is going to last, and those are sitting there to pay for those living expenses at those points in the future.
Now, the problem with that right now is that they are hardly expensive, and eventually... we'll have another crisis, eventually for maybe that reason or some other reason, their prices will fall, or yields will rise, and I think when you start seeing yields of 2% at the short end or 2%, 2.2%, 2.5% at the long end, which is where they have been historically, I think, you start picking them up.
Benz: Last thing I want to touch on, Bill, with you is the role of foreign bonds and whether that currency diversification that you get with an unhedged foreign bond or foreign bond fund is worth the extra volatility that you pick up?
Bernstein: No. The riskless part of your portfolio, the bond part of your portfolio, should be truly riskless, and we very recently saw a period during which foreign currencies got very badly hammered during a financial crisis. If we get a European financial crisis, that will almost certainly happen again, and so just when you need the liquidity most will be when the value of these things has declined very rapidly.
Benz: With the hedged products you pick up some extra costs, so I'm guessing that you are not a big fan there, either?
Bernstein: No, I'm really not. It is theoretically possible to gain some diversification value by investing in foreign bonds and then hedging those returns back, but in the long run, that's just way too complicated for most people. It's overkill in terms of complexity.A Tennessee couple helplessly watched their home burn to the ground, along with all of their possessions, because they did not pay a $75 annual fee to the local fire department.
Vicky Bell told the NBC affiliate WPSD-TV that she called 911 when her mobile home in Obion County caught fire. Firefighters arrived on the scene but as the fire raged, they simply stood by and did nothing. "In an emergency, the first thing you think of, 'Call 9-1-1," homeowner Bell said. However, Bell and her husband were forced to walk into the burning home in an attempt to retrieve their own belongings. "You could look out my mom's trailer and see the trucks sitting at a distance," Bell said. "We just wished we could've gotten more out."
South Fulton Mayor David Crocker defended the fire department, saying that if firefighters responded to non |
zhou Daily]OTTAWA - The Canadian job market mustered a disappointing headline number last month, but experts say the broader batches of economic data are still pointing to the economy's bounce back in the coming months.
The labour market itself, however, has swung back and forth in recent months to produce only a modest result over the longer term.
That month-to-month volatility continued Friday when Statistics Canada released its latest job numbers, which showed the economy lost 19,700 net positions in April. Last month's decline followed an unexpected increase of 28,700 jobs in March.
"At the end of the day, kind of an ugly top line, but the details I think were a bit firmer," RBC assistant chief economist Dawn Desjardins said of the April figures.
Desjardins said the positives include the national unemployment rate holding steady in April — for the third straight month — at 6.8 per cent. The survey, she added, also showed an acceleration in wage growth and a jump in full-time employment after a March tumble.
Between March and April, the country added 46,900 net full-time positions and shed 66,500 part-time jobs, Statistics Canada said. The economy also registered a net gain of the more-desirable 24,200 private-sector positions compared to a net loss of 19,900 jobs in the public sector.
The fresh basket of data for April — the first month of the second quarter — represents the start of a crucial flow of economic numbers for a country still smarting from the oil slump.
Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz has said his fingers are crossed that the economy will rebound in the second quarter. The central bank has predicted zero growth for the first three months of 2015 — a stretch Poloz has warned will yield "atrocious" economic data.
Desjardins noted that several earlier data releases for April have shown promise, including increases in vehicle and housing sales.
Back on the labour front, Desjardins says the numbers show more than 40,000 jobs were created over the first four months of the year. Another encouraging sign, she noted.
"Not a tremendous performance, not blowing out the lights, but certainly not terrible," she said.
"The bones for a bounce in economic growth in the second quarter are definitely there, so we are looking for a pretty solid rebound."
The slide in April data, which produced a headline number lower than economists' expectations, was blamed in part on the layoffs that followed the demise of retailer Target Canada.
Statistics Canada's trade category, which includes retail and wholesale trade, lost 20,500 positions last month. The construction industry, meanwhile, shed 28,400 jobs in April.
"Outside of that, things held up relatively well," said BMO chief economist Douglas Porter.
Job growth, Porter added, has been quite modest over the past year at less than one per cent, which explains why the unemployment rate has hovered just underneath seven per cent.
Compared to April 2014, Statistics Canada found employment up by 139,100 jobs thanks to a boost from 165,800 net new full-time positions over the same period.
The slight increase in employment has been just enough to offset the growing population, Porter said.
Aside from the increasingly predictable see-saw in the monthly headline numbers, April's regional data also contained a few surprises — starting with Alberta's performance.
The energy-rich province, which was expected to take a hit from lower oil prices, added 12,500 net jobs last month — even though the province's natural resources sector lost 3,500 positions.
The April jobs numbers, however, were a letdown for British Columbia. The province lost 28,700 net jobs last month and saw its unemployment rate rise to 6.3 per cent, up from 5.8 per cent the month before.
The country's youth unemployment rate climbed to 13.6 per cent last month, up from 13 per cent in March. The data showed there were 13,200 fewer jobs last month for young workers, aged 15 to 24, than the month before.
Follow @AndyBlatchford on Twitter.
Also on HuffPostSweden’s finance minister on the Portugal bailout, Europe’s recovery, and America’s budget mess
I had the change to sit down yesterdau with Sweden’s finance minister, Anders Borg, on the sidelines of the IMF Spring Meetings here in Washington. Borg described the meetings as the most "relaxed" that he’s attended since the start of the financial crisis. Then again, with Sweden raising its growth projections last week and predicting a budget surplus and falling unemployment, he can afford to be more relaxed than some of his colleagues. We talked about the reasons for Sweden’s surprising recent success (a combination of bad experience, luck, and good policy), why Sweden is reluctant to participate in a bailout of Portugal, and why he thinks U.S. politicians need to get real and raise taxes.
Our conversation is below the jump:
How have this year’s IMF meetings been going?
If I compare it to the other IMF meetings and G-20 meetings that I’ve been in during the crisis, everyone’s much more relaxed now. Most countries, with some small exceptions around the Mediterranean, are in much better shape than they have been. So you don’t have the tension that people are under pressure from the economic crisis to the same extent.
Partly I think it’s a little bit of a pause before the really tough decisions. For example here in the U.S. when it comes to deficits — I know because we’ve done a lot of fiscal restructuring in Sweden that that will bring a lot of political tension — but we are maybe a year or two before the U.S. will really start to get serious about their deficits.
But it’s been probably the most relaxed meetings that I’ve been to since I’ve been coming here. People are very much interested in our experience because we tend to be such an outlier in Europe. Sweden’s latest growth number was 7.2 percent. The debt figures are coming down. So people are interested in how this could be — it’s not a simple explanation.
So what is the explanation?
I think it’s a combination of bad experience, luck, and good policy. The bad experience is a real asset. What we went through in the early 90s means that around 97, 98 percent of the public agree we should have a balanced budget. The experience of fiscal restructuring is that it’s actually people who are less well off who are dependent on welfare, which means that they get a bigger part of the hurt when you do fiscal restructuring. So that means that everyone says, "we don’t want to go back to the ’90s. We don’t want to go back to the ’80s and ’70s with inflation and disorder in the labor market. So the bad experience is an asset.
Also, it is a little bit to do with luck. We have a composition with manufacturing, high tech, and iron ore, that is very well situated in the kind of global markets that we now see. Our world market will increase on average 7 percent in the coming years. So we have very strong positioning, which is at least party luck.
The third reason is good policy. We did a lot of structural reforms in 2006 and 2008 with tax cuts, huge restructuring of our early retirement system, and a huge restructuring of our unemployment benefits. That has been a very strong supply-side force on the labor market. So when we went into the crisis, we thought we would have a deficit of some 4 percent. But the underlying trends from these structural reforms have been so strong that we ended up with very close to a balanced budget.
What’s your sense of Europe more broadly? Do you think the crisis is nearing an end?
You have three different things going on at the same time. One is a very strong recovery in Northern Europe. It is not only Sweden that is growing. Estonia, Poland, Finland: all of these countries are forecasted to have around 5 percent growth next year. Germany is obviously in a much stronger position. So, the northern part of Europe is growing very fast.
This could be an issue in a couple of years, because you still have a lot of problems in the south of Europe, which means that the [European Central Bank] will be very reluctant to raise interest rates. So there is a risk that we could have a more unbalanced development.
We have two really big problems to deal with: one is the banking sector. The recapitalization that is needed in Europe is substantial. Then you have the huge issue of public finances which is both shot-term and long-term. Short term, obviously it’s Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. That could be dealt with. The governments are doing the right things. They are increasing VAT rates and the retirement age and so forth.
The other problem is that the whole of Europe is now indebted. So the room for stabilization policy in the next downturn will be very limited. We could have a very severe and harsh crisis the next time we see a slowdown in the world economy.
So from what I understand, Sweden is not interested in participating in a bailout of Portugal?
We have participated in Latvia — which nobody else did but the Nordics, we participated in Iceland — which nobody else did but the Nordics, we participated in Ireland — it’s not as obvious why we should do that but we should always try to be working in solidarity. As for Portugal, I think there are still a lot of uncertainties to be answered by the Portuguese government before we make that decision. I would say that it’s more unlikely we would participate in the Portuguese case than in Ireland.
Why is that, exactly?
Well there’s a limited responsibility. Why did Spain not participate in Latvia? Why didn’t France help us with Iceland? Every country has a neighborhood where you can get the taxpayers to accept that we need to chip in. We’ll contribute more than a billion dollars through the IMF and EU funds. A billion dollars is quite a lot of money. But we will follow the situation closely and if we have the sense that this is systemic risk, we might have to contribute.
In previous meetings it has seemed like there was a tension between the U.S. pushing a more expansionist monetary policy and European governments favoring austerity measures. Is that tension still there?
For us to say that we would ever be over-expansionary, would be very difficult. The U.S. can be very expansionary. You have 10 percent deficit and interest rates are still hovering around 1,2,3, percent. It’s basically only the U.S. that could behave that way. For everybody else it would mean huge bond spreads. To my mind, the U.S. is saying to the rest of us that we should be more expansionary, but we’re also on top of a huge U.S. debt. The markets will not punish the U.S., they will punish everybody else standing on top of that debt. I would be very cautious about running a huge debt like the U.S. because we are a small vulnerable country. That is true of many of these European countries.
Have you been following the budget debate here in the United States? What’s your sense as an outside observer?
When you look at fiscal restructuring — what the U.S. needs to do — it is very clear that they need to increase taxes and cut expenditures. The most obvious thing to do would be to introduce a VAT. Look at the U.K. They are run by a Tory government — they increased the VAT. Look at Greece — it’s a Social Democratic government, they’ve increased VAT. All of these countries have increased VAT because it’s a broad-based tax with low costs and limited impact on growth.
It’s also quite clear that the U.S. doesn’t have control over its healthcare sector. The cost control of Medicare and Medicaid doesn’t really work. We’ve all seen the Congressional Budget Office projections so it is quite obvious that you need to strengthen the revenue side, but also have much better control of the expenditure side.
I’m not sure to what degree people in Sweden are aware of this, but in U.S. political debates, your country is often used as a kind of code word for socialism, high taxes and a generous welfare state. Do you think this view Americans have of Sweden is still accurate?
During [the Moderate Party’s] period in government, we’ve cut taxes quite substantially. For ordinary people, we’ve cut them the most. We’ve also been restructuring our social welfare system. But our idea is that you can keep social cohesion by giving priority to education, healthcare. Everyone, regardless of income can get good healthcare and good education. We think that we are modernizing the Swedish model, making it more flexible, and trying to keep as much social cohesion as we can.Didier Drogba: Replacing Diego Costa against Leicester
Didier Drogba has returned to training with Chelsea ahead of a possible first European outing with the club since scoring the winning goal in the 2012 Champions League final.
Drogba's first spell with the Blues ended with him scoring the decisive penalty which defeated Bayern Munich in the final at the Allianz Arena.
He has now given manager Jose Mourinho a big boost by returning from injury sooner than expected, showing no ill effects as he trained with the Chelsea squad at their Cobham base on Tuesday.
Drogba rejoined Chelsea this summer after a spell at Galatasaray but missed Saturday's win over Swansea because of an ankle injury which was expected to keep him out of the Group G match against Schalke on Wednesday.
Mourinho is likely to start with in-form Diego Costa up front at Stamford Bridge but Drogba may well gain a place on the bench.
Watch Chelsea play Schalke live on Sky Sports 1 from 7.30pm on Wednesday.CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. –Four Marines were killed Thursday when a gunman attacked two military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the U.S. Navy said.
The suspected shooter, 24-year-old Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, is also dead, the FBI said.
“I have directed the FBI to take the lead in the national security investigation of this heinous attack on members of our military,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, calling the shooting “a shameful and cowardly act of violence.”
A terrorism task force involving federal and local agencies is investigating, a law enforcement source said.
Authorities “have not determined whether it was an act of terrorism or whether it was a criminal act,” Ed Reinhold, FBI special agent in charge, told reporters. “We are looking at every possible avenue, whether it was terrorism — whether it was domestic, international — or whether it was a simple, criminal act.”
A key detail will help them make that determination: finding out the suspect’s motive.
In the neighborhood where Abdulazeez is believed to have lived, police cars and an ambulance were on the streets. Residents were blocked from reaching their homes.
“We will treat this as a terrorism investigation until it can be determined that it is not,” Reinhold said. U.S. Attorney Bill Killian earlier told reporters that authorities were treating the shooting as an “act of domestic terrorism.”
The shootings unfolded at two sites over 30 minutes, Reinhold said.
The suspected gunman started spraying bullets at the glass doors of a strip mall military recruiting center around 10:45 a.m. ET, witnesses said. From there, he headed to another location more than seven miles away, an operational support center operated by the U.S. Navy. That’s where the four victims and the gunman were killed, Reinhold said.
At least three people were injured, officials said, including a police officer and a military service member.
The officer, who was injured when he was shot in the ankle, has been treated at the hospital, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke said. A military service member was also among the wounded, the Defense Department said.
What was security situation?
“Today was a nightmare for the city of Chattanooga. … We had someone viciously attack, at two different locations, people who proudly serve our country,” Berke said.
The shootings raised questions about the security at the military centers. Authorities haven’t released details yet about where at the centers the victims were killed or how the gunman gained access.
U.S. President Barack Obama said the FBI director had briefed him on the shootings.
“We take all shootings very seriously. Obviously when you have an attack on a U.S. military facility, then we have to make sure that we have all the information necessary to make an assessment in terms of how this attack took place and what further precautions we can take in the future,” he said, vowing that the investigation would be “thorough and prompt.”
‘It was very loud and very fast’
Gina Mule, a server at a restaurant, said she saw a man who’d been in a silver convertible Mustang, firing a “high-powered rifle” at the recruiting offices at about 10:50 a.m.
She said she first heard “Pow, pow, pow!” She then went to a window, through which she said she saw the man firing shots.
“I don’t know how many shots he fired, but it was a lot,” she said.
A second witness, April Grimmett, said she was working at a hair salon near the recruiting center when she looked out a window and saw a man ducking in between cars.
“Shortly after that, we heard the (shots). It was very loud and very fast,” Grimmett said, without saying what happened to the man she had seen.
A photo that she took shows glass doors damaged by the gunfire.
“I could not believe how many bullet holes were in that door. It was insane,” she said.
Fred Wright, a salesman at a nearby auto parts store, told CNN that after he heard gunshots, three people ran into the shop, hollering they thought “someone was shooting at them.”
Wright said he called 911.
“Sounded like it was 30, 40 shots to me,” Wright said, adding that he never saw a shooter.Cricketers Brett Lee and Ryan Harris describe it as their most prized possession, representing countless hours of hard work and effort, but fans are able to buy one online for less than $10 dollars.
The Baggy Green, made with 100 per cent local wool, is quite possibly the most recognisable and treasured piece of Australian sporting equipment.
Yet a number of eBay sellers, all hailing from India, are now offering "rare and authentic" Baggy Green caps for as little as $8.99.
''I'm very surprised and very disappointed to see that,'' CA spokesman Peter Young told Fairfax Media.
''We are vigilant about this kind of thing.
''It's important we let the world know we do protect Cricket Australia's intellectual property vigorously. We take this kind of issue very seriously and the matter has been referred to our legal department.
''We regard the cap as an iconic symbol and we protect it very, very closely. It is one of the most powerful symbols in not only Australian cricket, but world cricket.
''Genuine baggy green caps, when they go to auction, do very well. In one case, one went for over $400,000 because it was a Sir Donald Bradman cap.''
Originally the Baggy Green was issued as part of the uniform in your kit bag and be replaced on each tour, but then in the early 90s an unofficial tradition kicked off where players would hold on to the original woollen cap and wear it for their entire career.
Former Australian captain Mark Taylor, cap number 346, started the tradition of presenting the Baggy Green to the debutant on the first day of the Test during his tenure.
Steve Waugh, cap 355, then developed that tradition by inviting past players to come back and do the presentation, while Ricky Ponting often made the presentation himself as captain.
Since 1877, 437 caps have been issued, the most recent to Alex Doolan in South Africa.
Quick Single: Doolan receives Baggy Green 437
One thing current and former Australian players agree on it is a very emotional moment in your career.
"The first time I put a Baggy Green on it was very emotional," Mike Hussey told cricket.com.au.
"It was the culmination of 10 years of cricket and a lot of hard yakka; a lot of ups and downs and heartache and all of those emotions coming together to get your ultimate dream. Growing up that’s what I dreamed of wearing."
"You sort of pinch yourself to say this is actually mine now," Ryan Harris added.
"Justin Langer said a good thing to me. He said you're not looking at his Baggy Green and touching his Baggy Green, it's your Baggy Green now. That sort of stuck with me and it's quite an amazing feeling."
"It's a wonderful club to be involved with only 400-odd having had the opportunity," said Brett Lee. "It's my most prized possession."The Threefoot Building (sometimes referred to as simply "The Threefoot") is a historic office building located in downtown Meridian, Mississippi named after the Threefoot family who owned an operated a business in downtown Meridian during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Designed by Claude H. Lindsley and completed in 1929 in the Art Deco style, the 16-story building is still the tallest in the city. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 18, 1979, under the Meridian Multiple Property Submission of buildings contributing to the historic nature of the city's downtown. In 2008 the Threefoot was recognized by the state as a Mississippi Landmark.
Despite the completion of the building nearly immediately preceding the onset of the Great Depression, leading to the bankruptcy of the Threefoot family, the building was occupied by many different tenants until the 1990s, by which time suburban development had drawn off most of them in favor of peripheral locations. Hoping to attract new tenants to the building and the rest of downtown, in 2002 the city started the annual Threefoot Arts Festival, naming it after the building. After attracting some interest in the mid 2000s, the city's plans for redevelopment foundered with changes in city administration in 2009, resulting in the National Trust for Historic Preservation listing the building in 2010 in its annual group of "America's Most Endangered Places." In 2015 after extensive efforts by a newer administration, an agreement was reached in which the building was sold to a private developer and is project to be converted into a Courtyard by Marriott by 2017.
History [ edit ]
The 16-story brick structure was developed by and named for the Threefoot family, German-Jewish immigrants who arrived in the mid-19th century and anglicized their name from Dreyfuss ("three foot" in German) to join their new American home. Abraham Threefoot began to make a name for the family in the late 1860s.[3] He owned a grocery store on 25th Avenue in mid-1870. It may have been his grocery that was located at the corner of 4th Street and 25th Avenue on the ground floor of what was known as the Grand Opera House. The grocery moved at least once to a different location on the same street in 1884, but sources are unclear if it had three sites or two.[4] The grocery was taken over by Abraham's sons–H. Marshall, Kutcher, and Lewis, collectively known as the "Threefoot Brothers"–after his death.[3]
By 1910, sales at Threefoot and Sons exceeded $100,000 per year.[3] When the YMCA building was being constructed, the builders ran into financial trouble, but the Threefoot Brothers donated $35,000 to the project, allowing construction to continue.[4] Just before the beginning of the Great Depression, the company built the Threefoot Building in downtown Meridian on 22nd Avenue adjacent to the Marks-Rothenberg Department Store and the Grand Opera House.[3] It was the tallest building in the city and admired as a symbol of the city's growth. The office building was finished in 1929, shortly before the stock market crash. A combination of shaky finances and the onset of the Great Depression caused the family's business to cease operation.[4]
The building operated as an office building under different ownership for several decades. Demographic changes followed suburban development, stimulated by highway construction. After Meridian's first suburban mall was built in the 1970s, continued development outside the city drew off tenants and other businesses. By the 1990s, the Threefoot Building had been mostly abandoned.[5]
Threefoot Festival 2009
In an effort to attract interest from a private developer to reoccupy and renovate the building, the city started to hold an annual showcase of art by local artists in 2002, naming it the "Threefoot Arts Festival" in honor of the historic building's status as an icon of downtown and indirectly the Threefoot family, who had contributed much to the city. The festival was held annually in October at Dumont Plaza, located two blocks from the building, and on 4th and 5th streets between 22nd and 23rd avenues.[6]
Along with art exhibitions from state and regional artists, the festival also featured a variety of live music and entertainment throughout the day, as well as food and beverages sold by local companies and organizations. Retail stores and businesses throughout the city helped to promote the festival by offering special deals and discounts to members of the festival. Admission was free, so an accurate count of attendees is difficult to achieve, but annual turnout is estimated to have been several thousand people.[6]
In 2009 the festival was combined with the Arts in the Park Festival, previously held in early April at Bonita Lakes (and earlier at Highland Park), to create the Threefoot Festival.[7]
Since 2011 the festival has been held on the first weekend of April on 7th Street between 23rd and 25th avenues and on the lawn in front of Meridian City Hall.[8] It includes art contests for children in grade school (hosted at the Meridian Museum of Art), access for children to try out musical instruments provided by the Meridian Symphony Orchestra, performances by local bands, and stands promoting local restaurants.[9]
Preservation efforts [ edit ]
Threefoot Building in 2018
Historic Restoration Inc. [ edit ]
In August 2006, the city purchased the building from Alabama developer Howard Robbins for $1.2 million, with the expectation that it would be renovated by a developer from Jackson,[5] but the city could not immediately attract regional interest. Historic Restoration Inc. (HRI), a New Orleans developer known for restoring the King Edward Hotel in Jackson, eventually showed interest in the project in 2008, proposing that the building be transformed into a 120-room Courtyard by Marriott hotel.[10][11] The renovation would have cost $55 million, and the city would have backed $14 million of it. After much debate, HRI reached an agreement in January 2009 with mayor John Robert Smith and the city council.[5]
In July 2009 newly elected Mayor Cheri Barry took office and worked to undo the agreement. Stating that she saw problems in the plan, she asked Mississippi Heritage Trust Director David Preziosi if it was possible to remove the building from the National Register of Historic Places in order to make it easier to demolish. Preziosi advised Barry against having the property delisted and offered her names of people to talk to about funding options for the building. The Meridian Star reported in June 2010 that the mayor's office had still not contacted the people suggested to Barry.[5] At the same time, HRI was asking the city to help complete funding of the project by acquiring grants from the state. Barry, however, refused to ask the state, claiming that the economy was too stressed to ask for money that wasn't essential to the city's function.[5]
After a long controversy, HRI's agreement with the city was terminated in late 2009 due to lack of support from Barry and the need for various drainage repairs. Because the city had terminated the agreement, it was required to reimburse HRI for the $1 million already put into the project. In a prepared statement, Barry claimed that the city and HRI would "look down the road for future projects and possibly even resume the Threefoot Project under different circumstances and different finances."
Further efforts [ edit ]
After the deal with HRI was terminated, the National Trust for Historic Preservation included the building on its annual list of America's Most Endangered Historic Places in June 2010.[13] In October 2010, the city accepted a grant from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) for a study of the building. The study was to focus on what would have to be done to rehabilitate the building for use.[14] The city also hired Watkins Development, at a cost of $10,000 per month, to focus on developing not only the Threefoot Building but the rest of downtown and all of Meridian. Watkins Development – like HRI – was involved in the renovation of Jackson's King Edward Hotel.[14] The building assessment study was completed in mid-2012, finding that the foundation of the building was sound, but the upper floors were being subjected to daily weather because of blown out windows, crumbling bricks, and other structural problems.[15]
Seeing the lack of developer interest, a local group of private citizens, identifying as the Threefoot Preservation Society, formed in early June 2013 to discuss a future for the building.[16] Since 2013, the Threefoot Preservation Society has held weekly cleanups of the building, even attracting descendants of the Threefoot family to help out on occasion.[17][18] The group hosted an event celebrating the 84th anniversary of the building's opening in April 2014, where for the first time in years, the city opened the first floor of Threefoot Building to the public. Dr. Henry Threefoot and his family, descendants of the original Threefoot family, were invited to join in the festivities.[19] Another celebration was held in April 2015 for the 85th anniversary, and mayor Percy Bland was in attendance to show support for the society's endeavors.[20]
Ascent Hospitality Management [ edit ]
In September 2015 a deal was approved by the Meridian City Council which sold the building to a Buford, Georgia-based hotel management company named Ascent Hospitality Management. The building was purchased "as-is" for $10,000 cash, and Ascent agreed to begin construction within 12 months of the date of purchase on a Courtyard by Marriott hotel with 120 guest rooms. Construction is scheduled to take approximately 14 to 18 months, with the company committing to spending at least $14 million on the project.[21] John Tampa, head of Ascent Hospitality Management, has set a goal for the opening of the renovated building to coincide with the opening of the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Center at the site of the old Hotel Meridian in November 2017. As of August 2018, no renovations have begun on the building. [22]Starbucks is assuring customers that it does not provide any type of financial support to Israel or the Israeli army after an “uptick in false rumors” said otherwise.
The coffee giant issued a statement announcing that neither Starbucks nor CEO Howard Schultz “provide financial support to the Israeli government and/or the Israeli Army in any way.
“Starbucks has been and remains a nonpolitical organization. We do not support any political or religious cause,” the statement said.
The company has publicly refuted claims about its support for Israel before, CNN Money reported. Spokesman Jim Olson said the company is reiterating its position due to an “uptick in false rumors.”
Mr. Olsen wouldn’t say where the rumors are coming from, but CNN reports that a fast-growing boycott campaign on the app Buycott has targeted Starbucks for what it says is the company’s support for “the occupation of Palestine.”
“Starbucks does not support any political or religious causes, and that holds true for Howard as well,” Mr. Olson said. “There’s no financial support from Howard or the company to the Israeli government for any purposes.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.writing good tests is about much more than just verifying correctness
Clarity means that a test should serve as readable documentation for humans, describing the code being tested in terms of its public APIs.
A test is complete when its body contains all of the information you need to understand it, and concise when it doesn't contain any other distracting information.
@Test public void shouldPerformAddition() { Calculator calculator = new Calculator( new RoundingStrategy(), "unused", ENABLE_COSIN_FEATURE, 0.01, calculusEngine, false ); int result = calculator.doComputation(makeTestComputation()); assertEquals(5, result); // Where did this number come from? }
@Test public void shouldPerformAddition() { Calculator calculator = newCalculator(); int result = calculator.doComputation(makeAdditionComputation(2, 3)); assertEquals(5, result); }
resilient test doesn't have to change unless the purpose or behavior of the class being tested changesIn 1952 a killer fog that contained pollutants covered London for five days, causing breathing problems and killing thousands of residents. The exact cause and nature of the fog has remained mostly unknown for decades, but an international team of scientists believes that the mystery has been solved. Their research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 9, 2016, also suggests that the same air chemistry also happens today in China and other places.
When the fog first arrived, in December of 1952, London residents gave it little notice because it appeared no different from the familiar natural fogs that have swept over Great Britain for thousands of years.
But over the next few days, conditions deteriorated, and the sky became dark. Visibility was reduced to only three feet in many parts of the city. All transportation was shut down and tens of thousands of people had trouble breathing. By the time the fog lifted on December 9, at least 4,000 people had died and more than 150,000 had been hospitalized, although recent British studies suggest that the death count was likely far higher – more than 12,000 people of all ages. Thousands of animals in the area were also killed.
It has long been known that many of those deaths were likely caused by emissions from coal burning, but the exact chemical processes that led to the deadly mix of fog and pollution have not been fully understood over the past 60 years.
The 1952 killer fog led to the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1956 by the British Parliament and is still considered the worst air pollution event in the European history.
Through laboratory experiments and atmospheric measurements in China, the team has come up with the answers. Texas A&M University researcher Renyi Zhang led the study. Zhang said in a statement:
People have known that sulfate was a big contributor to the fog, and sulfuric acid particles were formed from sulfur dioxide released by coal burning for residential use and power plants, and other means. But how sulfur dioxide was turned into sulfuric acid was unclear. Our results showed that this process was facilitated by nitrogen dioxide, another co-product of coal burning, and occurred initially on natural fog. Another key aspect in the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfate is that it produces acidic particles, which subsequently inhibits this process. Natural fog contained larger particles of several tens of micrometers in size, and the acid formed was sufficiently diluted. Evaporation of those fog particles then left smaller acidic haze particles that covered the city.
The study shows that similar chemistry occurs frequently in China, which has battled air pollution for decades. Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, China is home to 16 of them, and Beijing often exceeds by many times the acceptable air standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Zhang said:
The difference in China is that the haze starts from much smaller nanoparticles, and the sulfate formation process is only possible with ammonia to neutralize the particles. In China, sulfur dioxide is mainly emitted by power plants, nitrogen dioxide is from power plants and automobiles, and ammonia comes from fertilizer use and automobiles. Again, the right chemical processes have to interplay for the deadly haze to occur in China. Interestingly, while the London fog was highly acidic, contemporary Chinese haze is basically neutral.
Zhang says China has been working diligently over the past decade to lessen its air pollution problems, but persistent poor air quality often requires people to wear breathing masks during much of the day. China’s explosive industrial and manufacturing growth and urbanization over the past 25 years have contributed to the problem.
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Bottom line: Scientists believe they have finally solved the mystery of the killer fog that blanketed London for five days in December 1952, causing breathing problems and killing thousands of residents. The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 9, 2016, also suggests that the same air chemistry also happens today in China and other places.
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Children were evacuated from a London hospital’s paediatric ward after a fox fell through the ceiling.
The animal is believed to have climbed into the roof while building work was being carried out at the North Middlesex University Hospital in Edmonton.
The inpatient ward was closed for several days while the building was secured and repairs carried out.
A spokesman for the trust said the fox fell through a ceiling tile after managing to get into the building during a programme of major building works.
Staff evacuated eight children from the ward and alerted the RSCPA who removed the animal.
The trust said work was undertaken, following the incident in late June, to improve the security of the 1970s tower block on its North London site, so that animals could not gain access.
A spokesman said no-one was harmed during the incident, which occurred in a “non-patient” area of the inpatient paediatric ward.Miss. Prison Operator Out; Facility Called A 'Cesspool'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Rogelio V. Solis/AP Rogelio V. Solis/AP
One month after a federal court ordered sweeping changes at a troubled juvenile prison in rural Mississippi, the private company managing the prison is out. A report by the Justice Department describes "systemic, egregious and dangerous practices" at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility.
As those words imply, the official report is scathing.
Federal Judge Carlton Reeves wrote that the youth prison "has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk."
Walnut Grove, located an hour's drive east of Jackson, is a 1,450-bed prison that houses inmates ages 13 to 22 who are minors convicted as adults. It is run by GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla., the nation's second-largest for-profit prison corporation, which posted a profit of $284 million last year. The Mississippi Department of Corrections pays GEO to manage the prison.
Jonathan Smith is chief of special litigation in the |
German guilt, think about the last century.
Hans Fallada’s novel of the German resistance, Every Man Dies Alone, is a masterpiece; your translation was flawless. How did you get the chance to translate that book, and what did you think of working on it?
That is an amazing book. I just remember the draw of it — I read it in two days. Another reason to translate things is to learn. Translating that book taught me a new thing: I’d never translated anything like a thriller before, and I just wanted to learn, to have that experience. The main task I set myself was not to get in the way of the reader, so that the reader in English can have an experience of similar speed to the experience of the German reader. When I read it in German, I couldn’t put it down.
How would you describe your process? And are there any specific tools you rely on when you’re translating?
I do the first draft as quickly as I can, then I put it away. I used to see my father’s manuscripts, clamped with bulldog clips, hanging rather like hams from the rafters. These manuscripts would be resting, or maturing. I like to do this: I work as quickly as I can; I let it hang for three months or six months, then I’ll go back to it and revise it five, 10, 15, 20 times. Bulldog clips — that would be my tool.
When you do your revisions, are you doing them through rewrites, or is it more like fine-tuning?
I am mostly copyediting. My girlfriend is German, and I am native, so if there is something sort of old or obscure then I may ask her advice — as luck would have it, she is a German copyeditor. Actually, on the question of a special tool I use for translating — she would be my instrument!
What shared characteristics do you find translators have?
I don’t really know many translators. I find writers or poets reclusive, and I think translators are fairly similar. I have met very few. I was lucky enough to meet Edie Grossman: she is just a wonderful character.
What do you dislike about translating?
In my own writing, my natural unit is a poem, which is under a page, or a book review, which is maybe four or five, so when I’m translating a book, the idea of being trapped under a large amount of prose is horrible. I kind of put my head down and drill through it.
Do you think that, as a native speaker of the language from which you translate, you work differently from translators who had to study the language they translate, and might their formal study of a foreign language give them an advantage at the craft?
People come at it from such different ways. I’ve never studied German; my program is quite wrong, my equipment is Glücksfall — luck — but I did study a bit of French and classical languages. Now my Latin and Greek are gone, but I did do Latin for six or seven years, and that seems to me terribly important. When I first translated Kafka, I made the discovery that it seemed more like translating Latin than German, because the structures are so firm and ineluctable. It was not a matter of vocabulary, it was a matter of argument; there would be a very strong drift one way, then a strong drift in the other.
I find Thomas Mann terribly difficult to translate.
But that’s just because of his vocabulary.
Do you have any favorite translators from the past?
I was lucky to meet Ralph Manheim, in Paris a long time ago. I think he just summoned me. We had drinks at his apartment in Paris, and from him I learned that translating could be a profession. Here was somebody who treated it as a job, who had an office, who got up in the morning, went to the office, came back, had whiskey, had his dinner — he didn’t live in the middle of it, which is what I suppose I do. I’m a little bit like Kafka’s creature in “The Burrow,” which I’ve just finished. I’ve just translated a collection of Kafka’s “other” stories — the ones that weren’t published in his lifetime — called The Burrow and Other Stories. Penguin will publish it in England, and I hope they will in America too.
Have you translated works that have previous translations, and if so, do you have any firm policy on looking at prior translations?
Yes — that is about as exposed as you can feel in literature. It is almost impossible that you would know a book and love it, and then a new translation would come along, and you would think, “Oh, this is even better!” That must be extremely rare. It is really difficult offering a new translation; there are readers like you and me who are just always going to prefer Constance Garnett. When I have retranslated, it’s either been work I didn’t know had been translated before, like Koeppen’s Death in Rome; or it’s been Kafka, of whom there are many other versions. I’m also doing a new translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I suppose I must retranslate a lot, because I do so many novels from the 1920s and 1930s. Germany is the only place I really know about. You tend to get new translations in Europe of important novels every 20 or 30 years, but in English, a version lasts for 80 years. Berlin Alexanderplatz was translated once, 80 years ago, so far as I know.
Will you read the earlier translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz as you work on your own?
Well, if I’m very unhappy about some particular bit, then I will look at it. I will only look at a preexisting translation in a spirit of anxiety, or to see how some unusual word is translated, like, for instance, “brougham.”
What is the difference between a poor translation and a good one?
A poor translation reads like a dead text — a foreign, alien text. A good translation provides an experience; it is alive, it quivers. That is the goal I’ve set myself.
Can you fill in the blanks: A translation is to the original as X is to Y?
I think that’s really difficult. It depends what your view is. Is this thinking of a reader who can read both the original and the translation? Or is it thinking of somebody who can’t?
Well, either; Petrarch once wrote something to the effect that a translation was to the original as the son is to the father: sharing similar, related blood and sinew, but having a distinct identity and form. I was thinking along those lines.
Well, I think there’s something filial about it in my case; there is my writing poems and translating, and my father’s writing novels — and indeed, my translating his novels. I was translating my father’s novels when he died 20 years ago, and it seemed to suspend mortality. I translated a book of his called The Film Explainer, then two more: Luck and Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl.
How many books have you translated?
I think I have translated 80-odd books, more than one a year, but I’m not really counting. I stopped counting some time ago. There is no definite number.
Which has been your most meaningful collaboration?
I have two answers, one is Joseph Roth, from whom I’ve translated the most books, and probably with whom I’ll be associated for a long time, the other is somebody I ironically think of as “my living author,” Peter Stamm, because he is alive. Otherwise, I specialize in translating dead people. Peter is my living author, and I think I’ve said ironically, “The dead are more grateful.” Peter is very charming, he tells this rueful story about getting my translation of his first book, then going through it and sending me two pages of notes and queries, quibbles; until then it sort of dawned on him, or people told him, that I knew what I was doing, and thereafter he left me completely alone. I’ve done 10 of his books.
What effect would you say online translating engines have on translation?
Hurting, I think. I guess I’m a linguistic conservative, and I feel most things relating to language and expression are getting worse, and I think machines and gadgets are not helping. I think one is a craftsman, and a person does better work than any machine.
Are there any books in translation that you are longing to read?
I haven’t read Knausgaard. I think I’m due, and I’ve just read something that Penguin is doing in England by the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian called For Two Thousand Years. It’s set among Jewish characters in Bucharest in the ’20s.
Can you name an author who writes in German and who ought to be translated into English but hasn’t been, or hasn’t been enough?
Jakob Wassermann. It’s really a question of getting a commensurate readership, I think. I’m sort of expecting the great German novel of reunification, of the fall of the Wall, but I’ve been waiting for a long time. I tried to get a writer named Hans Joachim Schädlich published; he is an East German author, and he has a great story about a character by the name of Tallhover, a Prussian police spy. It starts in 1848, and just keeps going. Demand for his services doesn’t cease, so the man himself doesn’t stop either. He lives through German unification, World War I, Weimar, the Nazi period, East Germany and the Stasi, and at the end he’s still going.
Why should people read books in translation?
Our own stories are not enough for us in an age of increasing insufficiency. For our own humanity, it is important to read the stories from other places: the book of Africa, the book of Asia, the book of Antarctica.
¤
Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic and translator.Abstract
North America hosted a diverse assemblage of horned dinosaurs from the late Campanian until the end of the Cretaceous, but comparatively little is known about earlier horned dinosaurs. This paper reports on previously undescribed ceratopsian remains from the middle Campanian beds of the Judith River Formation of Montana, which represent the oldest known chasmosaurine. The Judith River chasmosaur shows a combination of characters not seen in any previously described ceratopsid. The parietal has a broad median bar, a rounded caudal margin, and highly reduced epiparietals. Episquamosals are enlarged anteriorly but decrease in size posteriorly, and imbricate as in centrosaurines. The postorbital horns are moderately elongate, inclined anterolaterally, and have an unusual teardrop-shaped cross section. The unique combination of characters seen in the Judith River chasmosaurine precludes referral to any previously known genus, and it is therefore described as a new genus and species, Judiceratops tigris. The addition of Judiceratops to the dinosaurian fauna of North America underscores the diversity of horned dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous, which results from a combination of high diversity within faunas, a high degree of endemism, and rapid faunal turnover.
Keywords: Dinosauria, Ceratopsia, Ceratopsidae, Chasmosaurinae, Cretaceous, Campanian, Judith River Formation
_________________________In the wake of the meeting between the leaders of Russia and Japan, the United States has raised concerns over Tokyo's commitement to anti-Moscow sanctions imposed by G-7 nations.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The United States expects the other Group of Seven (G-7) nations including Japan to reject "business as usual" with Russia but would specify whether Tokyo would continue to impose economic sanctions, National Security Council Senior Director for Asian Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink said in a briefing.
"There's a great deal of unanimity within the G 7 including with Japan that we have fundamental concerns about certain actions taken by Russian including its aggression in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea," Kritenbrink told reporters on Wednesday.
© Sputnik / Sergey Krivosheyev Japan Prepares to Discuss Kuril Islands Economic Projects With Russia in 2017
Kritenbrink was previewing outgoing US President Barack Obama’s scheduled December 27 meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Hawaii, but he made no specific mention of whether Tokyo would continue to participate in imposing economic sanctions on Russia.
"We will not return to business as usual until Russia returns to its Minsk commitments," Kritenbrink stated.
Kritenbrink noted Obama and Abe would celebrate the achievements of the US-Japanese alliance over the past four years, but he gave no specifics apart from mentioning new guidelines on joint training between military forces that were approved last year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Abe held meetings in Nagato and Tokyo during Putin’s visit to Japan December 15-16. During Putin’s visit, Russian and Japanese companies signed 68 documents on energy, investment, agriculture and visa facilitation.In its submission to the Department of Telecommunications, Facebook has said that more than 17 million people have expressed support for its Internet.org services, via SMS and the Internet.org Facebook page. The company has made a 9.9 mb PDF with comments available via a dropbox link in its submission. A sample from the PDF:
MediaNama’s take: Facebook ran what are, in our opinion, misleading campaigns asking people to support Internet.org. As indicated in this Quartz story, it didn’t give people an option to not support Internet.org, or give it a thumbs down. It was also misrepresented its Internet.org group of services as free Internet services.
Already explicitly told @facebook 3 times I don’t support Internet. Org. Now they remove “No” button. #shameless pic.twitter.com/w5hIo90oOS — Brij Bhasin (@brijbhasin) August 19, 2015
Apart from this it’s important to note that the DoT never said that comments could have been sent via platforms other than MyGov:
@nixxin @lmirani @mojorojo Govt didn’t say FB was an acceptable medium for sending comments. Am I allowed to conduct a survey of my own? — Aritra Das (@the_kindly_1) August 24, 2015
Our fisking of Facebook’s comments (pdf) to the DoT on Net Neutrality:
Facebook: We oppose attempts by operators to block or throttle Internet traffic, or create special paid “fast lanes”. But net neutrality is not in conflict with working to get more people connected. We believe that the principles of net neutrality must coexist with initiatives to expand access to the Internet.
MediaNama’s take:
1. Internet.org allows operators to block sites: When it was relaunched in May, Internet.org’s terms and conditions said that, “Operators may decline services that cause undue strain to networks, or breach legal or regulatory requirements.” Now they’ve been modified to be far more vague: “Submission and/or approval by Facebook does not guarantee that your site(s) will be made available through the Internet.org.”
Therefore, Internet.org isn’t an “open” platform that allows access to all of the Internet, and Facebook’s submission claims one thing, while its terms and conditions allow another.
Also read:
2. Internet.org violates Net Neutrality: Note how Facebook positions Net Neutrality as merely being about blocking and throttling, avoiding any mention of price discrimination, which is a net neutrality issue, and has been banned in countries like Chile, Norway, Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Malta and Japan. Regulators in Norway, Germany and Austria have publicly said that zero-rating infringes net neutrality. (source: ToI and DFMonitor)
Facebook: To address the barriers of affordability and awareness, Facebook partners with local carriers to offer free basic services to people. People can browse a set of useful health, employment, search, social and local information services without incurring any data charges. These free basic services are accessible through the Internet.org app or through a simple web browser.
MediaNama’s Take:
1. Facebook is falsely positioning Internet.org as targeting poor people: If you see the advertisement from Reliance Communications, Internet.org’s telecom partner, it targets students.
2. Ignores the fact that there are neutral ways of providing free access: A false premiss is being created, that you cannot have access without violating Net Neutrality. As Mitchell Baker, Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation pointed out, their partnership with Grameenphone in Bangladesh allows users to receive 20 MB of data usage for free each day, in exchange for viewing an advertisement. Ozone Networks, an Indian WiFi provider does ad-supported WiFi too. Orange and Mozilla are experimenting with a model in multiple African African and Middle Eastern markets, where users purchasing a $40 (USD) Klif phone receive unlimited talk, text, and 500 MB a month for 6 months.
Facebook: (i) Internet.org is not a “gatekeeper” and is open to all developers: The Internet.org platform is an open program that lets developers easily create services and gives people choice over the free basic services they can use. Our goal with Internet.org is to work with as many developers and entrepreneurs as possible to extend the benefits of connectivity to diverse, local communities. The guidelines for developers to use the platform are that services should encourage the exploration of the broader Internet wherever possible; use data very efficiently; and meet various technical specifications. You can read more at:https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participation-guidelines.
MediaNama’s Take:
1. If it is open, then why do developers have to go through an approval process from Facebook and the telecom operators Why do they have to conform to Facebook’s terms and conditions, which include rewriting URL’s, removal of embedded content? To quote the Internet.org participation guidelines: “In order for your content to be proxied as described above, your URLs may be re-written and embedded content (like javascript and content originating from another domain) removed. In addition, secure content is not supported and may not load.”
2. According to Facebook’s terms and conditions, which are applicable to Internet.org partners they get a license for the content on partner sites:
1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
3. Facebook collects data on users of their partners websites: This, the user doesn’t really belong to the partner, but to Facebook.
“We collect information when you install, run or use any of our services, including the free websites and services provided through Internet.org. Please read our full Data Policy and Cookies Policy, which explain how we receive, use and disclose this info about you.”
Facebook: (iii) Internet.org brings new people online faster: July 2015 in fact marks the one-year anniversary of the introduction of the Internet.org app in its first country, Zambia. We’ve found that Internet.org brings new users onto mobile networks on average over 50% faster after launching free basic services. This means that if 1,000 peoplewho were brand new to the Internet were signing up per month for mobile data services before launching Internet.org, 1,500 people sign up per month after launching Internet.org.
MediaNama’s Take:
1. Not really bringing people online in droves in India: In fact, as per Facebook’s own data, of the 800,000 users on Internet.org in India, it said that only 20% had never used the Internet before. This indicates that users are switching to Internet.org from paid access to the open Internet. If you see the advertising from Reliance Communications, it appears that the company is using Internet.org to pull in customers from other telecom operators, rather than get new people online.
2. No data to ratify the claim that Internet.org brings people online 50% faster in India. How do you even prove this? Secondly, if you look at Internet growth data in India (sample copy), we really don’t have a problem signing new users up, so far.
Facebook: (iv) Internet.org encourages access to the broader Internet and bridges the“connectivity gap”:The Internet.org business model of partnering with local carriers will be successful only if new users access the broader Internet by buying paid data 3 plans. Because local carriers can’t afford to offer free Internet access, the program is designed only to serve as an onramp for users to the broader Internet. Our data shows that Internet.org accomplishes this goal of encouraging users to explore the wider Internet. In fact, more than half of the people who come online through Internet.org are paying for data and accessing the Internet within the first 30 days.
MediaNama’s Take: If Internet.org is a promotional scheme, then why is it permanent? Why can a user continue on Internet.org forever (or as long as telecom operators allow it), instead of being forced to switch within a week or a month? How is it encouraging broader access to the web? Why can’t we choose more neutral ways of giving access, or why can’t telecom operators just run promotional schemes offering 50 mb free Internet for everyone, like they did with SMS, where they offered users free SMS for a month?Christian Benteke: Working his way back from an Achilles injury
Christian Benteke is ignoring speculation regarding his Aston Villa future as he focuses on his return to full fitness.
The Belgium international striker saw an Achilles injury cut short his 2013/14 campaign and wreck his World Cup dream.
The 23-year-old is not expected to be back in action until October at the earliest, having been told that he would be sidelined for around six months.
Speculation is speculation. It doesn’t mean it’s the truth. What I need to do is get back to playing well for Aston Villa. And if some other club is interested in me they have to speak to the club, not just speak about me. Christian Benteke
A lengthy spell on the treatment table has done little to curb the rumours surrounding a possible summer switch, though, with clubs across Europe still closely monitoring the powerful frontman.
Benteke is aware of the ongoing transfer gossip, but he has sought to assure Villa supporters that he remains committed to a long-term contract in the Midlands and has expressed no desire to move on.
He told The Sun: “I intend to come back bigger, better and stronger than last season.
“Speculation is speculation. It doesn’t mean it’s the truth. What I need to do is get back to playing well for Aston Villa.
“And if some other club is interested in me they have to speak to the club, not just speak about me.
“Of course it’s nice to hear this club or that club wants you, but it means nothing.
“My first ambition is to focus on my rehabilitation.
“It was nice to be in the USA with the rest of the boys on the club’s tour – even though I was training on my own.
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“I knew the manager would take me to Texas. He gave me all those months off to recover in Belgium but now I need to be close to the squad again.”
Benteke may still be some way off a return to competitive action, but a man who has plundered 34 goals during his two seasons in English football is itching to get going again.
He added: “It’s going to be some feeling when I can finally kick a ball with the lads again.
“You know that look on a kid’s face when you give them a ball to play with for the first time and they’re really happy?
“I’m a grown man but I’ll be as happy as a child kicking his first ball when I return.
“I can’t wait to get back. I want to play football again. I’ve really missed it.
“That’s the hardest thing about being injured, not being able to go what I really love – playing football.”Photo: WPI Roboticists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute outfitted a Husky ground robot with an arm and spray system to demonstrate how a remotely controlled vehicle could assist in decontamination tasks.
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Last month, we previewed a workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers that was being held by the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at Texas A&M University in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology. The goal was to try to figure out how (or if) robots might be able to help out in the current Ebola crisis, and how we might prepare for robots to be useful in future medical situations. The workshop was held early this month, and yesterday, CRASAR director Dr. Robin Murphy posted her assessment of how things went.
According to Dr. Murphy, “the major takeaway was that robots do exist that could be immediately repurposed now to protect Ebola health workers but how robots fit into the medical response enterprise is as important as what the robots can actually do.”
What this means is that there are systems available now that fulfill some of those roles that we talked about in our previous article, but that actually getting robots to be useful, and used, in these roles requires thinking about all kinds of complicated stuff that people who develop and use robots right now might not have considered.
Let’s take a look at some examples that Dr. Murphy uses to illustrate how a robot might not be entirely appropriate to use in a context where it might otherwise be valuable:
Does the robot work within the cultural context in which it will be deployed? It seems like telepresence would be a great way to allow doctors to safely interact with patients, but as Dr. Murphy points out, this could easily “overwhelm a non-Western family who has never seen a computer.” A better solution might be to use something less, you know, robotic, like a tablet with a camera in it.
Does the robot fit in with existing workflow and practices? Healthcare workers are extraordinarily busy, and they’ve got a system of strict and established protocols for doing what they do. How likely is it that they’re going to want to spend the free time that they don’t have trying to adjust what they’re doing to deal with some kind of robotic system that they’d been getting along without? Dr. Murphy suggests that “small changes that produce at least a tenfold benefit can make a difference,” and might therefore be worth trying to implement.
Can the robot realistically function reliably within the environment? This is much more of a practical question. Robots will need to be able to deal with lots of dirt, canvas floors, narrow doorways, and electrical power and wireless that may not be reliable at all. Also, the robots will need to be decontaminated, and nobody is going to want to have to deal with some sort of special, gentle, robot-friendly decontamination procedure. Your robot had better be cool with getting doused in bleach.
Is the robot easy to maintain and use? Robots in the field likely won’t have access to a lot of batteries, not to mention spare parts, and even if they do, healthcare workers in protective gear are definitely not going to want to spend their time trying to fix a broken robot that they have no idea how to fix. Similarly, the robot can’t have a steep learning curve, or it just won’t be worth the time for health workers and responders to figure out.
With all of this stuff in mind, Dr. Murphy says that the biggest issue right now is “not the lack of capable robots but rather the lack of requirements that would allow industry to invest in repurposing robots and enable agencies to test and evaluate the robots and develop training.” In other words, the hardware exists, but nobody is quite sure yet how to effectively get the robots that can do the job into situations in which they’d be helpful.
Having said that, the workshop participants did come up with some near-term ways in which robots may be able to help with medical disasters. These seem to be the most realistic:
Remote interaction with family members: Medical interpreters could use telepresence devices to work with family members, performing relatively simple tasks like helping them fill out forms that might otherwise require a human to be present.
Materials handling: Robots could minimize the amount of time humans spend in risky situations by moving litters, transporting contaminated waste, or transitioning materials into or out of “hot” areas.
Decontamination: One of the most obvious uses, robots [like the one pictured above, a prototype developed by Taskin Padir’s group at at Worcester Polytechnic Institute] could sterilize rooms, equipment, or themselves.
Delivery and resupply: Some villages are inaccessible during the rainy season, and unmanned boats or UAVs may be able to deliver small amounts of critical supplies. However, even something as simple as this has important cultural considerations, as Dr. Murphy describes: “for example it is better for a medium sized UAV to drop off a large payload of supplies and let the village equivalent of the American Red Cross representative go fetch it and deliver it to different households as part of their daily routine or should a smaller UAV do a precision drop to individuals?”
In some ways, the things that this workshop is dealing with are considerations that the entire field of robotics needs to try to understand: just because robots can help, doesn’t mean that they should help, and especially doesn’t mean that the people that they would be helping even want them to help, all things considered.
Part of the focus of the workshop was identifying two things: what are the most critical problems in the current situation, and is the value proposition of using a robot to mitigate or solve these problems high enough to make it worthwhile? More specifically, can implementing a robot mean a small change in procedure that leads to a tenfold (at least) benefit?
In a few of the cases that Dr. Murphy discusses, the answer may be yes, although there’s still a lot of work to do in making that actually happen. And with that in mind, CRASAR will host a second workshop to discuss specific use cases for robots in early January of 2015.
Dr. Murphy goes into much more detail on the CRASAR blog, which you can read at the link below.
Via [ CRASAR ]Isis isn’t a fan of these jeans (Picture: File)
In a move that wouldn’t go down too well on the trendy streets of east London, Isis have imposed a new law to crack down on men wearing skinny jeans.
The terror group has said that it would also imprison anyone caught with music on their mobile phones, smoking, or turning up late for prayer in the state capital of Raqqa, Syria.
According to reports, skinny jeans-wearers will be jailed for 10 days, and made to take an ‘Islamic course’ during their imprisonment.
And at the end of their jail time, they will be forced to take a test, with those who pass being immediately released.
But those who fail will be kept behind bars until they pass.
MORE: This 150-egg omelette is the ultimate Easter treat
Isis militants have cracked down on skinny Jeans and loud music (Picture: PA)
Reports of the new laws were revealed by anti-Isis group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, who slammed the sanctions as ‘volatile and changeable’.
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Jassem, who lives in Raqqa, told the group: ‘Isis tightens penalties and uses the principle of intimidation in dealing with public, which led to the migration and escape of many people.
‘Freedom of expression has become a crime, so you can not oppose a decision issued by the group.
‘Otherwise you will be arrested on charges of violation of God’s law as its fighters claim, but they are far from this law.
‘There is no difference between Isis and Assad’s regime: bribery and favouritism are widespread within the group and play a major role, especially among the local members of the group’.
Last month, Isis continued their anti-smoking campaign as they carried out a second mass cigarette burning.
In photographs taken in the northern town of Barqah, the group’s religious police force can be seen torching huge piles of cigarettes in a field.
Isis also displayed anti-smoking posters featuring images of burning human lungs in a bid to prevent militants from smoking.
MORE: Why do some people just have bad breath?The Unstable previews are done, which means it's time for some card-by-card design stories. As the cards in this set are extra unusual, that means some of the stories are, too. Sit back and enjoy the tales of some truly Unstable cards.
Animate Library
One of the best reservoirs for Un-card designs is black-border sets, because the lines between what's possible and what's not aren't always that clear. No matter how crazy a design is, I've learned to always start with black-border because I've been surprised in the past what we could actually do. Sometimes the idea works as-is, sometimes we can do it with a little tweak, and sometimes it inspires a completely different design that's doable. Often, though, I'm told it can't be done and then I put it in my "for the next Un- set" file (what I call the Un-Published).
Such is the case with Animate Library. I designed it many years ago. I don't remember for which set, but I assume it was back in the early days—Mirage, Tempest, or Urza's Saga blocks. My original version is basically the one printed in Unstable. It actually enchanted the library and turned it into a creature. The first problem was you can't actually put the library onto the battlefield. The library is itself a zone, and you can't put one zone into another zone. Once again, I'm talking black-border Magic. Silver-border Magic will stack zones like a Russian nesting doll, it doesn't care.
This led me to try a version where it was a */* creature where power and toughness were defined by the number of cards in your library. This version did work in the rules, but required a lot of counting. ("How big is it again?") This made other members of the design team nervous and led to a somewhat lengthy fight about the card. I thought it was splashy enough to warrant the extra attention, but I was in the minority, and the card was cut from the file.
Fast-forward many years later. Unstable was in development. I was doing a Sealed playtest—not for Unstable, but a normal set—and I was in trouble. In fact, I was about a turn away from losing and I was trying to figure out if there was any way I could survive the turn. I had some Aura in my hand, and I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could enchant that could save me. Realizing there wasn't a way out, I joked, "The only way for me to get out of this was if I could enchant my library."
I then had one of those moments where the past flashes by your eyes as you relive a series of events. I'd completely forgotten about Animate Library. It had been probably fifteen or more years since I'd made it and I hadn't thought about it since then, but the joke inadvertently reminded me. I remember calling out to Dave Humpherys, who was at the time the lead developer of the set (Dave, Billy Moreno, and Ben Hayes were each the lead developer for a while—Unstable was in development for years). I yelled, "Dave, I have a new card for Unstable!"
The card as printed is basically the original version I'd made, except we decided to have it make the library an artifact creature, as there are a lot of artifact synergies in Unstable and the flavor seemed cool. We did talk about adding a rider that would make you mill cards from your library (put the top cards into your graveyard) for each damage it took, but the card was already a bit wordy. We also talked about whether or not to have the last line, but losing the game the turn after your library got destroyed felt like a bit much, so we left it in. And that is how Animate Library, many years later, finally made it to print.
Baron Von Count
In Fifth Dawn, Aaron Forsythe and I made the card Door to Nothingness. To the best of my memory, here's the original design (with updated templating):
Killing Machine
5
CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped.
WWUUBBRRGG, T: Destroy target creature or player.
We were tickled pink by this design. It just dripped with charm. Here, with dramatic license, is the conversation I had with then–Rules Manager Mark Gottlieb.
Gottlieb: That's charming. The card will never actually say that.
Me: Why not?
Gottlieb: Because we have a template for a player losing the game. It's "Target player loses the game."
Me: So what? We can have two templates.
Gottlieb: The game doesn't allow you to destroy a player.
Me: It could.
Gottlieb: For what reason?
Me: Because it's adorable.
Gottlieb: That's not a reason to make new templating for an ability we already have a template for.
Me: Players would get it. It wouldn't cause any confusion. Also, "Destroy target creature or target player loses the game" doesn't feel connected.
Gottlieb: Then we'll drop "destroy target creature." Why would anyone even choose that option when the other one is winning the game?
Me: It's not always about playability. Sometimes we should do things because it'll make players happy to see it. It's fun.
Gottlieb: Yeah, not going to happen.
The templating for Fifth Dawn happened late enough that I missed the window to get it into Unhinged. But I vowed that if we ever made another Un- set, I would include a card with "destroy target player."
Fast-forward many years to Unstable's design. We'd figured out the factions, and one of them was the supervillains (the League of Dastardly Doom). If anyone was going to "destroy target player," it was going to be them. One of the things I'd spent some time on was making sure that each organization worked differently from the others. I liked the idea that the League would be run by a cabal of supervillains, so I set out to make different archetypes.
One of them was the mad inventor intent on using his inventions to rule the world (think Lex Luthor or the majority of Bond villains). We liked the |
prevailed over the CA.
“It’s very sad that in the Commission on Appointments, clearly, business interests have run the day. And I think that needs to be reevaluated because how can a body, which is mandated to make decision based on the common good, make decisions based on business interests?” she said.
“What else can you say? The ones who voted no— explain it, what are the reasons for, explain it,” said the secretary. JE/rga
READ: Gina on CA rejection: It’s sad that business interests run the day
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MOST READFlorida's attorney general has objected to OJ Simpson's plans to live in the Sunshine State once he is released from prison.
In a letter to Florida's Department of Corrections on Friday, Pam Bondi urged its secretary to tell officials in Nevada - where Simpson remains incarcerated - that it does not want him to become a resident.
She used the 1994 murders of Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, which Simpson was criminally acquitted of but found liable for in subsequent civil lawsuits, among her reasons why he should not be allowed to settle in the Sunshine State.
Another was a previous conviction for speeding in his powerboat in a manatee zone.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (L) has written a letter to the Department of Corrections asking it to inform Nevada officials that she does not want OJ Simpson (R, at a parole hearing in July) to become a Florida resident once he is released from jail
Simpson's lawyers told his parole board there was 'no doubt' he would be setting up his new life on the outside in Florida once he is released.
The 70-year-old is due to be released from Lovelock Correctional Center as soon as next week, the earliest possible date, after serving nine years behind bars for armed robbery. He was granted parole earlier this year.
The former NFL star has not given detailed plans of where in Florida he wants to live, but it's likely he will choose somewhere close to his two children who live in St Petersburg.
During his parole hearing in July, he joked: 'I could easily stay in Nevada but I don't think you guys want me here.'
Sydney and Justin Simpson were at home sleeping when their mother was slaughtered on their doorstep in Brentwood, California, in 1994. Brown's killer has never been caught.
It is not clear what influence Bond's letter will have on the decision to grant Simpson's release.
In July, the state's Department of Corrections said it would have to accept him if Nevada officials were satisfied.
'We are aware of his potential relocation to Florida. Pursuant to the Interstate Commission on Adult Offender Supervision, if Nevada’s request meets all criteria, Florida must accept the transfer,' the Florida Department of Corrections said in a statement.
In her letter, Bondi pointed to the 1994 murder of Simpson's wife Nicole Brown and the fact that he had been found civilly liable for it despite being acquitted of murder. The pair are seen with their children Sydney and Justin before Brown's death. Now adults, the kids both live in Florida
'As is the case with any offender who transfers under this routine procedure, he will be assigned a Florida probation officer and will be supervised in accordance with the conditions of his parole.'
Ron Goldman was found dead alongside Brown outside her home in 1994
Simpson was acquitted of the 1994 murders in what was arguable the most highly publicized murder trial in recent history.
He was however found culpable for Brown and Goldman's deaths in a civil lawsuit later.
As part of the judge's decision in that lawsuit, he was ordered to pay $33.5million to their families in damages.
On Friday, DailyMailTV exclusively revealed previously undisclosed FBI documents which suggest he hid his money before going to jail in 2008 for his robbery conviction.
He had managed to avoid paying the families' money since the civil lawsuit verdict in 1997.
Given the amount of time which has now passed and interest accrued, Simpson is on the hook for damages of more than $100million.
His armed robbery conviction stems from an incident in a Nevada hotel room in 2007.
He claims he was going to retrieve stolen sports memorabilia with a group of friends who were heavily armed.Turkey's president resorted to FaceTime in an attempt to rally people against a military coup.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was forced to use an iPhone's video chat feature to address the country.
He used FaceTime in an interview with CNN Türk, this network's partner in Turkey. The interview, which took place live at 12:24 am local time in Turkey was with Hande Firat, the head of Ankara for CNN Turk.
"Go to the streets and give them their answer," Erdoğan urged as the reporter held up her phone to the network's camera. "I am coming to a square in Ankara."
Related: Twitter claims 'intentional slowing' of service during Turkey's coup
"This was done from outside the chain of command," he said. He said the lower officers had rebelled against senior officers.
"Those who are responsible, we will give them the necessary punishment," Erdoğan said.
It was not clear where he was speaking from.
On Friday, there was a surprise military uprising in Turkey. The military has taken over the government and imposed martial law, according to an announcement made on the Turkish state broadcaster TRT.
Little is known about what's going on there now. Turkish people are sharing images of tanks in city streets and low-flying military jets.
"Truly a modern coup. President Erdogan speaking to CNN-Turk on FaceTime," Katy Lee, a journalist for AFP tweeted. "You can't make it up."Draft classes don’t completely ride on the success of the quarterbacks, but it’s obviously the premier position in the NFL, so it gets most of the attention. Granted, a draft littered with Hall of Famers at other spots can overshadow a horrendous crop of quarterbacks, but how we remember a particular year typically comes down to how the QBs panned out.
Since 1992, there’s been a wide array of quality at the quarterback position when it comes to the draft. We’ve seen Hall of Famers get drafted, and we’ve also watched some of the biggest busts flop at the professional level.
To put each of the last 25 quarterback classes into perspective – excluding 2017, because it’s way too early to tell – we ranked them from abysmal to all-time great.It’s easy to forget who Steve Yzerman is. On a day like yesterday, when the entire hockey world was shocked by Team Canada’s omission of Martin St. Louis to its Olympic roster, it’s easy to look at Yzerman with gaping eyelids and palms upturned, wondering: why? But then again, if you think about Yzerman and his career, both as a player and a GM, you should already know why. This, in a strange way, is just Stevie being Stevie.
For those of you thinking the move was cold, harsh, et cetera: you’re right. It was all of those things. Despite the fact that NHL Insiders are widely reporting that Yzerman wanted St. Louis on this team, the decision still came down to Yzerman. So yes, it was cold, harsh, cruel… you can insert your own favorite adjective. There is no buck-passing. It stops with Yzerman and, regardless of the arguments I’m about to make and the point of view I’m about to express, when you ask: who left Martin St. Louis off Team Canada? The answer is Steve Yzerman. No argument. No two ways about it. But when you think about how gut-wrenching it must have been for Yzerman to not only make what must have been the hardest phone call of his professional career, but also to make such a gut-wrenching phone call even though all he had to do to avoid it was simply put his authoritarian foot down and say, “St. Louis’ is on the team, period,” you can perhaps see the move as something other than cold, harsh, cruel, snake-like. It was also something else: unselfish.
And unselfishness has been Yzerman’s trademark for about the last twenty years – at least since he famously changed his style of play from an explosive offensive superstar to a smart, two-way workhorse under Scotty Bowman.
Let’s not forget, we’re talking about a man who, in 2006, after being named to Team Canada’s Olympic squad, voluntarily withdrew from the team because he didn’t think his play warranted the selection at that point in his career. We’re also talking about a man who heard boos at his own jersey retirement ceremony because, during his speech, he credited his teammates for so much of his, and the Detroit Red Wings’, success.
And as a GM, this isn’t exactly Yzerman’s first staring contest with controversy. If anything, controversy has been the signature Yzerman leaves on his moves.
I know we Lightning fans are all over the moon about our team’s success this year, but it also wasn’t that long ago that many of us were frothing at the mouth about one, or many, of Yzerman’s decisions in building this team. But when you look at those decisions, you’ll see more of the same: Yzerman sets what might be best for him personally and professionally aside and makes decisions based solely on the merit of the options in front of him. In this case, it appears the choice Yzerman was faced with was whether to overrule the other members of his selection committee when it would make his life in Tampa a lot easier. He didn’t. Instead he did the thing that was hard. He removed his personal agenda from the equation.
And that’s pretty consistent with what Yzerman has done here in Tampa. Time and time again Yzerman has made decisions that were hard on him personally, and risky professionally, for the good of the team.
We’ll start with the firing of Guy Boucher. That one was pretty polarizing. There were many fans, like myself, who felt it was long overdue and faulted Yzerman only in giving Boucher so much rope. Others felt it was Yzerman who should have been fired and Boucher should have been named Tampa Bay’s coach for rest of time. The word “scapegoat” was used a lot.
That was then. Now? Now the Boucher era seems a distant memory and Jon Cooper is hopefully Tampa Bay’s eternal coach. Well, hindsight is 20/20, they say.
And oh how the venom flew when Yzerman traded our beloved Cory Conacher for Ben Bishop. I could pull quotes up from any number of sources about Yzerman and his state of competence, and/or mental stability, but I won’t. And how do you think Anders Lindback felt when Yzerman went out and got a starting goalie? Probably not good. Yzerman did it anyway. Why? Because it was the right move for the team. Whether leaving St. Louis off Team Canada is good for the team is debatable (I would argue “no,” for the record), but Yzerman’s willingness to trust the process he set up, even when it went against his own personal views, and even against his own personal relationships, is pretty much in line with everything else he’s ever done.
How did that move work out for the Lightning, by the way?
But let’s move on.
Perhaps the toughest decision Yzerman ever had to make, perhaps even tougher than yesterday’s, was the decision to buy out Vincent Lecavalier‘s contract. Pretty much anyone who set their emotions aside could see it was the right move for the team, but we’re talking about sports fans here, and it’s not always easy to set one’s emotions aside. Still, it came as a shock to the hockey world when Yzerman pulled the trigger for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of the risk to Yzerman’s public image. And because the decision was hard. He’d just cut ties with the face of the Tampa Bay Lightning, the long-time captain, arguably the most beloved athlete in the city. But he did it. And he did it with the same cold-blooded, analytical approach with which he does everything else in his GM life.
And the team got better.
Finally, there was the decision to sign Valtteri Filppula. And here, I must admit, even my own faith wavered. To me, it looked like a desperation move. Yzerman was over-paying Filppula, I thought, to hopefully keep the Lightning competitive enough to keep the heat off for the Lecavalier axing. And I think my reaction to the Filppula signing reflected most Lightning fans’.
Of course, that’s all a distant memory now. Filppula’s had such a great year that only the most love-blind among us would even consider dealing him for Lecavalier, and most of us think he’s a steal with his current contract.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, here’s the theme of this article: this is who Steve Yzerman is, and it’s who he’s always been. It’s the type of player he was, the type of captain he was, and the type of GM he is and will be. If you want a GM who would’ve pounded the selection committee table and wrote MARTIN ST. LOUIS in large letters across its face, despite the fact that the majority of the committee and, if the reports are true, the coach, didn’t want St. Louis on the team? Well, I hear Mark Messier‘s available for a GM job. But don’t expect Mark to listen to you when he thinks he’s right and you’ve got six guys saying he’s wrong, even if he put you and those six guys in place to help him make choices.
Yzerman set up the system – he made the rules. And he followed them, even when they bit him in the end. Say what you want about the decision to leave St. Louis off Team Canada. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever really know whether or not it was a mistake. But what we know for sure is it took a massive amount of integrity, to say nothing of the set of stones, for Yzerman to allow St. Louis to be held to the same democratic process as every other player, knowing full well that he, not Mike Babcock, not Ken Holland, not Kevin Lowe, was going to have to call Marty and give him the news.
Not exactly an easy spot to be in. You can put Marty on the team, but then, deep down, regardless of how much you truly believe Marty belongs there, you’ll know you played favorites. Even if no one questions it. Even if it’s acceptable to play favorites in this case. You’ll still know you played politics to get your way. Yzerman’s never been that type of leader.
But he’s always acted with integrity. And, when you look at this situation in that light, I hope you can see the staggering amount of personal integrity involved. An amount so staggering that it’s even kind of shocking for someone with Yzerman’s character to display it. I don’t think anything will surprise me at this point. But there’s also no way I’ll ever believe politics have played a role in one of Yzerman’s decisions from here on out. Because if ever there was a case where none of us would’ve blamed him, where we even wanted him to play politics, it was this one. This was the case. And he still didn’t.
But I guess, looking back, that’s just Stevie being Stevie.Infighting between East Ghouta's main rebel groups threatens to undermine the security of the opposition-held district as regime forces encircling the Ghouta area stand to benefit from the instability
A protest broke out Sunday evening in the city of Saqba in the besieged eastern Ghouta, called for by activists and journalists opposed to the Army of Islam rebel group. The protesters rejected the return of the “security bureaus,” and demanded that those accused of assassinations be held to account, while calling for the release of the Army’s hostages, most importantly Al-Rahman Legion leader Abou Samer Kabou. Kabou was not known to have interfered in security or civilian affairs, and was spending most of his time on the front before he was kidnapped during a visit to Saqba more than 10 months ago.
This demonstration came as a response to a protest that broke out Friday from Douma, one of the Army of Islam’s strongholds, to Zamlaka, an Al-Rahman stronghold. The protests were organized by members, activists and journalists of the Army of Islam.
The protest called on the Army to establish a military operations room gathering the rebel groups and “restore rights to those whose they were,” activate and supply the active fronts with quality weapons and remove the checkpoints dividing the towns of the Ghouta (despite already being removed a day before the protest by the Army and and Al-Rahman). The protesters’ demands to “restore rights” was a reference to the control of Al-Rahman and Jaish al-Fustat, which includes Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Nusra Front), separately, the storehouses and military workshops of the Army of Islam after internal fighting which has been waged for six months and has led to the end of the Army of Islam’s presence in most areas of the Ghouta.
The Friday protest, once it reached Zamlaka, began to accuse Al-Rahman of treachery and working for foreign powers, with protesters marching on the base of Al-Rahman leader, Lt. Abou al-Nasr Samir. His guards fired warning shots into the air to prevent the protesters from advancing to the base. Abou al-Nasr has previously been attacked by protests organized by the Salafi Hizb al-Tahrir movement, which calls for an “Islamic caliphate,” after the protesters broke into his base.
Al-Rahman published a statement in which it said shooting in the air in front of the protesters was unacceptable and vowed to hold to account those responsible, but it also stressed that the protesters changing course toward military bases was dangerous.
The Army of Islam protest — which did not announce its affiliation with any group — did not call for any of the demands which activists opposed to it consider the basis of the problem between the rebel groups in the Ghouta, most prominently accountability for the “assassination cell,” which is accused of belonging to the Army. Activists have also called for the release of hostages, and the abolition of the “security bureaus,” in which a number of people have been killed under torture, like Abi Alaa Talib from the Jobar district, who had been summoned by Branch 309 of the Army of Islam before his body was delivered to his family the following day.
One of the most important repercussions of the Army’s protest was the return of the checkpoints to their previous level and the withdrawal of Al-Rahman’s it sent to support the Army of Islam on the Tel Kurdi front, and the return of tensions to a level close to the start of fighting six months ago. This came after there had been talk about a deal between Al-Rahman and the Army, which had become so imminent that they had pulled out their checkpoints between areas under their control.
This collapse in the relations between the two parties comes after a round of negotiations carried out by the Army with a delegation close to the regime over the last few days. The negotiations were attended by civilian parties loyal to the Army, such as the local council in the city of Douma, which lost its independence after the Army gained solid control of Douma, and thereby over the Douma people’s council.
The negotiations with the regime did not bear fruit after it imposed conditions which the Army of Islam considered unfair to it and limited only to the areas under its control, and which would not have been imposed by the regime if the Army controlled the whole Ghouta.
The Army of Islam has not changed its security practices, most recently the aggression through attacks on the organizers of a feminist lecture around the political rights of women after they rejected the order from Army security officials to cancel it. The security officials told organizers they would have to bear the reaction of the people, before a group of young marched on the lecture hall, broke it up, looted its contents, and attacked two young men from among the conference organizers. The organizers accused them of trying to “spread immorality and desecrate our honor.”
Many Ghouta activists feared the possibility of the return of the Army’s control and the return of it restricting public activity and the relative intellectual diversity which has become a reality in the areas under Al-Rahman control.
It seems that this crisis between the military groups in the Ghouta, interlaced with security, civilian and criminal issues, is far from a solution and requires a change in behavior and the return of trust, to prevent the disintegration of military force and its activities on the fronts, leading to it falling into the hands of the regime despite the massive military force of the rebel groups, which control dozens of tanks, equipment and heavy weapons, and despite their warehouses being full.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.Tuesday on the The Blaze Network’s “Tomi,” Glenn Beck compared Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to Argentina’s Eva Perón and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to Italy’s Benito Mussolini, claiming if either gets elected there will be “horrible times of revolution in the streets.”
Beck said, “I think if she gets elected, I think we’re looking at Argentina, I think we’re looking at Evita. We’re looking at Argentina. However, I think there is also a chance if Donald Trump gets elected we are looking at Mussolini. Because we are going to go through horrible economic times and horrible times of revolution in the streets.”
“A strong man can come up, either a male or a female, it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “Communist, dictatorship, it doesn’t matter. That is the progressive choice—a dictatorship, fascist or communist. There is no constitutionalist here. There nobody talking about the Constitution.”
He added, “As I said to my kids, either one of those end with dad in jail.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNENNote: This index is a leading indicator for new Commercial Real Estate (CRE) investment.
From the American Institute of Architects: Architecture Firm Billings Increase Slightly in February
The Architecture Billings Index (ABI) score of 50.6 for February indicates that very modest growth occurred at architecture firms that month. Although the pace of growth has slowed from the end of 2010, February still marks the fourth consecutive month that the ABI has been 50 or higher; an encouraging sign for a recovery. In addition, inquiries into new projects remain strong at firms.
Click on graph for larger image in graph gallery.
This graph shows the Architecture Billings Index since 1996. The index showed billings were slightly higher in February (at 50.6).Note: Nonresidential construction includes commercial and industrial facilities like hotels and office buildings, as well as schools, hospitals and other institutions.According to the AIA, there is an "approximate nine to twelve month lag time between architecture billings and construction spending" on non-residential construction. So this indicator suggests the drag from CRE investment will end mid-year 2011 or so - but there won't be a strong increase in investment.SporeCrawler said: haha like all the fears came true. on 3ds and just a "remake"
still gonna buy it as the original is probably the best Ds JRPG Click to expand...
Wow. A full remake is really cool. I always liked the look of Radiant Historia and wanted to play it but never got around to it. Probably won't here either lol. I'd love to play it, but at this point I've kinda resigned myself to not buying a 3DS. Waited too long and money is kinda limited.Oh well. Hope it's even better than it's original for those that get it. ^^Worst fears would've been mobile and just a port. Or a port to 3DS that looks the same. This sounds like it's being rebuilt from the ground up for 3DS.It's not what you probably would consider "best" case, which I'm guessing is Nintendo Switch + full sequel, but it's a lot closer to that than what could've happened, I think..This year's Queen's Speech comes in the wake of a general election that left the Conservatives without a majority. Legislation to deliver Brexit dominated the government's plans. Here is a bill-by-bill guide to what is in the 2017 Queen's Speech - and what was left out.
Brexit
Image copyright PA
Repeal Bill
This measure will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act and convert EU law into UK law
The UK Parliament (and where appropriate, the devolved legislatures) will be free to make any future changes to its laws
Customs Bill
The bill will ensure:
the UK has a standalone UK customs regime on exit
flexibility to accommodate future trade agreements with the EU and others
changes can be made to the UK's VAT and excise regimes on exit from the EU, whatever the outcome of negotiations
the government can collect payments of customs duties, administer the customs regime and tackle duty evasion
control over the import and export of goods
Trade Bill
puts in place a legal framework to allow Britain to strike free trade deals with countries around the world while ensuring domestic businesses are protected from unfair trading practices
Immigration Bill
enables the government to end the free movement of EU nationals into the UK, but still allows the country to attract "the brightest and the best".
EU nationals and their families will be "subject to relevant UK law"
Fisheries Bill
enables the UK to control access to its waters and set UK fishing quotas once it has left the EU
Agriculture Bill
This measure will ensure an effective system is in place to support UK farmers and protect the natural environment after the UK leaves the EU and therefore the Common Agricultural Policy
Nuclear Safeguards Bill
establishes a UK nuclear safeguards regime as the UK leaves the EU and Euratom
ensures the UK continues to meet its international obligations for nuclear safeguards, as applies to civil nuclear material through the International Atomic Energy Agency
to support international nuclear non-proliferation and protect UK electricity supplied by nuclear power
International Sanctions Bill
ensures that as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UK continues to play a central role in negotiating global sanctions to counter threats of terrorism, conflict and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as bringing about changes in behaviour
returns decision-making powers on non-UN sanctions to the UK
enables the UK's continued compliance with international law after the UK's exit from the EU
allows the UK to impose sanctions to ensure compliance with obligations under international law, including asset freezes, travel bans and trade and market restrictions
ensures individuals and organisations can challenge or request a review of sanctions imposed on them
exempts or licenses certain types of activity, such as payments for food and medicine that would otherwise be restricted by sanctions
amends regulations for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing and to pass new ones
Economy
Image copyright PA
Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill
extends compulsory motor vehicle insurance to cover the use of automated vehicles, to ensure compensation claims continue to be paid quickly, fairly and easily, in line with longstanding insurance practice
allows the government to require the installation of charge points for electric vehicles at motorway service areas and large fuel retailers, and to require a set of common technical and operational standards. This will ensure charge points are convenient to access and work seamlessly right across the UK
These provisions would apply to England, Wales and Scotland
Space Industry Bill
new powers to license a wide range of new commercial spaceflights, including vertically launched rockets, space planes, satellite operation, spaceports and other technologies
a comprehensive and proportionate regulatory framework to manage risk, ensuring commercial spaceflight in the UK remains safe
measures to regulate unauthorised access and interference with spacecraft, spaceports and associated infrastructure, particularly in aviation security
promote public safety by providing a regulatory framework to cover operational insurance, indemnity and liability
High Speed 2 Phase 2A Bill
allows cities in the north of England and Scotland to enjoy increased capacity, improved connections, economic benefits and reduced journey times of HS2 sooner by accelerating the building of a connection to Crewe
powers to compulsorily acquire the land needed for the railway, construct the railway and operate it
deemed planning permission to deliver the scheme. Details of planning will be developed on a site-by-site basis in coordination with the local planning authority
set out the way railway regulation will apply to the railway
Goods Mortgages Bill
repeals the Victorian-era Bills of Sale Acts and replaces them with a Goods Mortgages Act that enables individuals to use their existing goods (such as a vehicle) as security for a loan, while retaining possession of the goods
increases protection for borrowers who get into financial difficulties, by introducing a new requirement for a lender to obtain a court order before seizing goods where a borrower has made significant repayments
helps borrowers in financial difficulties by giving borrowers the right to voluntary termination by handing over their vehicle or other goods to the lender
provides protection for innocent third parties who buy a vehicle subject to a logbook loan that may be at risk of repossession, and makes clearer that borrowers who knowingly sell goods with a logbook loan attached could be committing fraud
Smart Meter Bill
puts consumers in control of their energy use, helping them understand their energy and bills, bringing an end to estimated billing and transforming the experience of pre-paying customers
protects the operation of the national data and communication service to safeguard smart services at all times
ensures smart meters will be offered to every household and business by the end of 2020
introduces a Special Administrative Regime, which will provide insurance for the national smart meter infrastructure in the unlikely event that the company responsible for it becomes insolvent
National Insurance Contributions Bill
legislates for the National Insurance contribution (NICs) changes announced in the 2016 Budget and 2016 Autumn Statement
makes the NICs system fairer and simpler
does not relate to the discussion of Class 4 contributions at the time of the Spring Budget 2017
Image copyright EPA
Travel Protection Bill
improves protection for holidaymakers by updating the UK's financial protection scheme for holidays
ensures the Air Travel Organisers' Licence (Atol) travel protection scheme for holidaymakers keeps pace with innovation in the online travel market, and appropriate protection is in place regardless of whether consumers book online or the High Street
updates the Atol scheme and aligns it with enhancements to the EU and the UK package travel regulations that predate people booking holidays on the internet
Draft Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill
protects victims of domestic violence and abuse
establishes a domestic violence and abuse commissioner, to stand up for victims and survivors, raise public awareness, monitor the response of statutory agencies and local authorities and hold the justice system to account in tackling domestic abuse
defines domestic abuse in law to underpin all other measures in the bill
creates a consolidated new domestic abuse civil prevention and protection order regime
ensures if abusive behaviour involves a child, the court can hand down a sentence that reflects the devastating life-long impact that abuse can have on the child
applies to England and Wales only
Civil Liability Bill
cracks down on fraudulent whiplash claims and is expected to reduce motor insurance premiums by about £35 per year
ensures a fair, transparent and proportionate system of compensation is in place for damages paid to genuinely injured personal injury claimants
ensures full and fair compensation is paid to genuinely injured claimants
applies to England and Wales
Courts Bill
ends direct cross-examination of domestic violence victims by their alleged perpetrators in the family courts and allows more victims to participate in trials without having to meet their alleged assailant face to face
enables those charged with some less serious criminal offences to opt to plead guilty, accept a conviction and pay a statutory fixed penalty online, to free up court time for more serious cases. An example would be a first offender who admits travelling on a train without purchasing a ticket
introduces digital services that will allow businesses to pursue their cases quickly, enabling them to recover debts more easily
provides better working environment for judges, allowing more leadership positions in the judiciary to be offered on a fixed term, enabling judges to be deployed more flexibly to improve opportunities for career progression
applies to England and Wales and in part to Northern Ireland and Scotland
Financial Guidance and Claims Bill
establishes a new statutory body, accountable to Parliament, with responsibility for coordinating the provision of debt advice, money guidance and pension guidance
enables the body's activities to be funded through existing levies on pension schemes and the financial services industry
transfers the regulation of claims management services to the Financial Conduct Authority, and transfers complaints-handling responsibility to the Financial Ombudsman Service
ensures the Financial Conduct Authority has the necessary powers to implement a claims management regulatory regime. This will include a new power that will allow the Financial Conduct Authority to cap the fees that claims management companies charge consumers, as well as ensuring a more robust authorisation process for new companies who wish to enter the market
Data Protection Bill
gives people new rights to "require major social media platforms to delete information held about them at the age of 18"
allows police and judicial authorities to continue to exchange information quickly and easily with the UK's international partners in the fight against terrorism and other serious crimes
modernises and updates the regime for data processing by law enforcement agencies. The regime will cover both domestic processing and cross-border transfers of personal data
updates the powers and sanctions available to the information commissioner
Draft Patient Protection Bill
improves how the NHS investigates and learns from mistakes by establishing an independent Health Service Safety Investigation Body
ensures serious incidents can be investigated without the need for expensive, lawyer-led inquiries
applies to England and Wales
Defence
Image copyright PA
Armed Forces Bill
provides service personnel with "modern, flexible" opportunities to serve their country in a way that allows them to balance their family responsibilities and that better suits their lifestyle aspirations and circumstances, including forms of part-time service
Housing
Image copyright PA
Draft Tenants' Fees Bill
bans landlords and agents charging letting fees as a condition of their tenancy
enforces the ban with provision for tenants to be able to recover unlawfully charged fees
applies to England only - some minor amendments to the Consumer Rights Act 2015 may apply to England and Wales
Other measures
The legislative programme will also include three finance bills to implement Budget decisions, a technical bill to ratify several "minor EU agreements" and further bills to affect the UK's exit from the bloc.
What was not in the Queen's Speech?
Flagship Conservative manifesto policies that found no place in the government agenda include:
Social care funding, which opponents branded a "dementia tax" - a fresh consultation on the subject is instead promised
Means-testing of the winter fuel payment
Anything on pensioners or pensions
Grammar school plans are reined in, with a promise only to work with Parliament to bring forward proposals for school improvement "that can command a majority"
Free vote on fox hunting
Fixed-term parliaments
Free school lunches
Energy price cap - the speech states ministers are "considering the best way" to protect those on the poorest-value tariffs and suggests this could be done by regulators rather than legislative action
This report was first published on 21 June 2017.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Bernard Cribbins accepts his OBE from the Princess Royal. Footage courtesy of British Ceremonial Arts
Veteran actor Bernard Cribbins, who narrated cult children's show The Wombles, has been appointed an OBE.
The star, whose credits also include 1970's The Railway Children, received the honour for his services to drama.
He said he had a "lovely, wee chat" with the Princess Royal, who presented him with the honour at Windsor Castle.
The 82-year-old said he had no intention of retiring, adding: "I love it, I can't stop, why should I? I'm still able to read and write."
Cribbins provided the voices for Uncle Bulgaria, Tobermory and Orinoco in the popular 1970s series The Wombles.
The actor said it was "lovely" working on the show, which was based on a book of the same name.
Image caption Bernard Cribbins appeared alongside David Tennant in the 10th series of Doctor Who
"I enjoyed it enormously, it was great fun - but the reaction since is what is enjoyable, " he added.
"I can almost identify people's ages just by what they are saying. It was a very nice episode in my career."
Recent appearances have included roles in major TV shows such as Coronation Street and Doctor Who.Nicky Ashwell is the first person to be fitted with the latest prosthetic technology from Steeper, the bebionic small. Steeper is a UK-based healthcare company whose latest product features cutting edge technology that will change the field of prosthetics. While Nicky may be technically referred to as a congenital amputee, she never had an amputation. She was born without a right forearm and hand. With Nicky’s new “robot hand,” as she refers to it, she is able to ride a bike comfortably, thread a needle, tie her shoes and perform many other tasks which most people take for granted. In an interview with the BBC, Nicky states that
“[She] could do almost everything but [she] never realized how challenging [she] was making it for [her]self.” When discussing how she ties her shoes now, she says that, “[she] can do that easily and [she doesn’t] have to bend down as far. It just makes [her] life so much easier.”
The new bebionic hand is 30% smaller than previous models, but still maintains the same functionalities. Developments accross many different industries went into making this hand. F1 technology was used when designing the knuckle mechanisms, and the small motors in the fingers can be found in some missiles. The hand itself is made of aircraft grade aluminum and engineered polymers to make it as lightweight yet strong and durable as possible. This innovation makes the bebionic small the first multi-articulated prosthetic hand of its size and functionality. By making the hand smaller, it allows many women and younger people to benefit from this advanced technology.
The bebionic small has many features to make it easy-to-use. There are 14 different possible grips which allow users to do things like hold and control a computer mouse or shake a hand. The different grips are controlled using sensors embedded in the arm of the prosthetic. The user simply has to flex their arm muscles |
U (Lucky Happy Come” or more intuitively, “May Luck and Happiness Come My Way”). The lyrics throughout the song seem to back this up, so I ran with it.DECEMBER 12--After a trio of Ohio women was busted earlier this week following a botched robbery attempt, cops searched the group's getaway car and discovered printed instructions downloaded from the Internet that detailed 'How To Commit Armed Robbery In Six Easy Steps.'
The seized instructions, a copy of which you'll find here, were printed Monday morning at 10:16, about 11 hours before the women sought to hold up the Dollar Tree store in Bedford Heights. When a manager claimed that she could not open the store safe, the alleged robbers--Jocelyn Addison, 19; Nia McBrayer, 21; and Jenniffer Watson, 18--departed empty-handed.
Though the downloaded list was clearly written tongue-in-cheek, the suspects, who had masks, a plan, and a bb gun, apparently followed some of its suggestions. According to a December 8 Bedford Police Department report, Addison, McBrayer, and Watson were apprehended in a vehicle about a mile from the convenience store.
Each woman was charged with robbery. (5 pages)by Michael DeLaney and Drew Baumgartner
This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!
Michael: It seems that the divisive issue this holiday season was not about the fictitious “War on Christmas” but instead about your opinion of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I’m fascinated by the varying differences of opinions on this film. One of the most popular criticisms amongst detractors is that it didn’t meet their expectations. Some Star Wars fans might have given The Last Jedi a small margin of potential victory where the film was both different and spiritually the same to the original films. I’m reminded of this intense desire for both nostalgia and innovation in Doomsday Clock 2.
Doomsday Clock 1 beautifully set the stage for the post-Watchmen world, and in issue two our “heroes” have abandoned it for the DC Universe that we know and love. Adrian Veidt meets up with Lex Luthor, Rorschach comes face to face with Batman — what more could you want? Geoff Johns meets the expectations of what you’d hope for in a story like this, but it would be a mistake to simply label it as a crossover. Instead, he introduces these characters to one another in a way that both services the story and the integrity of the characters themselves. Johns doesn’t dumb down the script in the slightest for the sake of simplicity and accessibility.
As great as these character introductions were, I found that one of the most memorable parts of Doomsday Clock came from the new character of The Marionette.
Marionette finds an old bottle of one Adrian Veidt’s signature products: Nostalgia perfume. I feel like this disjointed sequence — split up on the bottom of one page and the top of another — is symbolic of both Doomsday Clock and Watchmen as a whole. “Nostalgia…they don’t make this anymore.” What a delightful mindfuck that is. Is Johns saying that we champion books like Watchmen because we’re nostalgic for nostalgia’s sake?
Marionette goes on to say how disappointing the follow-up scent “Millennium” was. I think it’s widely agreed that, while trends from the ‘80s and ‘90s often come back in style, no one is really nostalgic for the early 2000s. This feed into my The Last Jedi hypothesis: Johns is aware that with a “legacy sequel,” it’s important to innovate certain story elements while replicating others present in the original.
After all, for all of the boldness of throwing the characters of Watchmen in with DC’s stable of heroes, Doomsday Clock is mirroring a lot of story beats from its predecessor. Barring Superman waking up from a nightmare at the end of last issue, Doomsday Clock 2 is the first introduction to the goings-on of the DCU in this series.
Instead of Watchmen’s “The End is Near” signs we have numerous protest signs of the anti-Bat variety. This latest anti-superhero sentiment is due to recent revelations of “The Superman Theory,” that contextualizes America’s superheroes as government-funded WMDs. The real reason that most superheroes are from America is simple: the writers, publisher and (majority of) readers are American, but this is a great in-story way to address the over-abundance of superheroes from America. “The superman/God exists and he’s American” was a headline featured in Watchmen announcing the arrival of the super-powered hero Dr. Manhattan — one that Johns is most certainly emulating in Doomsday Clock 2. And like Watchmen, a lot of the meat and potatoes of the public policy and opinion of Doomsday Clock is in its “supplemental” materials — The Superman Theory is detailed in full in news stories from The Bulletin.
The Superman Theory is also explored a bit in Watchmen world just before they hop into the Owl Ship and come over to the DCU. As most of the city runs in terror, Gary Frank draws one man standing out from the crowd to recite part of the old catchphrase from The Adventures of Superman:
It’s kind of surprising that a Superman optimist such as Geoff Johns would paint such an ominous and contemptuous picture of the archetypal do-gooder as the bringer of annihilation. Personally, I found this imagery ten times more effective than a Superman/evil Superman counterpart. The juxtaposition of the world looking up for a hero to save them and instead being greeted by a nuclear warhead is very Watchmen indeed.
And even though it might have seemed like I poo poo-ed the base level of a Watchmen/DC crossover earlier, it was a delight to see Rorschach in Wayne Manor/The Batcave.
Gary Frank does some great visual storytelling with Rorschach on par with Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen work. Without a speech bubble or internal monologue, Frank shows us Rorschach’s detective work in action.
Similarly I think that Rorschach’s reaction to all of Batman’s trophies in the cave was awesome.
Though Batman has seen his share of evil in his time, Rorschach comes from a world that is as violent and unforgiving (maybe moreso) than our own. Can you blame him for thinking that Batman’s collectibles were trophies commemorating his crimes?
Drew, if you couldn’t tell I am still really digging this series — was Doomsday Clock 2 a dip in quality for you? I’m also still digging The Mime and The Marionette, do you have anything you’d like to comment on their robbery/costumes? One thing I’ll say is that this DCU doesn’t necessarily jibe with the current continuity — it has a different feel to it — do you think that’s intentional or matters at all?
Drew: I’m willing to chalk that up to the style of the creative team and the tone of this series — of course it feels different, but I think we’re meant to understand this as the mainline DC Universe. Those kinds of differences of tone and voice are true of pretty much any crossover, but are particularly pronounced in one that is explicitly paying homage to a series that was conceived in many ways as a critique of the DC Universe.
But I think this works best for me when I’m thinking of this less as a crossover between these universes (or even as a sequel to Watchmen), and more of a way of reconciling the legacies of these two properties. Specifically, the way the more shallow “grim’n’gritty” elements of Watchmen were adopted by the DC Universe in the wake of Watchmen‘s runaway success. The precise narrative for how and why that happened is a bit more complicated than that, but I don’t think “Watchmen made the DC Universe dark for decades” is entirely inaccurate.
Which may be why the DC Universe seems so markedly dark in this issue. The reality of the DC Universe probably is darker on the whole than it was before Watchmen, but some corners of the DC Universe have resisted that more — or recovered from it more rapidly — than others. Indeed, we might understand Rebirth as a kind of rebuke to the lingering effects of Watchmen, returning the DC Universe to a more hopeful, less bleak outlook.
But that it’s “returning” to that hopefulness complicates the nostalgia narrative for me. Is the nostalgia for Watchmen or a time before Watchmen? Is this series critical of one of those nostalgias but not the other? I think it’s too early to say specifically what this series has to say on the issue of nostalgia, but I’m excited that Johns seems committed to the idea of addressing these issues in a series that clearly has a complicated relationship to nostalgia.
I suppose what interested me most in this issue is where Johns and Frank start to break away from the Watchmen style. That style clearly has a profound influence on the look of this series, from the nine-panel grid to Rob Leigh’s hand-drawn(looking) speech balloons, but the strict intercutting that Johns and Frank use for much of the issue insists on a few four-panel rows that feel decidedly alien to the Watchmen universe.
That may feel like a modest example of breaking the Watchmen style — and it would definitely be an overstatement to suggest that this issue’s visual style isn’t largely conceived as a tribute/homage — but it does show that Johns and Frank are willing to break with convention when and where it suits their story. That’s an important distinction for this series moving forward, and one that gives me confidence for how things might pan out. There’s a deep reverence for the source material, to be sure, but it’s not slavish devotion.
Which might just speak to the Carson McCullers quote from which this issue gets its epigraph:
We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
It’s an obscurer reference than we ever got in Watchmen, but I think its specificity more than makes up for its unfamiliarity — this is obviously chosen rather precisely. Which is why I’m reading this quote as a mission statement of sorts for this series. We’re not just torn between the foreign and strange; we’re homesick for something we’ve never seen before. Here’s hoping Doomsday Clock can deliver on that promise.
For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page. Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore. If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to Comixology and download issues there. There’s no need to pirate, right?Ontario and Quebec signed an agreement with the Mexican government Wednesday to jointly develop carbon markets with the aim of allowing companies in those provinces to purchase Mexican greenhouse-gas-reduction credits to satisfy provincially regulated emission caps.
With Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne looking on, Environment Minister Glen Murray, his Quebec counterpart David Heurtel and Mexico's Environment Secretary Rafael Pacchiano-Alaman signed the memorandum in Guadalajara, Mexico, during the annual Climate Summit of the Americas, a meeting of provincial, state and local government officials aiming to co-operate on climate policy.
Their agreement envisions Mexico joining with the provinces and California – and potentially other U.S. states – in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), which allows the buying and selling of emission allowances among jurisdictions with the goal of financing the lowest-cost emissions reductions.
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"If [Mexico's participation] can lead to a broadening of the market, I think that will be great. The broader the market, the better it will function," Ms. Wynne said in a telephone interview from Guadalajara. Before it can join, however, the existing WCI members will assess the stringency and transparency of its trading system.
Ontario and Quebec have launched cap-and-trade programs, in which governments set limits to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and require fossil-fuel users and distributors to either meet individual caps or purchase credits, either within the province or from within the WCI.
Ms. Wynne defended the cap-and-trade approach against critics who argue the Ontario and Quebec plans are not as stringent as the carbon tax that has been adopted in British Columbia and is being rolled out in Alberta. The floor price for WCI credits will be about $20 a tonne in 2020, when the carbon tax in British Columbia and Alberta will be at $30.
The federal government is promising to implement a national minimum carbon price, and some experts argue it should be set at $30 a tonne, using Alberta and B.C. as the benchmark.
Ms. Wynne said the key issue isn't the price but the effectiveness of the policy. Indeed, she noted that the goal of developing an international carbon market is to reduce the cost per tonne of GHG reduction while achieving aggressive emissions-reduction targets.
"We have to look at where is the reduction happening and where do we see the greatest success?" she said. "That has to be the measure; it can't be some sort of abstract measure like price – that's not the point."
Critics complain that millions of dollars will flow out of Ontario and Quebec to finance emissions reductions elsewhere.
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Quebec's Mr. Heurtel said there is growing interest in cap-and-trade markets around the world, and he suggested those markets will be eventually be linked in order to drive investment into the lowest-cost emissions reductions. Quebec recently hosted a delegation from China, which is starting a pilot cap-and-trade program in several provinces next year.
"We are looking at the beginnings of a North American framework for a carbon market," Mr. Heurtel said in an telephone interview. "It's showing that something that seemed so esoteric just three or four years ago is now becoming a very positive and essential tool to achieve reductions."
Mexico has a pilot cap-and-trade program with 60 companies participating and is aiming to expand it in 2018 to a national cap-and-trade plan by 2018, Mr. Pacciano-Alaman told the summit on Wednesday. Mexico has an agreement with California similar to the one it signed Wednesday with Ontario and Quebec.
Mexico is undergoing dramatic liberalization of its energy markets, has aggressive emission-reduction targets and has launched pilot programs for carbon trading. It is eager to link carbon markets with partners in North America in order to attract capital to its economy.
California and Quebec hit a speed bump with their last auction of emission credits when only 11 per cent of emission permits that were available in a May auction were sold. However, Mr. Heurtel remained unfazed by the result, saying the market is volatile but has underlying strength.
California is facing a legal challenge to its cap-and-trade program, but last week the legislature passed a law that sets a target of reducing greenhouse gases by 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030, a move that Mr. Heurtel said should bolster confidence in the market.Vermont Police Protest Marijuana Decrim at State House
Surprise, surprise. The cops don’t want us to reform the marijuana laws.
Police from across Vermont descended on the State House in Montpelier on Thursday to protest ongoing hearings on legislation that would decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana — despite the fact that the move is supported by the state’s Attorney General, the Governor himself and many state lawmakers, reports Thomas H. Clarke at The Daily Chronic.
Two marijuana decriminalization bills currently in the Legislature are officially opposed by the Vermont Police Association, the Vermont Police Chiefs Association and the Vermont State Sheriffs Association. The Vermont Troopers’ Association has taken no position regarding cannabis decrim, according to the group’s president, Sgt. Mike O’Neil.
Law enforcement officers were at the State House from about 8 a.m. until around 1 p.m. to “confer with” (read: pressure, browbeat and defend the rotten status quo) lawmakers and others about why decriminalizing cannabis is supposedly such a horrible idea.
House Bill 200, introduced by Rep. Chris Pearson (P-Burlington), would remove criminal penalties for possession of up to two ounces of marijuana and replace them with a civil fine of $100, similar to a traffic ticket. The bill is cosponsored by 38 other state representatives.
Senate Bill 48, introduced by Sen. Joe Benning (R-Caledonia), would remove criminal penalties for up to an ounce of marijuana and replace them with a civil fine of $100. It has a tri-partisan group of eight cosponsors.
Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell, the top law enforcement officer in the state, supports the legislation.
“I’m here in support of decriminalization,” he told a House committee last week. “This might be a surprise to some but the reality is possession of small amounts of marijuana has in effect been decriminalized for quite some time in this state.”
He added that Vermonters, in addition to enjoying the benefits of decrim, should be allowed to grow “one or two” marijuana plants without fear of arrest.
“If you take away the ability to grow your own, you’re pushing someone who wants to possess and use marijuana into the marketplace of having to deal with marijuana dealers,” Sorrell said. “And is that the behavior you essentially want to require and foster?”
Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn and Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan also testified in favor of the bill, joining public defenders and marijuana advocates in expressing their support.
Vermont Gov. Pete Shumlin also supports decrim, but at the one-ounce level proposed in the Senate rather than two ounces as proposed in the House.
But Steve McQueen (yeah, that’s really this ass-bag’s name), chief of the Winooski Police Department and president of the Vermont Association of Police Chiefs, and Essex County Sheriff Trevor Colby, president of the Vermont Sheriffs’ Association, really dislike the idea of decriminalizing pot. Why, what on earth would they do without all that ridiculous power to disrupt people’s lives over possessing a plant?
Both officers claimed that decriminalizing marijuana would send “the wrong message” to the “state’s youth.” McQueen revealingly added that the “hammer” of prosecution gives officers the “leverage” they “need” to get offenders on the “straight and narrow.” (I think I just puked a little in my mouth.)
Vermonters strongly support marijuana decrim according to a February survey by Public Policy Polling. It found nearly two of every three residents — 63 percent — support “a change in the law to provide for a fine of up to $150 without jail time for those who possess an ounce or less of marijuana for personal use.”A Windows 8-style version of VLC is finally here. After months of delays, the Kickstarter-funded project has reached its beta goal and is available to download from the Windows Store. While Windows 8 includes a built-in video player, VLC adds its signature support for a broad array of formats, including Ogg, FLAC, and MKV. VLC for Windows 8 also includes support for background audio, removable storage, and DLNA servers.
It’s practically the Swiss Army Knife of video playback, and the user interface matches Microsoft’s “Metro” design language with a Live Tile for the Start Screen. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows 8 right now in beta form, and the developer warns "it's clearly not as stable as it should be." It's also not compatible with ARM-based Windows RT devices like the Surface 2, but VLC is planning to add support in future alongside a version for Windows Phone. VLC for Windows 8 is available immediately in the Windows Store.CHINESE builders have ambitious designs on erecting the world’s tallest skyscraper, soaring more than more 3,000 feet (900 metres) into the heavens.
The Phoenix Towers, planned for the central city of Wuhan, is set to be built on a footprint of 70,000 square meters, under the direction of London-based Chetwoods Architectural Firm.
Builders hope to break ground next year and be done in as little as three years.
The taller of the side-by-side, $2 billion Phoenix Towers structures is going to be one kilometre high, designers said. That would top the world’s current tallest building — the Khalifa Tower in Dubai, which is 830 metres high.
Lower floors of Phoenix Towers, which bear a modernistic resemblance to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, would be apartments and businesses, while upper levels would be used as a huge recycling plant.
The neighbouring structures would include solar power, wind turbines and an air-cleaning and filtration system.
Phoenix Towers might not have the title of world’s tallest structure for long.
Builders in Saudi Arabia have plans for the Kingdom Tower in the city of Jeddah. That building would stand one kilometre tall — thus equalling Phoenix Tower — and could be done by 2020.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Petraeus: "Iraqi forces fought and died for their country at vastly higher numbers... than coalition forces".
Ex-CIA Director David Petraeus has told the BBC that Islamic State militants can only be defeated through a dual military and political approach.
"Industrial-strength" extremists cannot be dealt with "just with force of arms", he said in a rare interview.
During the Iraq war, Mr Petraeus devised the strategy that saw a "surge" in US troop numbers and secured support from Sunni tribesmen against al-Qaeda.
Iraq's US-backed army is now battling to retake territory seized by IS.
Gen Petraeus described the group as "a formidable enemy".
"It is really a conventional army that also has elements of an insurgency, and indeed significant terrorist elements as well," he said.
But when asked to compare IS with its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq - which Gen Petraeus was instrumental in defeating - he said the latter "had much greater roots in Iraq and much greater numbers than IS".
Image copyright AFP Image caption The US has invested in training and arming the Iraqi army
'Setback'
The retired general characterised the recent capture by IS of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, as "a strategic loss in the sense that the narrative of IS being on the defensive - of losing - was shown to be somewhat hollow".
"I do think Ramadi will be retaken in a matter of weeks or less," he added.
"But this was a big setback. At such a time, one has to look at the strategy, at refinements that need to be made, at efforts that need to be augmented, and I know that's what's going on right now."
David Petraeus' career
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Gen Petraeus is now a civilian, but he still has the ear of senior officials
1974: Graduates from West Point US military academy, joining the army
2007: Leads US troop surge during Iraq conflict
2008: Head of US Central Command
2010: Nato commander in Afghanistan
Mid-2011: Leaves military to become CIA director
November 2012: Resigns over affair
After commanding international troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen Petraeus became head of the CIA but was forced to stand down in 2012, following revelations of an extra-marital affair.
Subsequent allegations that he provided classified information to his mistress while he was CIA director led him to plead guilty to one misdemeanour charge.
But despite the turbulence of his private life, Gen Petraeus remains one of the heroes of America's controversial military operations of recent years.
He was the architect of the "surge" in Iraq that deployed more US troops, but equally important, got them out of their defended compounds to create security at a local level.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Thousands of civilians fled fighting when IS captured Ramadi in May
He also greatly expanded the Anbar Awakening, the mobilisation of Sunni tribesmen to combat al-Qaeda.
Not surprisingly in the wake of the recent setbacks in Iraq, his views are being canvassed by the White House, the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill.
Dying for Iraq
The keynote of the Petraeus approach today is as it always was - the need for the political and military aspects of strategy to march closely in step.
"You cannot deal with an industrial-strength extremist problem just with force of arms," he said. "You have to have that political component as well."
Political change has to start at the top. Above all, Gen Petraeus says, "the Sunni Arabs have to be given incentives to support the new Iraq rather than to oppose it".
As to the fundamental question - can the Iraqi military actually win against Islamic State? - he has few doubts.
"During the surge and in the years after the surge, Iraqi forces fought and died for their country at vastly higher numbers than did US and coalition forces. We know that they can fight," he insists.
"We know that they will fight. But they will only fight if they have good leadership, and the support and knowledge that somebody will have their back if they get into a tough fight."
That looks like requiring greater US involvement closer to the frontline. Gen Petraeus is reluctant to give details.
"Should there be US advisors with Iraqi forces below the divisional level?" he asks. "Should there be joint teams of tactical air controllers on the ground with security and other assets to support them?
"Does there need to be an augmentation of the train-and-equip effort? Can we accelerate the delivery of some of the equipment that Iraq so desperately needs?"
It sounds like the elements of a blueprint for a re-invigorated US effort. But then again - typical Petraeus - there is the political dimension.
"Are we doing all that we can to empower and support those Iraqi leaders, starting with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who recognise the need to bring the Sunni Arab population back into the fabric of Iraqi society? And, most importantly, are our military elements and structures sufficiently supporting the political component and vice versa?"
Attractive model
In response to my comment that all this could have been said a year ago - Gen Petraeus responded by saying that he did indeed say it all a year ago. This is not about re-inventing the wheel.
"We need to see the same elements of this (previous) comprehensive civil-military counter- insurgency campaign, albeit today with the Iraqis playing the key roles, enabled by the Americans."
Gen Petraeus acknowledges the difficulties of grappling with the horrors in Syria but insists that the only way forward is to train and equip moderate opposition elements. He says that more such fighters will spring up once the programme gets under way.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Who's in charge of IS? In 90 seconds
And he is very cautious about any Iranian role in combating IS. He insists Iran remains a revolutionary power in the region.
"This is a country that has made progress because of chaos. It has both benefited from chaos and fomented chaos to try to achieve regional hegemony," he says.
So he believes that "while there can indeed be some coincidence of interest between the US, its coalition allies in the region and Iran in terms of the defeat of IS (...) the over-arching context is one that gives you reason to have considerable caution in how you go forward in the relationship with Iran".
Gen Petraeus still travels to Iraq regularly. He knows the key players well. And though out of uniform and established in a civilian career as an adviser, he remains the man who did achieve a kind of success in Iraq.
That is a commodity that is in short supply today for the Americans and the Iraqi authorities. This makes the Petraeus approach an attractive model.
But the question remains: Can the outcome be the same with the Iraqi military cast in the role of the Americans?His cult sitcom Community may be over, but his sci-fi cartoon for Adult Swim proves the mercurial showrunner’s comic experiments are far from finished
Harmontown is a 2014 feature documentary profiling the writer and showrunner Dan Harmon, as he tours his podcast of the same name around the US. In it, a murderer’s row of comic talent line up to pay their respects to the creator of the dazzlingly overwrought, criminally undervalued sitcom Community. Ben Stiller calls him “kind of a genius”. John Oliver, the British stand-up whom Harmon cast in a recurring guest role on Community, describes him as “a human hand-grenade with a predilection for pulling his own pin out”. Sarah Silverman, who headhunted Harmon to write for her own comedy series The Sarah Silverman Program, sums it up. “I’m his biggest fan,” she says. “And I fired him.”
A mercurial, wild-bearded, apparently abrasive 42-year-old from Wisconsin, Harmon is a total cult. While feuding with NBC, the exasperated network which fired him as Community showrunner after three seasons, then hastily wooed him back, Harmon publicly declared it was trying to “smother the show with a pillow”. It often seemed like the behind-the-scenes drama of the programme – which screened on EPG nosebleed channel Sony TV in the UK – was reaching a much wider audience than ever tuned in to the actual show. When Harmon clashed repeatedly with disgruntled cast member Chevy Chase, there was the additional pleasure of seeing industry commentators having to attribute “Dan Harmon Poops”, his now-dormant Tumblr, as their source for quotes. Harmon eventually admitted: “I’m a selfish baby and a rude asshole.”
On the line from his office in Burbank, Harmon does not sound much like an asshole. Even though Community was finally laid to rest this summer after a last-gasp sixth-season resurrection on Yahoo, he sounds upbeat, even jaunty. He loves the UK, particularly our most enduring gift to world culture. “The pubs over there are absolutely perfect,” he says. “I love to hang out in those pubs.”
Five reasons why Dan Harmon had to return to Community Read more
Harmon’s infectious enthusiasm might be because his current project, the mind-bending animated sci-fi Rick And Morty, has some critical wind in its sails. Currently midway through a successful second series on the oddball US network Adult Swim, the show, co-created by Harmon and actor-animator Justin Roiland, has already been recommissioned for a third season. Earlier this year, this funhouse mirror version of Back To The Future’s Doc and Marty even ramraided the mainstream. Rick and Morty crashed their flying saucer into the Simpsons’ sofa during the opening-credits couch gag of season 26’s finale, pulverising the famous clan into marmalade globs. (“No more guest animators, man!” complained Bart.)
Harmon’s segue from live-action to animation isn’t particularly surprising. One of the things that delighted Community’s small but vocal fanbase was Harmon’s restless tinkering with the form, like zapping his underachieving study group into a 16-bit video game or making a Christmas episode in Claymation. “Community was designed from the ground up to be, in my mind, the perfect live-action prime-time network sitcom,” he says. “All the experimentation was my attempt to make that very unreal universe as real as possible by making it more challenging and deeper.”
Community's sixth season: still smugly self-referential Read more
Interviewing Harmon is like talking to an oil strike: gushing, messy, enriching. One moment he’s raving about Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, the next he’s pinpointing the key tonal differences between Ghostbusters 1 and 2. There’s a similar chaotic feel to Rick And Morty, a show that parodies Star Trek’s space-safari optimism by sending brilliant but perma-drunk inventor Rick and his fearful grandson Morty on wild sci-fi adventures with disastrous consequences. An intergalactic talent show forces them to team up with Ice-T to write a song that will save the world from destruction, while an Inception-style dream heist in a teacher’s brain ends up with them trapped in a sex dungeon. All Rick’s self-centred meddling comes with a side-order of cosmic comeuppance: imagine Futurama directed by Michael Haneke.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bird Dan: Harmon, pictured at Comic-Con in San Diego, 2014 Photograph: MJ Kim/Getty
The show only recently arrived in the UK on Fox, and when I ask Harmon how he would pitch it to mostly oblivious Brits, he zeroes in on the influence of both Dahl and Douglas Adams. “In the writers’ room it feels like I’m always actively referencing some parallel from Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says. “I think that’s where I learned everything about the concept of an infinite universe as entertainment, as it pertained emotionally to the common man. I don’t know if British people feel the same way about Adams as I found out they do about Ricky Gervais but I assume they still like Adams fine,” he says. “So I’d lead with that. And after that round of ass-kissing, I would get really belligerent, then start throwing stuff around until I got bounced out of whatever pub we were in. Then I’d start crying and would confess I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I just try and sound smart when I drink.”
Rick and Morty at Comic Con: Adult Swim cult favorite is back and in-joking Read more
As the show gathers momentum – incoming Late Show host and mega-fan Stephen Colbert cameos as an alien scientist in season two – the universe appears to have finally aligned for Harmon. But he’s not resting on his space laurels. “I have a midwestern American phobia about having all my eggs in one basket and losing my home and stuff,” he says. “So I’m trying to arrive at a work mode that allows me to scatter myself efficiently. I’ve got nine projects with younger writers that I’m supposed to be exec-producing right now. I’m very naive about time management.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dan in unreal life: Jeff Winger and Jim Rash in Harmon’s Community. Photograph: Getty
There’s also the continuing saga of Harmontown. Since 2012, the weekly podcast that grew out of his improv comedy night has been a dense, unfiltered insight into his churning, pop culture-saturated mind. Harmon hopes the podcast is “eternal” because it requires “zero effort” and he finds it therapeutic. In fact, he reckons the podcast boom has benefited the US comedy ecosystem as a whole. “It’s been making superstars of some really wonderful people who have always been less appreciated than they should have been.”
He may have enough on his plate, but after manoeuvring one way, could Harmon ever imagine taking Rick And Morty back into the live-action realm? “Maybe one day, when Justin and I are old and feeble, they’ll make some kind of horrible movie based on nostalgia for the property.” he laughs. “That would actually be great. But if you’re going to do a live-action show about an incredibly smart person travelling through time and space? Just call it Doctor Who.”
Rick And Morty starts 11pm, Thursday, Fox UK
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manga management: Attack On Titan.
Five other ace animated series for adults
Attack On Titan
Thrilling anime pitting mankind against cannibalistic giants.
The Venture Bros
Comic-book action spoof following a dysfuntional family.
Bojack Horseman
Will Arnett is a burned-out ex-actor, um, horse. It works.
Archer
Showing the dafter side to espionage. Cruel, crude and very, very funny.
Mr Pickles
A family dog may very well be possessed by the devil. Why not.1. Introduction
In this quick article, we will have a look at Java 9’s StackWalking API.
The new functionality provides access to a Stream of StackFrames, allowing us to easily browse stack in both directly and making good use of the powerful Stream API in Java 8.
2. Advantages of a StackWalker
In Java 8, the Throwable::getStackTrace and Thread::getStackTrace returns an array of StackTraceElements. Without a lot of manual code, there was no way to discard the unwanted frames and keep only the ones we are interested in.
In addition to this, the Thread::getStackTrace may return a partial stack trace. This is because the specification allows the VM implementation to omit some stack frames for the sake of performance.
In Java 9, using the walk() method of the StackWalker, we can traverse a few frames that we are interested in or the complete stack trace.
Of course, the new functionality is thread-safe; this allows multiple threads to share a single StackWalker instance for accessing their respective stacks.
As described in the JEP-259, the JVM will be enhanced to allow efficient lazy access to additional stack frames when required.
3. StackWalker in Action
Let’s start by creating a class containing a chain of method calls:
public class StackWalkerDemo { public void methodOne() { this.methodTwo(); } public void methodTwo() { this.methodThree(); } public void methodThree() { // stack walking code } }
3.1. Capture the Entire Stack Trace
Let’s move ahead and add some stack walking code:
public void methodThree() { List<StackFrame> stackTrace = StackWalker.getInstance().walk(this::walkExample); }
The StackWalker::walk method accepts a functional reference, creates a Stream of StackFrames for the current thread, applies the function to the Stream, and closes the Stream.
Now let’s define the StackWalkerDemo::walkExample method:
public List<StackFrame> walkExample(Stream<StackFrame> stackFrameStream) { return stackFrameStream.collect(Collectors.toList()); }
This method simply collects the StackFrames and returns it as a List<StackFrame>. To test this example, please run a JUnit test:
@Test public void giveStalkWalker_whenWalkingTheStack_thenShowStackFrames() { new StackWalkerDemo().methodOne(); }
The only reason to run it as a JUnit test is to have more frames in our stack:
class com.baeldung.java9.stackwalker.StackWalkerDemo#methodThree, Line 20 class com.baeldung.java9.stackwalker.StackWalkerDemo#methodTwo, Line 15 class com.baeldung.java9.stackwalker.StackWalkerDemo#methodOne, Line 11 class com.baeldung.java9.stackwalker.StackWalkerDemoTest#giveStalkWalker_whenWalkingTheStack_thenShowStackFrames, Line 9 class org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod$1#runReflectiveCall, Line 50 class org.junit.internal.runners.model.ReflectiveCallable#run, Line 12...more org.junit frames... class org.junit.runners.ParentRunner#run, Line 363 class org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestReference#run, Line 86...more org.eclipse frames... class org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner#main, Line 192
In the entire stack trace, we are only interested in top four frames. The remaining frames from org.junit and org.eclipse are nothing but noise frames.
3.2. Filtering the StackFrames
Let’s enhance our stack walking code and remove the noise |
.
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Conservatives have a weakness for that “acting white” business because we are intellectually invested in emphasizing the self-inflicted problems of black America, for rhetorical and political reasons that are too obvious to require much elaboration. It’s a phenomenon that may or may not be exaggerated. John McWhorter argues that it is a real problem, and makes a pretty good case. So did President Barack Obama, who called on the nation to “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” I am not sure that a white man from Lubbock, Texas, has a great deal to add to President Obama’s argument there.
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But I do have something to say about the subject of white people acting white.
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We rarely used to put it in racial terms, unless we were talking about Eminem or the Cash-Me-Ousside Girl or some other white person who has embraced (or affected) some part of black popular culture. With the Trump-era emergence of a more self-conscious form of white-identity politics — especially white working-class identity politics — the racial language comes to the surface more often than it used to. But we still rarely hear complaints about “acting un-white.” Instead, we hear complaints about “elitism.”
The parallels to the “acting white” phenomenon in black culture are fairly obvious: When aspiration takes the form of explicit or implicit cultural identification, however partial, with some hated or resented outside group that occupies a notionally superior social position, then “authenticity” is to be found in socially regressive manners, mores, and habits. It is purely reactionary.
Republicans, once the party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the bits where most of the people live — as ‘un-American.’
The results are quite strange. Republicans, once the party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the bits where most of the people live — as “un-American.” Silicon Valley and California at large, New York City and the hated Acela corridor, and, to some extent, large American cities categorically are sneered at and detested. There is some ordinary partisanship in that, inasmuch as the Democrats tend to dominate the big cities and the coastal metropolitan aggregations, but it isn’t just that. Conservatives are cheering for the failure of California and slightly nonplussed that New York City still refuses to regress into being an unlivable hellhole in spite of the best efforts of its batty Sandinista mayor. Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion. God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts.
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We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen from Duck Dynasty. Why?
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American authenticity, from the acting-even-whiter point of view, is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home — the world John Mellencamp sang about but understandably declined to live in.
Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?
White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish, promiscuous, consumerist. The white working class has a very different ethic. Its members are, in the main, churchgoing, financially prudent, and married, and their manners are formal to the point of icy politeness. You’ll recognize the style if you’ve ever been around it: It’s “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” but it is the formality of soldiers and police officers — correct and polite, but not in the least bit deferential. It is a formality adopted not to acknowledge the superiority of social betters but to assert the equality of the speaker — equal to any person or situation, perfectly republican manners. It is the general social respect rooted in genuine self-respect.
Its opposite is the sneering, leveling, drag-’em-all-down-into-the-mud anti-“elitism” of contemporary right-wing populism. Self-respect says: “I’m an American citizen, and I can walk into any room, talk to any president, prince, or potentate, because I can rise to any occasion.” Populist anti-elitism says the opposite: “I can be rude enough and denigrating enough to drag anybody down to my level.” Trump’s rhetoric — ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. — has always been about reducing. Trump doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to duke it out with even the modest wits at the New York Times, hence it’s “the failing New York Times.” Never mind that the New York Times isn’t actually failing and that any number of Trump-related businesses have failed so thoroughly that they’ve gone into bankruptcy; the truth doesn’t matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kid’s lunch money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. That’s what all that ridiculous stuff about “winning” was all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives — and how “smart people” came to be a term of abuse.
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This involves, inevitably, a good deal of fakery.
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The man at the center of all this atavistic redneck revanchism is a pampered billionaire real-estate heir from New York City, and it has been something to watch the multi-millionaire populist pundits in Manhattan doing their best impersonations of beer-drinkin’ regular guys from the sticks. I assume Sean Hannity picked up his purported love for country music in the sawdust-floored honky-tonks of... Long Island.
As a purely aesthetic enterprise, none of this clears my poor-white-trash cultural radar. I’m reminded of those so-called dive bars in Manhattan that spend $150,000 to make a pricey spot in Midtown look like a Brooklyn kid’s idea of a low-rent roadside bar in Texas. (There’s one that even has Lubbock license plates on the wall. I wonder where they got them — is there some kind of mail-order dive-bar starter kit that comes with taxidermy, Texas license plates, and a few cases of Lone Star? Maybe via Amazon Prime?) The same crap is there — because the same crap is everywhere — but the arrangement isn’t quite right.
The populist Right’s abandonment of principle has been accompanied by a repudiation of good taste, achievement, education, refinement, and manners — all of which are abominated as signs of effete ‘elitism.’
The populist Right’s abandonment of principle has been accompanied by a repudiation of good taste, achievement, education, refinement, and manners — all of which are abominated as signs of effete “elitism.” During the Clinton years, Virtue Inc. was the top-performing share in the Republican political stock exchange. Fortunes were made, books were sold by the ton, and homilies were delivered. The same people today are celebrating Donald Trump — not in spite of his being a dishonest, crude serial adulterer but because of it. His dishonesty, the quondam cardinals of Virtue Inc. assure us, is simply the mark of a savvy businessman, his vulgarity the badge of his genuineness and lack of “political correctness,” and his pitiless abuse of his several wives and children the mark of a genuine “alpha male.” No less a virtue entrepreneur than Bill Bennett dismissed those who pointed out Trump’s endless lies and habitual betrayals as suffering from “moral superiority,” from people on “high horses,” and said that Trump simply is “a guy who says some things awkwardly, indecorously, infelicitously.”
Thus did the author of The Book of Virtues embrace the author of “Grab ’Em By the P***y.”
We need a Moynihan Report for conservative broadcasters.
The problem, in Bennett’s telling (and that of many other conservatives), isn’t that Trump is a morally defective reprobate but that he is aesthetically displeasing to overly refined “elitists.” That is a pretty common line of argument — and an intellectual cop-out — but set that aside for the moment. Let’s pretend that Bennett et al. are correct and this is simply a matter of manners. Are we now to celebrate vulgarity as a virtue? Are we to embrace crassness? Are we supposed to pretend that a casino-cum-strip-joint is a civilizational contribution up there with Notre-Dame, that the Trump Taj Mahal trumps the Taj Mahal? Are we supposed to snigger at people who ask that question? Are we supposed to abandon our traditional defense of standards to mimic Trump’s bucket-of-KFC-and-gold-plated-toilet routine?
Ludwig von Mises was as clear-eyed a social critic as he was an economist, and he noted something peculiar about the anti-Semitism of the Nazi era: In the past, minority groups were despised for their purported vices — white American racists considered African Americans lazy and mentally deficient, the English thought the Irish drank too much to be trusted to rule their own country, everybody thought the Gypsies were put on this Earth to spread disease and thievery. But the Jews were hated by the Nazis for their virtues: They were too intelligent, too clever, too good at business, too cosmopolitan, too committed to their own distinctness, too rich, too influential, too thrifty.
Our billionaire-ensorcelled anti-elitists take much the same tack: Anybody with a prestigious job, a good income, an education at a selective university, and no oxy overdoses in the immediate family — and anybody who prefers hearing the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center to watching football on television — just doesn’t know what life is like in “the real America” or for the “real men” who live there. No, the “real America,” in this telling, is little more than a series of dead factory towns, dying farms, pill mills — and, above all, victims. There, too, white people acting white echo elements of hip-hop culture, which presents powerful and violent icons of masculinity as hapless victims of American society.
The “alpha male” posturing, the valorizing of underclass dysfunction, the rejection of “elite” tastes and manners — right-wing populism in the age of Trump is a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s act, once acidly (and perfectly) described as a “white minstrel show.”
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I wonder if Bill Bennett can tap-dance.
Race is part of this, as it is part of many things in America, but it is easy to make too much of it, too. The white underclass may suffer from “acting white,” but what poor people in general suffer from is acting poor, i.e., repeating the mistakes and habits that left them (or their parents and grandparents, in many cases) in poverty or near-poverty to begin with.
The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it. What the Trump-style would-be tribunes of the plebs most have in common with self-appointed progressive advocates for the poor is ignorance of the actual subject matter. It weren’t the scheming Chinaman what stole ol’ Bubba’s job down Bovina, ’cause ol’ Bubba didn’t really have him a job to steal. And it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is. Well-heeled children of privilege such as Elizabeth Bruenig condescend to speak on behalf of people and communities about whom they know practically nothing — people who have not, let’s remember, asked the well-scrubbed sons and daughters of the ruling class to speak on their behalf. When they were asked, they chose Donald Trump by a very large margin, but then the poor make poor choices all the time — that’s part of why they’re poor. The Left is convinced of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? thesis, that the poor and struggling in the conservative and rural parts of the country are just too besotted with Jesus talk and homosexual panic to understand what actually is at stake, and who therefore — the famous phrase — “vote against their own economic interests.” Progressives preach about — and to — people with whom they have no real connection, and do so in ways that would embarrass them to death if it were a racial line rather than a class line they were crossing in such a state of pristine ignorance. They are the mirror image of white conservatives who wonder why poor black people in the Bronx can’t just “act white” and get with the program.
If I might be permitted to address the would-be benefactors of the white underclass from the southerly side of the class line: Ain’t nobody asked you to speak for us.
One of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take external forces, economic and otherwsie, into greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks.
Of course there are external forces, economic and otherwise, that act on poor people and poor communities, and one of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take those into considerably greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks. “Get off welfare and get a job!” has been replaced by solicitous talk about “globalization.” Likewise, the reaction to the crack-cocaine plague of the 1980s and 1990s was very different from the reaction to the opioid epidemic of the moment, in part because of who is involved — or perceived to be involved. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a rash of deaths from opioid overdoses. As Dr. Peter DeBlieux of University Medical Center in New Orleans put it, heroin addiction was, for a long time, treated in the same way AIDS was in its early days: as a problem for deviants. Nobody cared about AIDS when it was a problem for prostitutes, drug addicts, and those with excessively adventurous sex lives. The previous big epidemic of heroin overdoses involved largely non-white drug users. The current fentanyl-driven heroin episode and the growth of prescription-killer abuse involve more white users and more middle-class users.
But there are internal forces as well. People really do make decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made.
Consider the case of how I became homeless.
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I wasn’t homeless in the sense of sleeping in the park — most of the people we’re talking about when we’re talking about homelessness aren’t. The people who are sleeping on the streets are mainly addicts and people with other severe mental-health issues. I was homeless in the way the Department of Health and Human Services means: in “an unstable or non-permanent situation... forced to stay with a series of friends and/or extended family members.” (As a matter of policy, these two kinds of homelessness should not be conflated, which they intentionally are by those who wish for political reasons to pretend that our mental-health crisis is an economic problem.) Like many underclass families, mine lived very much paycheck-to-paycheck, and was always one setback away from economic catastrophe. That came when my mother, who for various reasons had a weakened immune system, got scratched by her poodle, Pepe, and nearly lost her right arm to the subsequent infection. A long hospitalization combined with fairly radical surgery and a series of skin grafts left her right arm and hand partially paralyzed, a serious problem for a woman who typed for a living. (She’d later learn to type well over 100 words per minute with only partial use of her right hand; she was a Rachmaninoff of the IBM Selectric.) I am sure that there were severe financial stresses associated with her illness, but I ended up being shuffled around between various neighbors — strangers to me — for mainly non-economic reasons. My parents had two houses between them, but at that time had just gone through a very ugly divorce. My mother was living with a mentally disturbed alcoholic who’d had a hard time in Vietnam (and well before that, I am certain; his grandfather had once shot him in the ass with a load of rock-salt for making unauthorized use of a watermelon from the family farm) and it was decided that it would be unsafe to leave children alone in his care, which it certainly would have been. He was very precise, in funny ways, and would stack his Coors Lite cans in perfect silver pyramids until he ran out of beer, at which point he would start drinking shots of Mexican vanilla, which is about 70 proof. Lubbock was a dry city then, and buying more booze would have meant a trip past the city limits, hence the resort to baking ingredients and, occasionally, to mouthwash. I am afraid the old realtors’ trick of filling the house with the aroma of baked cookies has the opposite of the desired effect on me.
Our mortgage then was $285 a month, which was a little less than my father paid in child support, so housing was, in effect, paid for. And thus I found myself in the strange position of being temporarily without a home while rotating between neighbors within sight, about 60 feet away, of the paid-up house to which I could not safely return. I was in kindergarten at the time.
Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal immigrants or Chinese competition to the Texas Instruments factory on the other side of town. Culture didn’t do it, either, and neither did poverty: We had enough money to secure comfortable housing in a nice neighborhood with good schools. In the last years of her life, my mother asked me to help her sort out some financial issues, and I was shocked to learn how much money she and her fourth and final husband were earning: They’d both ended their careers as government employees, and had pretty decent pensions and excellent health benefits. They were, in fact, making about as much in retirement in Lubbock as I was making editing newspapers in Philadelphia. Of course they were almost dead broke — their bingo and cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and paid for it with a credit card.
It was not the case that everything that was wrong with the lives of the people I grew up with was the result of their own choices, but neither was it the case that they were only leaves on the wind.
They didn’t suffer from bad luck or lack of opportunity. Bad decisions and basic human failure put them where they were. But that is from the political point of view an unsatisfactory answer, because it does not provide us with an external party (preferably a non-voting party) to blame. It was not the case that everything that was wrong with the lives of the people I grew up with was the result of their own choices, but neither was it the case that they were only leaves on the wind.
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Of course, they were anti-elitists before it was fashionable, FDR Democrats who grew into Buchananism and Perotism before those became Trumpism. It might never have occurred to them to imitate the habits of people who had gone farther and done better in life than they had, even though they had the experience of seeing people who came from the exact same conditions as they did — or, in some cases, from far worse circumstances — build happy, prosperous, stable, productive lives. My mother despised the college professors for whom she worked in her last job, who were unfailingly kind and generous to her, because they were unfailingly kind and generous to her, which she understood (as she understood many things) as condescension. Hers was a world of strict tribal hierarchy: She would, for example, enact petty cruelties on waitresses and grocery-store clerks and other people in service positions, taking advantage of the fact that she had momentary social inferiors, and she must have been confused that the professors and deans did not behave that way toward her. In fact, they did the opposite, entrusting her with work far beyond her modest formal credentials or the official duties of her position. Class is funny in a small-ish town: The father of a school friend of mine became the dean of her college and her boss, and she spoke of the family as though they inhabited some faraway realm when in reality they lived three blocks north and two blocks east. That she herself could have had a life more like theirs, or that her children might yet, never occurred to her — it was sour grapes raised to a state of psychosis.
Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin — that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors — is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message — that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer, before it became a white-minstrel show. It is a sad spectacle, but I do have some hope that the current degraded state of the conservative movement will not last forever.
The thing about eternals truths is, they’re eternal.
READ MORE:
The Impact Marriage Makes on Poverty
How Class Warfare Helps Trump
Class Warfare is Tearing the Country ApartAn Additional Ranger Archetype: Arcane Half-Caster
Natural Arcana
At 3rd level when a ranger chooses this archetype, they gain proficiency in Intelligence (Arcana) checks and they learn three 1st level spells from the wizards spell list. They then learn a new spell from the wizard spell list whenever they learn a new ranger spell. Whenever you have the option to replace an old ranger spell you know with a new ranger spell, you also have the option to replace an old spell from the wizard spells list you know for a new wizard spell. The spells you know through natural arcana counts as ranger spells for you.
From now on, you must prepare spells. Out of all the spells you know, you can prepare an amount of spells equal to half your ranger level (rounded up) plus your Wisdom modifier. Doing so takes an hour and is done after a long rest. If you don't prepare spells, you have the same spells as yesterday prepared for that day.
Additionally, you learn the cantrips Prestidigtation and Eldritch Blast. You learn a new cantrip from the wizard spell list at 7th, 11th and 15th level. You must choose the damage type for Eldritch Blast. Choose a type of damage: Fire, Cold or Lightning.
Preparation Arcanum
At 7th level you learn to perform perform a ritual that takes 1 hour to complete. The ritual can be performed during a short rest. During the ritual, you can gain levels of exhaustion in exchange for bonuses. You can gain as many levels of exhaustion as you want through this ritual during the 1 hour. You lose your bonuses when you finish a long rest but you lose your levels of exhaustion as you would normally. Your options are:
You gain one level of exhaustion and gain resistance to one of the following damage types of your choice: Acid, Fire, Cold, Poison, Necrotic, Radiant, Lightning, Psychic, Thunder or Force
You gain two levels of exhaustion and gain resistance to one of the following damage types of your choice: Slashing, Piercing or Bludgeoning.
You gain one level of exhaustion and you choose one specific type of creature and a damage type. That creature can no longer benefit from resistance against attacks or effects you make dealing that type of damage.
You gain one level of exhaustion and you choose two specific types of creatures that are your favored enemies and a damage type. Those creatures can no longer benefit from resistance against attacks or effects you make dealing that type of damage.
Specialized Techniques
At 11th level, you gain one of the following benefits of your choice.
The Nature of Magic. Choose two spells from any class, including this one. A spell you choose must be of a level you can cast, as shown on the Ranger table, or a cantrip.These spells count as Rangers spells for you.
Improved Preparation. The levels of exhaustion you have from preparation arcanum are halved (rounded down).
One with Nature. You no longer have to prepare spells.
Call of Magic. When you cast Eldritch Blast, add your Wisdom modifier to the damage it deals on a hit.
Hunter of the Pack. Once on each of your turns when you make a weapon attack, you can make another attack with the same weapon against a different creature that is within 5 feet of the original target and within range of your weapon.
Big Game Hunter. When a Large or larger creature within 5 feet of you hits or misses you with an attack, you can use your reaction to attack that creature immediately after its attack, provided you can see the creature.
Adaptable Combatant. You learn a fighting style from the fighter's list that you do not already know.
Battle Magic
At 15th level, you have mastered the art of weaving spellcasting and weapon use into a single harmonious act. When you use your action to cast a ranger spell, you can make one weapon attack as a bonus action.On Tuesday, October 29, a drilling rig will be atop the Russell Street bridge digging more than 100 feet down through the river bed to test for a new bridge foundation.
Loren Frazier is manager on the Russell Street project for the WGM Group. He said on Friday, October 25, that the drilling will help determine the soil conditions for a new bridge.
"The drilling will collect soil samples down underneath the river bed so that we can properly design a foundation for a new bridge," Frazier said. "If all goes well, the drilling will be conducted from the current bridge deck on Tuesday between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. This will disrupt traffic, so we will need to close one lane of the bridge. They're going to drill right off the existing bridge, through the deck and down about 120 feet below the surface to get the information we need."
Winter weather is forecasted for Monday into early Tuesday. Frazier said the weather could complicate the drilling project.
"If the weatherman is right, it could delay us a little bit," Frazier said. "If we're still able to work and get it done, hopefully we can because gaining this information for the bridge design is time-critical, so even if we have to delay a day or two, we still need to get it done this fall to keep going."
WGM Group has been contracted by the Montana Department of Transportation for the Russell Street project.
"We'll provide a full design for replacement of the Russell Street bridge and the streets between West Broadway and Idaho Street," Frazier said. "We're also under contract to provide preliminary, or as we like to call them 30 percent designs, for the remainder of the project from Idaho Street all the way down to Mount Avenue."
The completed design is planned for 2015, with construction scheduled to begin in the spring of 2016.
Manager on the Russell Street project for WGM Group, Loren Frazier:ORLANDO — Everyone knows the best social-media jabs and jokes are the ones deleted before they get posted.
Michael Bradley weighed this problem last week before ultimately deciding not to Instagram a few videos of his son, Luca, hilariously professing — as much as a four-year-old can — his dislike for the Montreal Impact.
Bradley described his son’s response as “unprompted” amid sharing the short clip with your correspondent — a brief foray into the charming home life of Toronto FC’s captain, who turns 30 later this month.
“My son has quickly realized that whenever Montreal is playing, he wants them to lose regardless of who they’re playing against,” Bradley told the Toronto Sun at the club’s hotel ahead of Wednesday’s match against Orlando City.
“Any time Montreal is playing he’s rooting against them pretty hard,” Bradley added with a grin. “And if TFC is playing Montreal he’s rooting against them really hard.”
Luca now knows the 401 Derby also is a chance to stay up past his bedtime — especially when dad is playing for a trophy.
“It was a Tuesday night and the kids’ last day of school was coming up,” Bradley added. “At one point my wife (Amanda) said, ‘It’s a school night. I’ll get a babysitter and go to BMO Field by myself.
“She came back a little later and said, ‘Wait a second! The kids have to come. If you guys win, the chance for them to be there and to share that with you, they can’t miss that.’”
It all happened like it was supposed to thanks to a gritty team effort and Sebastian Giovinco’s late heroics. Then, Amanda, Luca and Quinn Elle joined Bradley on the field post-game to touch the trophy and take in the fireworks that lit up the night sky above the most raucous stadium in Canada.
“When you have moments like that and to have the people who you’re closest with there,” Bradley added, “to be able to share it with them is something you never forget.”
It was a night etched in Bradley’s memory — a night when Toronto FC’s near-capacity-crowd continued to show the sporting landscape in Toronto is shifting course.
“The atmosphere the other night…” Bradley paused as he searched for words. “It was unbelievable. I mean, a Tuesday night in June? The atmosphere in the second half? I mean, that doesn’t happen anywhere in the league.
“To see the way the club has grown and is growing into the fabric of Toronto is unbelievable. In so many ways that’s just as rewarding as any one win that we’ve had.”
Winning is merely a symptom of Bradley’s original promise.
At his introductory press event three-and-a-half years ago, TFC’s captain guaranteed one thing: A side Toronto can be proud of.
Mission accomplished, it would seem.
But even Bradley was taken aback by the number of people who’ve continued to approach him following last year’s run to the MLS Cup final.
“I went to one of the Leafs-Capitals playoff games,” Bradley told the Sun. “The number of people at a Leafs playoff game who came up to me and congratulated me, it was unbelievable.
“They were basically saying, ‘Yeah, (the NHL playoffs) are awesome, but the atmosphere at the ACC doesn’t compare to the one you guys have at BMO.’ They were saying that at a Leafs playoff game! That’s why I came here.”
While preliminary promises have been kept, Bradley’s missions — both individually and collectively — haven’t yet wrapped up.
In addition to perhaps another run at an MLS Cup, he intends to play a big role at next summer’s World Cup. He hopes to be there in 2022, as well, though he admits competition for places at 34 years old will be more fierce.
“My best years are still ahead of me,” Bradley said. “With how much I love to work, my ceiling is still much higher … to be better and more consistent at a higher level in the best games.”
Collectively, The General didn’t hesitate to raise the bar for him and his TFC teammates, either. He wants to win everything.
“I feel like now we’re in a place where we will genuinely compete to win every trophy for the next few years,” Bradley said. “Will we win every one? I sure as hell hope so.
"But, maybe not."
He talks about being “on a mission” to win this year’s Supporters Shield and MLS Cup before being the first MLS side to claim next year’s CONCACAF Champions League.
He wonders “what it could all mean for Toronto and for TFC’s place in the city.”
Rest assured, if all of that happens Bradley will be Instagramming anything he pleases.
BRADLEY TALKS ABOUT ‘THE GOAL’
Michael Bradley surprised everyone last month when he scored from 50 metres in a huge World Cup qualifier against Mexico.
That is, Bradley surprised everyone except, well, Michael Bradley.
“Surprised? No,” Bradley responded when asked to talk about one the greatest goals in U.S. soccer history.
“Excited, yeah. Very excited,” Bradley added.
Even sweeter was the fact the U.S. escaped Azteca Stadium with a valuable draw that has the Americans back on track to qualify for next summer’s World Cup.
“We said before the game that night that for an American there’s no better game than U.S.-Mexico at Azteca,” Bradley said.
“To be able to help make a difference on that night and get a goal like that, I won’t forget that.”
The U.S. currently sits third in CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, a point ahead of Panama for the third an final guaranteed spot at Russia 2018.
klarson@postmedia.comSo far, of 153 kits tested, 21 match evidence in a criminal database and may involve serial rapists. But Worthy, who herself was raped while she was in law school, says the broader problem is indifference to sex crimes.
“Sexual assault is the stepchild of the law enforcement system,” she said. “When rape victims come into the criminal justice system, they are often treated poorly. They may be talked out of pursuing the case.”
The bottom line, Worthy said, is that “sexual assault is not taken as seriously as other crimes.” That — more than any offensive words — is the real scandal.
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Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California, eliminated the rape kit backlog in state crime labs after she took office. “If you don’t test it, you’ve got a victim who is absolutely petrified, and you’ve got a rapist who thinks he got away with it,” she said. “There could be nothing worse as a continuing threat to public safety.”
The lackadaisical attitude toward much sexual violence is seen in another astonishing fact: Sometimes, women or their health insurance companies must pay to have their rape kits collected.
“No other forensic evidence collection is treated in this way,” said Sarah Tofte of the Joyful Heart Foundation, which has focused attention on the rape kit backlog. If her home is broken into, she notes, the police won’t bill her or her homeowner’s insurance company “for the cost of dusting for fingerprints.”
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Yet another indication of cavalier attitudes: In 31 states, if a rape leads to a baby, the rapist can get visitation rights. That doesn’t happen often, but the issue does come up. In Massachusetts, a convicted rapist is suing for access to the child he fathered when he raped a 14-year-old girl.
One way to start turning around this backward approach to sex crimes would be to support the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry (Safer) Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would help local jurisdictions count and test their rape kits.
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According to data from the Department of Justice, one person in the United States is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes. A slight majority of rapes are never reported to the police, and others are never solved. For every 100 rapes, only three lead to any jail time for the rapist, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
There has been plenty of outrage this year, justifiably, at the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and Penn State for averting their eyes from sexual abuse of children. Yet America as a whole typically does the same thing when it comes to the trafficking of teenage girls by pimps, which amounts to rape many times a day. The police often treat those girls as criminals, rather than victims, even as the pimps get away.
These problems are not insoluble, and we are seeing progress. Some prosecutors are going after pimps in a serious way, and according to surveys, sexual assault has fallen by 60 percent over the last couple of decades. Even the furor over the comments by Senate candidates shows that times are changing.
So, sure, let’s pounce on politicians who say outrageous things. But even more, let’s push to end outrageous policies. Routine testing of rape kits would be a good start.Image: Mark Van Scyoc/Shutterstock
On Tuesday, Motherboard reported that the FBI had carried out an "unprecedented" hacking campaign, in which the agency targeted at least 1,300 computers that were allegedly used to visit a site hosting child pornography.
While it looks like several of those already charged will plead guilty to online child pornography crimes, one defense team has made the extraordinary step of arguing to have their client's case thrown out completely. Their main argument is that the FBI, in briefly running the child pornography site from its own servers in Virginia, itself distributed an "untold" amount of illegal material.
"There is no law enforcement exemption, or statutory exemption for the distribution of child pornography," Colin Fieman, one of the federal public defenders filing the motion to dismiss the indictment, claimed in a phone interview earlier this week. Jay Michaud, a Vancouver teacher arrested in July 2015, is also being represented by Linda Sullivan.
"THE GOVERNMENT'S OPERATION OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST 'HIDDEN SERVER' CHILD PORNOGRAPHY SITE AND ITS GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF UNTOLD NUMBERS OF PICTURES AND VIDEOS IS OUTRAGEOUS CONDUCT THAT SHOULD RESULT IN DISMISSAL OF THE INDICTMENT," a court filing dated November 20, 2015 reads.
Fieman and Sullivan reason that if the methods of the investigation that supposedly identified his client "cannot be reconciled with fundamental expectations of decency and fairness," then the indictment should be dismissed.
A section of the filing, which outlines the defense lawyers' argument.
In February |
your brain.”
I started to get nervous. I liked my brain the way it was. I mean, there were some pretty big issues there, no doubt about it—a proclivity for depression, an obsession with the mistakes I’d made in life, the whole death-terror thing—but I didn’t want a new one. I had no interest, for example, in leaving my wife. A friend had told me a story about a couple who’d done ayahuasca and had an epiphany that they should get divorced, then took a second dose the same weekend and had an epiphany that they should stay together. What if they’d stopped after the first trip?
In fact, there was something a bit contradictory about this whole idea of self-transformation. You were supposed to get back in touch with your essential self, to tsunami away all the cultural programming in your brain, and yet the psychedelic experience was all about losing one’s self. (Which is why Brian Wilson, in his admonition to acidheads, warned them to “hang on to your ego.”) How could you escape your “self” and find it at the same time? Probably, in the Journey People’s calculation, the ego is different from the self; one of the paradoxical teachings of Buddhism is that there’s a “self” and a “Self,” and that you have to lose the small to find the big. Over and over that night at the suburban guide’s house, I heard the “analytical mind” referred to with distaste. But it was the analytical part of my mind—the one that thought critically about the world, that saw the absurdity in life and death, that was able to write clear and concrete things as opposed to “specificity into chaos”—that I admired most. Who would I be without it?
On the other hand, Garcia-Romeu’s good-hearted advocacy was seductive. It helped that I liked him a lot. Bearded and benevolent, he’d ordered a Bushmills with his beer; in different clothes he would not have looked out of place on a Harley. He recently got a tattoo of a serotonin molecule with an oriole perched on it. He told me he’d struggled with depression in college but had found his calling in what he deems the “Renaissance in psychedelic science.” In ten years, he believes, psilocybin will be reclassified a Schedule II drug; there will be clinical centers, equipped with trained and certified guides, around the country. This is his life’s mission—not only to get to the bottom of why psychedelic therapy works wonders but to legitimize it as a viable treatment.
There’s some thought, he told me, that our brains have evolved to attribute special meaning to life-altering events and that due to their neurochemistry, psychedelics trigger such feelings. How else to explain the long history of psilocybin and mescaline use among ancient peoples? (Archaeologists have found sculptures of magic mushrooms—“mushroom stones”—dating all the way back to 1000 B.C.) This jibes with what Garcia-Romeu has seen in the lab: “Consistently, people in our studies rank their experience as one of the most meaningful events of their lives, right up there with the death of a parent and the birth of a child.”
I’d read the same thing in The New Yorker but still found this hard to believe. “The death of a parent?”
“That’s what they say. Even 14 months later.”
I told him about my disappointing “journey” at the suburban guide’s house. He seemed a bit disheartened by the whole ayahuasca fad, as if it were giving his work a bad name. Maybe there was some value in these drug-ins, but they didn’t sound all that useful to him as therapy: “The work we do generally requires two to three months, working one-on-one with the subject and building up trust. The idea is to plant the seeds very carefully, then let it storm.”
He seemed like a dream gardener to me, someone I’d love working with. I asked him if he could fit me into one of the Hopkins studies, but alas, I wasn’t a smoker, and the other available one involved dosing people blindly with various drugs. I wasn’t into being a guinea pig. For several reasons—not the least being my brain hemorrhage—I wouldn’t have qualified, anyway. If I wanted to experience the real thing, I’d have to find a psychologist willing to do it on the Q.T.
Now, here’s where things get a bit tricky. Because I did find someone, a trained psychologist, willing to work with me on the condition that she remain anonymous. Because for the time being, these are still Schedule I drugs we’re talking about and she could lose her license (or worse). So let’s call the trained psychologist S. Why did S agree to do this for me? I don’t think it had anything to do with money, though I was paying her for her work, of course. Like everyone else in the field of psychedelic science that I talked to, she’s a true crusader and wants to spread the word any way she can. I think she also wanted, sincerely, to help me.
So we made up a plan, compressed into a month because of scheduling issues: eight hours of “preparation,” followed by an all-day psilocybin session, followed by four hours of “integration.” The preparation, meted out in face-to-face therapy sessions, would take up most of the month. And quite honestly, these drugless sessions—essentially talk therapy—were a hundred times more useful to me than lying in someone’s hammock, watching the trees blossom. I told S about my life. I talked about my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I discovered that I still have Daddy issues. I cried, sober as a judge. I discussed my “intentions” for the upcoming session, all the issues I was hoping to address: my terror of death. My chronic insomnia. My on-and-off struggle with depression. My life-is-elsewhere syndrome. My desire to recapture some of the gleeful spontaneity I felt when I first started writing. As the intentions mounted, multiplying like rabbits, I began to invest psilocybin with legendary powers.
“I should warn you that during the session, you might believe that you’re going crazy. You might also think you’re exploding.”
I shifted in my chair. “What percentage of people have bad trips?”
“A little less than half.”
“Half?”
“Give or take.”
“How bad are these trips?”
“Some of them are hellacious,” S said calmly.
This did not seem like a scientific term to me. I remembered my all-nighter in the fetal position. But I’d signed on to this thing; it would have seemed cowardly—an acquiescence to my thanatophobia—to back out now. What if I was transformed?
n the day of the session, S picked me up at ten thirty in the morning and drove me to her apartment. The sun was out, sparkling off cars and delivery trucks, and it seemed a bit unseemly to be doing drugs before lunchtime. At S’s request, I’d made a playlist on Spotify of various jazz and classical albums I liked. (Words were too distracting, she’d said, and could interfere with the session.) I’d also brought some old family photo albums, to peruse while we waited for the drug to kick in.
S, who for obvious reasons couldn’t commandeer any lab-grade psilocybin, had bought some magic mushrooms from a friend. I knew she had done this, but it was still a bit startling to see her pull out a Ziploc bag full of caps and stems. There was something dispiritingly undergrad about it. Also, it looked like a lot to me. Enough for more than one person. I couldn’t remember ever taking that much as a kid. Outside a lab, of course, it’s impossible to measure the dose perfectly, so the best S could do was guess; she worried that it wouldn’t be enough. (When I asked her what constituted too high a dose, she told me that for our purposes there was “no such thing.”) I couldn’t imagine getting them all down my throat, so she very hospitably tossed the shrooms into a blender and mixed them up with some OJ and berries. A purple smoothie. It was delicious, with a hint of umami.
It’s a weird thing waiting for a drug to come on while someone observes you from a chair. You feel a bit like a TV set. I fought the urge to put on a good show. I was also scared, nauseated, and making some teary costume-drama good-byes to my brain. Eventually the shadows on the ceiling began to interest me. Not deeply, but in a vaguely groovy way. I couldn’t tell if a piece of geometric art on the wall was actually three-dimensional or not (it was). I put on my sleep mask—or “night shade,” as S called it—and waited to confront the void. The night shade is a major component of psychedelic therapy; it’s meant to direct you brainward, so you’re not distracted by groovy shadows. The music, too, is designed to take you inside yourself—to lead you, Pied Piper-style, to “a wondrous portal.” Or so I imagined.
But there were no portals in my brain, or even portholes. Just business as usual. Admittedly, the music sounded fucking great. It was like a trip to the stereo store, except we were listening to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady instead of “Stairway to Heaven.” Still, I could have played a passable game of tennis. The only vision that came to me was that of an ice-cold beer. After a while, fighting off boredom, I started to wonder if this whole thing was an elaborate hoax.
“It looked like a good dose to me,” S said, perplexed. “It might have been a potency issue. Or you might be one of those people with an extremely high tolerance.”
“What do you do in those cases?”
“We up the dose.”
This is how I found myself in a hotel room a couple days later, preparing to take some LSD that S happened to have in her fridge. The only way we could fit the session in was to pull an all-nighter. I didn’t want to do it at home with my children upstairs, and S’s partner meant that her place was off-limits, so I’d booked a room at the Royal Sonesta with sweeping views of the harbor. Red and blue lights shimmered off the water, painting the face of the bay like smears of mascara. Yachts rocked gently in the dark. In the distance, giving us the neon finger, was the humongous guitar sign of the Hard Rock Cafe.
Like all hotel rooms, it was freezing cold. We had a portable speaker, a night shade, and the LSD. I’d never done acid before—had assumed I would die happily without trying it—but S assured me it was very similar to psilocybin. The main difference was the length of the trip, which was one of the reasons they didn’t use it in the lab. “Personally, I prefer it,” she told me. “Easier on the stomach.” Still, I was taken aback when she pulled two tabs from her satchel and told me to stick them under my tongue.
“Both of them?”
“That’s right.”
“Are they low doses?”
“Ordinarily I’d start you off with one, but we’ve seen how little you’ve been affected. Plus, they’ve been sitting around for a year.” S looked at me encouragingly. She didn’t seem worried. “I’d say we’re talking 150 to 200 micrograms.”
Later I’d find out that 200 micrograms was what Aldous Huxley asked his wife to inject him with when he was dying of cancer—in two smaller doses—but at the time it meant nothing to me. I melted the tabs under my tongue. Then I sat on the bed, waiting for my plane to depart. At this point, I half expected nothing to happen. S had to take a phone call, and I remember thinking that this was maybe the weirdest thing I’d ever done: sitting in a hotel room after dark with a near-stranger, waiting for a double hit of acid to kick in while she chatted amiably with her parents. Eventually, things began to look strange. I remember that my legs extended on the bed in front of me looked very long. Everything was long. I’d entered Long Land. The corners of the desk looked sharper and more protuberant. It was like I’d put on 3 1/2-D glasses. The chiaroscuro, too, was Vermeerian. Before long I began to swoon. It was like having the spins. After drinking the shroom smoothie, I had voluntarily lain down and put on the night shade, but now I had no choice: I couldn’t possibly sit up or look at things or move an inch. I lay there immobilized, trying to hold on to the fact that I was doing this for a reason—that I was supposed to go spelunking in the void and therapeutically return, purged of my fear of death. Then: BOOM.
And then I felt something: “Rapture,” I guess you’d call it, though it bears about as much relationship to the way I’ve used that word in the past as a sneeze does to an orgasm.
Drug narratives are boring for the same reason that other people’s dreams are boring: Any attempts to describe the experience, which is by essence non-narrative, or in the very least experimentally plotted, come out sounding like dorm-room malarkey. You can’t make a plot without time, and time—chronology, cause and effect, some sense of action or drama—is what’s missing from the psychedelic experience. Time and, well, a protagonist. For about an hour and a half (or so I learned later, from S, because time had ceased to mean anything) I was completely obliterated. Blown into smithereens. I didn’t exist. The only thing that remained was a feeling, and even this is hard to describe, as it’s like no feeling I’d ever experienced before. It should be, in fact, impossible to feel. The best description I’ve found for it is the term mysterium tremendum et fascinans, coined by theologians to describe an encounter with the “Wholly Other”: a feeling of joy and demonic terror at the same time. Not two different feelings, mind you, but a single unbearable one. Huxley talks about it in The Doors of Perception as “the fear of…being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear.” That’s how I felt: completely overwhelmed, though not by fear but by Joyterror. Even the notion of a “bad trip” was meaningless, though I could feel myself teetering on the edge of something evil. But the notion of “teetering” was meaningless too—I was on both sides of the precipice at once. The only thing I remember doing is crying, though S’s notes claim I said the following things: “intense,” “too intense,” “overwhelming,” “wow,” and “melting.” Rising action, climax, denouement. Not bad for someone narrating from the primordial void.
And then something happened. A tunnel opened up in the void, shaped something like a heating duct, though more attractive, pimped out with divine light, and at the end of this very long heating duct I saw my self. It was a joyous reunion. I don’t think I’ve been so happy to see anyone in my entire life. I conceived—in the way you sort of immaculately conceive things while on drugs—that this self, this Eric P., existed eight hours from now. I was looking down a time-tunnel, into the future. And this Eric from the future, no longer tripping, spoke to me in a small, faraway voice, assuring me that everything I was experiencing wasn’t real, that I’d merely taken a shitload of LSD. For the first time, the Joyterror relaxed its grip on me a bit and I was able to think, to understand that I was listening to music, and that this music was unspeakably beautiful, the shouting of angels. It was Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (though I didn’t realize this at the time), and it was pouring down upon me from above. And then I felt something I will never forget. “Rapture,” I guess you’d call it, though it bears about as much relationship to the way I’ve used that word in the past as a sneeze does to an orgasm. The music became Beauty, and the waves of Beauty cascaded over me, rippling though my body, again and again and again. I was being bathed in it. A baptism. At the same time that I was being baptized by Beauty—and weeping, and trying to describe it to S—I was being delivered upward toward the source of the music, floating away from my body, ecstatic to leave the crummy, aging thing behind. I heard Eric P. talking from the end of the time-tunnel, saying This isn’t real or profound or unique, it conforms exactly to the Rapture as described in those Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets that come in the mail, but what I thought was: Fuck you, Eric, it doesn’t matter.
And then we floated back to earth, Eric and I, separate but within earshot, and the Beauty was gone. We hadn’t been raptured. We pulled the night shade off and took a look around us. The air vent on the ceiling rippled like the gills of a fish. The whole room was alive, pulsing in and out. We could see the world breathing. We thought about my mother’s Alzheimer’s, how meaningless it was that she was losing her mind, how cruel and senseless and obscene, and an image materialized of the Creator as a beast. He looked something like the Minotaur. We explained this to S, that God was a beast. We decided to take revenge on this beast, for the universe’s meaninglessness. We chased Him down and slit His throat with a sword, Theseus-style, and there was some catharsis in this. The blood of God was on us, and we liked it. As the night wore on, there were other epiphanies, ones that would sound trite in the retelling; suffice it to say that we forgave certain people that had wounded us, and lamented that we’d wounded others.DALLAS – After two consecutive seasons of being an award finalist, the third time was a charm for Creighton University senior Doug McDermott, as he was named winner of the 2014 Naismith Trophy for Men's College Player of the Year presented by AT&T.
The Atlanta Tipoff Club made the announcement earlier tonight during the AT&T National Association of Basketball Coaches' Guardians of the Game Awards Show at the Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas. The other finalists for the 2014 Naismith Trophy presented by AT&T included University of Arizona junior Nick Johnson, Duke University freshman Jabari Parker and University of Louisville senior Russ Smith.
McDermott was one of four finalists for the Naismith Trophy in 2013 and 2012, but saw Trey Burke (University of Michigan) and Anthony Davis (University of Kentucky), respectively, take home the award.
First created in 1969, UCLA's Lew Alcindor claimed the inaugural award.
During the current season, McDermott averaged 26.7 points and 7.0 rebounds in leading the Bluejays to a 27-8 record, and a second-place finish in the BIG EAST, Creighton's first season in the conference. With 3,150 points and 1,088 rebounds, McDermott is one of only three men in NCAA history with 3,000 points and 1,000 rebounds in a career. After earning Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year (POY) honors as a sophomore and a junior, he claimed the 2014 Big East POY award, making him just the third player in NCAA history to win POY honors in multiple conferences.
“With Doug you have to reflect not only on the current season but also his entire career to appreciate the full impact he had on college basketball,” said Eric Oberman, Atlanta Tipoff Club Executive Director. “He's got all the intangibles to make him a tremendous all-around player, and he showcased those attributes this season. It's an honor for us to call him a Naismith Trophy winner.”
"Doug has been the ultimate team player since arriving at Creighton four years ago, and there's no one happier about his individual success than his teammates," said his father and head coach, Greg McDermott. "He has experienced tremendous acclaim for his play on the court, and to do so while also serving as a role model for so many people makes recognition like the Naismith Trophy so special."
McDermott was chosen by the Atlanta Tipoff Club's national voting academy, which based its selection on individual performances throughout the 2013-14 men's college basketball season, and by fans, who were eligible to vote via a desktop and mobile device voting program from March 24 through April 5. For the 10th consecutive year, fans have contributed to the selection of the Naismith Trophy for Men's College Player of the Year presented by AT&T. The fan vote accounts for 25 percent of the vote total. The vote was tabulated and certified by the accounting firm of Habif, Arogeti& Wynne, LLP. HA&W is the largest independent accounting firm in Georgia and one of the top 50 firms in the United States.
“We'd like to congratulate and thank each of this year's nominees for their commitment to superior athletic performance, sportsmanship and leadership; and a special thank you to the fans who again helped select the winner,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer, AT&T. “It's an honor to welcome three-time finalist Doug McDermott into the elite company of Naismith Trophy recipients. His passion for the game has shown throughout his collegiate career.”
Other notable Naismith Trophy alumni include a pair of three-time winners in Bill Walton (1972, '73, '74) and Ralph Sampson (1981, '82, '83), as well as Michael Jordan (1984), Kevin Durant (2007) and Blake Griffin (2009). The Naismith Trophy presented by AT&T is the most prestigious national award presented annually to college basketball's best player.
The Naismith Trophy is the 13th different honor for McDermott as National Player of the Year this season, joining the USBWA Oscar Robertson Trophy, the John R. Wooden Award, Lute Olson Award, CBSSports.com, Sporting News, USA Today, NBCSports.com, BleacherReport.com, Basketball Times and Dick Vitale. McDermott also won the Senior CLASS Award on Thursday, which takes into account his work on the court and in the classroom and community.
Creighton finished the 2013-14 season with a 27-8 record while reaching the third round of the NCAA Tournament for a third straight season.
For more information, visit www.naismithawards.com.
ABOUT THE ATLANTA TIPOFF CLUB
Founded during the 1956-57 season, the Atlanta Tipoff Club, an Atlanta Sports Council property, is committed to promoting the game of basketball and recognizing the outstanding accomplishments of those who make the game so exciting. The Atlanta Tipoff Club administers the Naismith Awards, which have become the most prestigious national honors in all of college basketball. Named in honor of Dr. James Naismith, inventor of the game of basketball, the Naismith Trophy presented by AT&T recognizes the top Men's and Women's College Basketball Players of the Year. Other Naismith Awards are presented to the Men's and Women's College Basketball Coaches of the Year, Boy's and Girl's high school basketball players and coaches of the year, high school scholar-athletes, basketball officials, student sections and overall contributors to the game. The Naismith Trophy was first presented to UCLA's Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in 1969. Old Dominion's Anne Donovan won the inaugural Women's Naismith Trophy in 1983. For more information, visit http://www.naismithawards.com.In a campaign that is shaping up as the battle of the boring, the contest of the consultants and the nastiness of name-calling, let's give credit to Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulThe Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times The 10 GOP senators who may break with Trump on emergency MORE (R-Ky.) for his leadership on the floor of the U.S. Senate in his battle to protect the privacy of Americans against excessive eavesdropping.
Agree with Paul or not — and I agree with much of what he says when he warns against the dangers of the bulk collection of intelligence — he has injected substance and purpose to the presidential campaign. Good for him. He has been attacked for taking this stand of principle to raise money for his campaign. If donors want to support him because he battles for their privacy against Big Brother, good for them!
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Paul's battle for privacy in the latest Patriot Act debate was a breakthrough moment for him. Unlike former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), he did not spend a week trying to decide his position on an Iraq War that was initiated more then a decade ago. Unlike Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), he did not spend his time apologizing for insulting Vice President Biden while the nation was mourning the death of his heroic and widely admired son.
Paul received the attention of the nation on a major issue because he earned it by taking a stand on an issue of paramount importance. If every candidate in both parties would find an issue of equal magnitude on which to take an important stand of principle, as Paul did, we would have a better campaign.
I hope Rand Paul continues and escalates this issue, as I suspect he will. It will be hotly discussed in the GOP presidential debates, as it should be, which could well continue his breakthrough moment.
Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), who was then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. Contact him at brentbbi@webtv.net.Photo by Evan Switzer
Since binge watching Life on Netflix while stoned, I have considered myself well-versed in animal urges. But when it comes to the diversity of flora and fauna on this impossible rock we call Earth, there's always more to witness—like, for example, the homosexual necrophiliac tendencies of birds. In 2014, researchers in Japan caught three sand martin birds in the act of mating with the corpse of another male sand martin. They just recently published this finding in the journal Ornithological Science.
"We observed three sand martin Riparia riparia repeatedly attempting to copulate with a dead bird lying face down on the ground, with its wings spread and lowered. One of the three remained on the ground close to the dead bird and guarded it against copulation from the other two birds. Then, the guarding bird itself attempted to copulate with the dead bird," write the study's authors, Naoki Tomita and Yasuko Iwam. "Based on subsequent dissection the dead sand martin was identified as an adult male."
Here's the video of one of nature's many wonders:
Though necrophilia amongst human animals is explicitly taboo, elsewhere in the animal kingdom various species have been commonly caught in the act of mating with a deceased member of their tribe. (Remember that "mourning" kangaroo who was actually just trying to fuck his dead wife?) Unlike with humans, however, sex between animals and their fallen comrades isn't necessarily motivated by a macabre fetish. "Based on our observations, we propose that the observed homosexual necrophilia may be partly explained by the absence of sexual dimorphism in this species and the posture of the dead martin," the researchers explain. The unfortunate sand martin happened to die in a mating position that is an "important trigger arousing male sex drive."
Read More: Check Out This Giant Fossilized Daddy Longlegs Dick
According to the New Scientist, 30 cases of necrophilia have been recorded across variously deviant birds, some less innocent than others. Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker was the first to document homosexual necrophilia amongst birds in 1995 when he saw a drake mallard die after it crashed into the window of the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam, where he works. He then witnessed as "another drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes." Moeliker affectionately named the deceased duck "NMR 9997-00232."
Photo by Ivan Sazima
Moeliker didn't see what happened before NMR 9997-00232 died, but he "strongly believes" that it was engaged in a chase with its would-be attacker before it flew into the window. Male drake mallards, Moeliker writes in his paper on the event that was published in 2001, often "chase a single female in the air, trying to force her down and rape her." This behavior is known as "attempted rape flight," and it can also take place between two males of the species, though it is less common.
The fact that the copulation attempt continued after the duck died was a rare discovery. "Necrophilia is known in the mallard, but only among heterosexual 'pairs,'" he writes. "To the best of my knowledge, this case is the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."
(Ornithologists that I reached out to declined to comment—citing that the niche topic wasn't their area of expertise—but one did point us to a poetic limerick.)
Other animals, too—like the viral kangaroo—have been caught romancing corpses. Last year in Brazil, Ivan Suzima, a zoologist, stumbled upon lizard necrophilia in the park. According to National Geographic, Sazima saw a male lizard known as the black-and-white tegu mating with the dead body of a female. He returned again the next day and, even though the female's body was thoroughly decomposed, witnessed another male trying to copulate with it. Sazima told the publication that, based on body temperature and lingering pheromones, the males might not have realized that the lizard they were trying to court was a rotting pile of flesh. Similar behavior has been found in other types of lizards and frogs.
Penguins and sea lions, though both widely known for being cute as hell, have also been observed mating with the dead.
Photo via Wikipedia
Happy Friday!!Pat Delahanty (right), KCADP’s executive director, was quoted in an article in the Sept. 23 LEO Weekly about Shawn Windsor.
On Dec. 27, 2003, Windsor killed his estranged wife, Betty Jean Windsor, and their 8-year-old son, Corey. Before his trial, in October 2006, Windsor tried to commit suicide by overdosing on antidepressants.
From Sarah Kelley’s “A Life and Death Decision“:
Five days after the suicide attempt, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Martin McDonald conducted a hearing to determine whether Windsor–still being treated at University Hospital–was competent to proceed. The judge weighed the disparate views of two mental health experts, and the following day declared that although Windsor might not be “firing on all cylinders,” he was competent enough under state law to go forward with his capital case. A few days later, Windsor appeared in court and — ignoring the advice of defense attorneys — told the judge he wished to waive a jury trial, plead guilty to the murders and be executed.
Three years later, Windsor is appealing his death sentence to the Kentucky Supreme Court. Kelley spoke with Delahanty about his–and KCADP’s–position on this case:
At a minimum, he [David Niehaus, the Louisville public defender representing Windsor] argues, Windsor should be re-sentenced because his mental state was not thoroughly investigated, pointing out that [Marco] Chapman — who did not attempt suicide — was granted three competency evaluations, whereas his client underwent only one. It’s a sentiment shared by the Rev. Patrick Delahanty, executive director of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who believes the state should make every attempt to determine whether a defendant is competent. “If his intent at the time was to die and he took advantage of the state’s willingness to do that, it’s a public policy gone completely awry,” he says. “Obviously, in our opinion the death penalty is never warranted. But regardless of whether you agree or disagree on that, it clearly should not be up to the person who committed the crime to determine the penalty.”
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Constitutional Fundamentals 2
The Constitution seems to be a mystery for everyone. It is actually a very simple document that has been made a mystery by those that want to confuse the governed. Most of the constitution concerns itself with administration of government itself. All the "duties" of this government are spelled out explicitly in Article I section 8. Here they are, and nothing more:
{There is no mystery here. There is nothing complicated here. When this was written, the men toying with this idea knew well that a "government" of any kind is the most dangerous thing to man kind that has ever existed here on young planet Earth. A Constitution is written for one purpose, and that is to LIMIT the power of a government--period! Iron workers have a nick name for a twenty pound sledge hammer. They call it a Blue Monday. This is your Blue Monday right here, Use it on government. Ask them where they get the audacity to provide health care, or any thing else we didn't specifically specify for them, as a duty, to perform.}
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;
To establish post offices and post roads;
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
To provide and maintain a navy;
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
John Conway
Republican Liberty Caucus
"Pursuing libertarianism within the GOP since 1990" In Liberty,John Conway"Pursuing libertarianism within the GOP since 1990"
___
In ref to:
Hey John,
What part of the Constitution limits/defines what our government can spend our tax dollars on? I'm looking, but I can't find anything. I'm sure it's there though and I want to point it out to someone.
Thanks
October 14, 2008 in Current Affairs | Permalink
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The comments to this entry are closed.U.N. to Vote on PalestineSept. 26, 2011 9 P.M. EDT
After considering the Palestinians’ statehood bid in a meeting on Monday, the U.N. Security Council will meet again on Wednesday morning, when they will send the bid to the admissions committee. According to Security Council President Nawaf Salam of Lebanon, the decision was made as required by Article 59 of the United Nations’ rules of procedure. The bid will most likely fail because of the American veto, which would block the bid for full membership. But the General Assembly could still upgrade the Palestinians from nonvoting observer “entity” to permanent observer “state.” The Palestinian Authority’s permanent observer to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour said, "We hope that the Security Council will shoulder its responsibility and address this application with a positive attitude, especially since we have 139 countries that have recognized the state of Palestine so far, meaning more than two-thirds majority," he said. "We are ready to govern ourselves."
_______________________________
Abbas Rejects Quartet’s BlueprintSept. 24, 2011 |
| RESULTS |
Fourteen people participated in the tasting panel (2 groups of 7 participants), none of whom were aware of the nature of the exBEERiment. Participants were text messaged the survey link (feel free to check it out) and asked to complete the survey without talking to the other participants. I stood watch over both groups and ensured there was no collusion. Similar to the last exBEERiment and likely a practice I’ll continue, each beer was designated the name of a character from one of my favorite movies, in this case that movie was Rad.
Each participant received 2 clean glasses that were filled with approximately 4 oz of each beer, I was certain to clarify which beer was in each glass and everyone expressed understanding.
Side-note: I received a few recommendations to stop sharing the percentages due to the limited statistical power as a result of a small sample size, something I wholly understand. However, given the growing number of tasting panel participants and the general interest others have expressed, I plan to continue sharing this data and encourage readers to interpret it with a degree of caution. Also, I’ve decided to forgo sharing each participants individual comments, figuring a more cohesive summary would be less cumbersome and potentially more enjoyable to read, particularly as the tasting panel continues to grow.
– 57 % preferred the extract beer and 43% preferred the AG beer (prior to knowing the difference)
– 57% accurately guessed the beer made with extract, 14% said they did not know
Appearance
The most common comment regarding appearance was that the extract beer was darker than the AG beer, which was very obvious. Tasters also generally agreed that the AG was slightly clearer, but that both looked nice and had a similar head. Interestingly, 50% (7) of the tasters thought the extract beer’s appearance was better overall, seemingly due to the darker color, while 1 participant (7%) believed there to be no difference, at least preferentially.
Aroma
The extract beer was described by panel members as having a much more sweet aroma, with some tasters saying is tasted more “malty” and “caramelly” when compared to the AG beer. In describing the AG beer, one taster commented it “smells like a macrobrew” while others experienced the extract beer has having a somewhat “fruity” aroma. Overall, 57% of the participants preferred the aroma of the extract beer with no one claiming there to be no difference.
Flavor
The extract beer was most commonly described as having a sweeter/maltier flavor and being more sharply bitter. Some tasters said they could taste the “actual malt” in the AG beer, though nearly all agreed it was generally lighter/cleaner in flavor. 57% of tasters said they preferred the flavor of the extract beer, with most commenting their preference was due primarily to the sweeter character when compared to the AG beer. Nobody on the panel said there was “no difference” between the 2 beers in regards to flavor.
Mouthfeel
Overwhelmingly, the extract beer was described as having a fuller mouthfeel and more body, with one taster remarking it “lingers longer in my mouth.” The AG beer was most described by most as having a thinner body and less in the realm of overall mouthfeel. While 2 tasters felt there was no difference in mouthfeel between the beers, 50% reported they preferred the mouthfeel of the extract over the AG beer.
General Preference
When asked to select the beer they preferred overall, prior to being informed of the nature of the exBEERiment, 57% (8) of tasters selected the extract beer and 43% (6) selected the AG beer.
Could They Predict the Difference?
One of the questions on the survey asks, “What do you believe is different about the beers you are tasting?” The purpose of this question, which tasters had the option to skip, was to determine if the relatively experienced tasting panel might be able to accurately predict the nature of the exBEERiment. While no one specifically guessed extract vs. all-grain, 57% (8) thought it had something to do with the the grains/malts and 2 tasters postulated the extract beer was basically the AG beer brewed with crystal malts.
Once tasters were made aware of the nature of the exBEERiment, they were asked to predict the beer they believed was made using the malt extract. Of the 57% (8) who accurately predicted the extract beer, 4 commented it was the darker color that gave it away. 29% (4) inaccurately guessed that Cru was the extract beer and 14% (2) said they simply didn’t know which was made with extract.
My Impressions: I started drinking both of these beers a few days prior to presenting them to the tasting panel, attempting my best to evaluate them with as little bias as… yeah right, I’ve neither the desire nor balls to try to claim my evaluation of these beers was unbiased. Rather, I’ll share some of my expectations and personal experiences with each beer.
Being a rather vocal advocate for newer brewers getting into all-grain brewing sooner than later, I certainly had some ideas as to how these beers might turn out, I even wrote some down prior to my own tasting, just to see how they’d match with my perception of the beers once finished. Given the fact the AG beer was made using a single malt, I expected it to be very clean with maybe a slightly perceptible biscuit character from the Maris Otter malt. Since I used Fuggles later in the boil, I thought I might also pick up some earthy and/or floral hop character. The extract beer I expected to have that typical “extract flavor” I usually experience with more caramel notes and a thicker mouthfeel than the AG beer, though I figured the hop character would be about the same. Going into this exBEERiment, I understood the AG beer would most likely have a lighter aroma and flavor with thinner body.
Every time I compared the beers, the most noticeable difference was how the extract beer seemed to have a more prominent bitter bite, which I’ve heard could be due to the way the malt extract is added to the water. As expected, the AG beer was crisper in mouthfeel and certainly lighter in flavor and aroma. Where the extract beer had a rather prominent caramelly maltiness that hid most hop character, the AG beer was subtly nutty with a more noticeable, though still slight, floral hoppiness. Before sharing my personal preference, I’d like to give major kudos to MoreBeer for offering a truly unique product, as the LME used in this exBEERiment far surpassed my expectations and produced a beer I was absolutely unashamed to share. With some specialty malts and the proper techniques, I’ve no doubt some award winning beers can be made with this high quality ingredient.
Personally, I prefer my beer on the dryer side, so I choose the AG beer as the better of the 2. I also liked how the hop character seemed to come through stronger in the AG beer and the crisper mouthfeel made it a bit more easy-drinking. The extract beer had a sharper bitterness and sweeter character, which was fine, just less preferable to me.
| DISCUSSION |
To reiterate, the purpose of this exBEERiment was NOT to prove whether all-grain beers were better than extract beers, but rather to examine whether differences would be perceived between 2 beers made using the same base malt, one in extract form the other all-grain. To these ends, I believe the results of this exBEERiment support the notion that malt extract, at least in liquid form, does produce a unique flavor not found in beers made with all-grain. In discussions with tasting panel participants following completion of the survey, it was suggested that the AG beer would likely have resembled the extract beer more closely had it included a fairly significant dose of a mid-range Crystal malt, with a nationally-ranked BJCP judge suggesting up to 1 lb of C60.
As always, please feel free to comment or ask any questions. Cheers!
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Like this: Like Loading...A Haltom City family says someone stole their cutout of Anna from the movie 'Frozen' from the Christmas decorations in their front yard. (Published Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2015)
It appears one Haltom City 2-year-old girl has her very own Christmas Grinch.
Last Sunday thieves stole Wynter Trussell's favorite Christmas decoration – a handcrafted wooden cutout of Anna from the movie Frozen – from her front yard.
"She came out that (next) morning and immediately noticed she was missing and was like, 'Where's Anna? Where's Anna?'" said Wynter's father, Michael Trussell.
The cutout is among several Frozen characters standing in the Trussell family's lawn. Wynter's grandmother carved and painted the figures as a gift for her granddaughter's first Christmas.
"She's just starting to learn who Santa is and really enjoying the process of Christmas and enjoying time with family, and then something like that happens?" said Lauren Trussell, Wynter's mother.
Though the family allows neighbors to regularly stop by their house and take pictures with the cutouts, none of them had ever been stolen.
"They're all anchored into the ground, so you'd have to pull up the anchors and travel all the way back down to the street," Michael Trussell said. "I would hope it's just a group of kids playing around, or something like that, and we can just get it returned."
Developing Judge Issues Arrest Warrant for Dallas City Councilman
After NBC 5 ran the story about Anna's disappearance on Tuesday night, we received word on Wednesday afternoon, Anna had been returned.
"I want to say thank you for running Wynters story last night. Today Anna was returned to us and placed back with her friends. Thank you once again for making our Christmas merry," said Michael TrussellDallas Cowboys executive vice president/COO Stephen Jones, owner Jerry Jones, and head coach Jason Garrett discuss their picks in the second and third rounds of the 2015 NFL Draft at their Valley Ranch training facility on Friday, May 1, 2015, in Irving. (Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News)
If former Notre Dame linebacker Jaylon Smith was completely healthy he'd likely be in consideration for the Cowboys' fourth overall pick.
Unfortunately, Smith is not completely healthy. He tore the ACL and LCL in his left knee and possibly suffered nerve damage after landing awkwardly at the end of a play in this year's Fiesta Bowl. He had reconstructive surgery and will miss the entire 2016 season.
"He was clearly a top-five talent in this draft," McShay said. "I know of two general managers right now that told me he was going to be the No. 1 player on their board. They thought he was the best football player in this draft."
Smith displayed so much athleticism and versatility in college that he looked capable of playing any of the three linebacker spots in the Cowboys' defensive scheme.
But the knee injury has brought a considerable amount of uncertainty to the 6-2, 223-pounder's NFL future.
"From what I understand talking to multiple teams and people around here, it's highly concerning," McShay said. "He's certainly not playing next year. He may never get to the level that he was, so you're taking a huge medical risk. For each team it's about their doctors and what their protocol is.
"But if you're asking me where I project him, it won't surprise me if we get to Day 3, and I can't believe I'm saying it, but it won't surprise me if we get to Day 3 and Jaylon Smith is still on the board."
Considering that Cowboys team physician Dan Cooper performed the operation on Smith in January, Dallas should know more about the situation than any other team.
The Cowboys have four sixth-round picks this year. If they believe Smith has a chance of returning to his old form, maybe they spend one on a player who could end up being the steal of the draft.A cannabinoid is one of a class of diverse chemical compounds that acts on cannabinoid receptors in cells that alter neurotransmitter release in the brain. Ligands for these receptor proteins include the endocannabinoids (produced naturally in the body by animals),[1] the phytocannabinoids (found in cannabis and some other plants), and synthetic cannabinoids (manufactured artificially). The most notable cannabinoid is the phytocannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis.[2][3] Cannabidiol (CBD) is another major constituent of the plant.[4] There are at least 113 different cannabinoids isolated from cannabis, exhibiting varied effects.[5]
Synthetic cannabinoids encompass a variety of distinct chemical classes: the classical cannabinoids structurally related to THC, the nonclassical cannabinoids (cannabimimetics) including the aminoalkylindoles, 1,5-diarylpyrazoles, quinolines, and arylsulfonamides as well as eicosanoids related to endocannabinoids.[2]
Uses [ edit ]
Medical uses include the treatment of nausea due to chemotherapy, spasticity, and possibly neuropathic pain.[6] Common side effects include dizziness, sedation, confusion, dissociation and "feeling high".[6]
Cannabinoid receptors [ edit ]
Before the 1980s, it was often speculated that cannabinoids produced their physiological and behavioral effects via nonspecific interaction with cell membranes, instead of interacting with specific membrane-bound receptors. The discovery of the first cannabinoid receptors in the 1980s helped to resolve this debate.[7] These receptors are common in animals, and have been found in mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. At present, there are two known types of cannabinoid receptors, termed CB 1 and CB 2,[1] with mounting evidence of more.[8] The human brain has more cannabinoid receptors than any other G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) type.[9]
Cannabinoid receptor type 1 [ edit ]
CB 1 receptors are found primarily in the brain, more specifically in the basal ganglia and in the limbic system, including the hippocampus [1] and the striatum. They are also found in the cerebellum and in both male and female reproductive systems. CB 1 receptors are absent in the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain stem responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular functions. CB1 is also found in the human anterior eye and retina.[10]
Cannabinoid receptor type 2 [ edit ]
CB 2 receptors are predominantly found in the immune system, or immune-derived cells[11] with the greatest density in the spleen. While found only in the peripheral nervous system, a report does indicate that CB 2 is expressed by a subpopulation of microglia in the human cerebellum.[12] CB 2 receptors appear to be responsible for the anti-inflammatory and possibly other therapeutic effects of cannabis seen in animal models.[11]
Phytocannabinoids [ edit ]
Main classes of natural cannabinoids Type Skeleton Cyclization Cannabigerol-type
CBG Cannabichromene-type
CBC Cannabidiol-type
CBD Tetrahydrocannabinol-
and
Cannabinol-type
THC, CBN Cannabielsoin-type
CBE iso-
Tetrahydrocannabinol-
type
iso-THC Cannabicyclol-type
CBL Cannabicitran-type
CBT
The bracts surrounding a cluster of Cannabis sativa flowers are coated with cannabinoid-laden trichomes
Cannabis-derived cannabinoids [ edit ]
The classical cannabinoids are concentrated in a viscous resin produced in structures known as glandular trichomes. At least 113 different cannabinoids have been isolated from the Cannabis plant[5] To the right, the main classes of cannabinoids from Cannabis are shown[citation needed]. The best studied cannabinoids include tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabinol (CBN).
Types [ edit ]
All classes derive from cannabigerol-type (CBG) compounds and differ mainly in the way this precursor is cyclized.[13] The classical cannabinoids are derived from their respective 2-carboxylic acids (2-COOH) by decarboxylation (catalyzed by heat, light, or alkaline conditions).[14]
Tetrahydrocannabinol [ edit ]
Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the primary psychoactive component of the Cannabis plant. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC, THC) and delta-8-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ8-THC), through intracellular CB 1 activation, induce anandamide and 2-arachidonoylglycerol synthesis produced naturally in the body and brain. These cannabinoids produce the effects associated with cannabis by binding to the CB 1 cannabinoid receptors in the brain.
Cannabidiol [ edit ]
Cannabidiol (CBD) is non-psychotropic. Recent evidence shows that the compound counteracts cognitive impairment associated with the use of cannabis.[15] Cannabidiol has little affinity for CB 1 and CB 2 receptors but acts as an indirect antagonist of cannabinoid agonists.[16] It was found to be an antagonist at the putative new cannabinoid receptor, GPR55, a GPCR expressed in the caudate nucleus and putamen.[17] Cannabidiol has also been shown to act as a 5-HT 1A receptor agonist.[18] CBD can interfere with the uptake of adenosine, which plays an important role in biochemical processes, such as energy transfer.[citation needed] It may play a role in promoting sleep and suppressing arousal.[19]
CBD shares a precursor with THC and is the main cannabinoid in CBD-dominant Cannabis strains. CBD has been shown to play a role in preventing the short-term memory loss associated with THC.[20]
There is tentative evidence that CBD had an anti-psychotic effect, but research in this area is limited.[21][15]
There is now strong evidence that CBD treats chronic pain, and it is used by many in the form of a topical oil treatment.[citation needed]
Cannabinol [ edit ]
Cannabinol (CBN) is the primary product of THC degradation, and there is usually little of it in a fresh plant.[citation needed] CBN content increases as THC degrades in storage, and with exposure to light and air.[citation needed] It is only mildly psychoactive. Its affinity to the CB 2 receptor is higher than for the CB 1 receptor.[22]
Cannabigerol [ edit ]
Cannabigerol (CBG) is non-psychoactive but still contributes to the overall effects of Cannabis. CBG has been shown to promote apoptosis in cancer cells and inhibit tumor growth in mice.[23] It acts as an α 2 -adrenergic receptor agonist, 5-HT 1A receptor antagonist, and CB 1 receptor antagonist.[24] It also binds to the CB 2 receptor.[24]
Tetrahydrocannabivarin [ edit ]
Tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV) is prevalent in certain central Asian and southern African strains of Cannabis.[25][26] It is an antagonist of THC at CB 1 receptors and lessens the psychoactive effects of THC.[27]
Cannabidivarin [ edit ]
Although cannabidivarin (CBDV) is usually a minor constituent of the cannabinoid profile, enhanced levels of CBDV have been reported in feral cannabis plants from the northwest Himalayas, and in hashish from Nepal.[26][28]
Cannabichromene [ edit ]
Cannabichromene (CBC) is non-psychoactive and does not affect the psychoactivity of THC.[29] CBC has shown antitumor effects in breast cancer xenoplants in mice.[30] More common in tropical cannabis varieties.
Biosynthesis [ edit ]
Cannabinoid production starts when an enzyme causes geranyl pyrophosphate and olivetolic acid to combine and form CBGA. Next, CBGA is independently converted to either CBG, THCA, CBDA or CBCA by four separate synthase, FAD-dependent dehydrogenase enzymes. There is no evidence for enzymatic conversion of CBDA or CBD to THCA or THC. For the propyl homologues (THCVA, CBDVA and CBCVA), there is an analogous pathway that is based on CBGVA from divarinolic acid instead of olivetolic acid.
Double bond position [ edit ]
In addition, each of the compounds above may be in different forms depending on the position of the double bond in the alicyclic carbon ring. There is potential for confusion because there are different numbering systems used to describe the position of this double bond. Under the dibenzopyran numbering system widely used today, the major form of THC is called Δ9-THC, while the minor form is called Δ8-THC. Under the alternate terpene numbering system, these same compounds are called Δ1-THC and Δ6-THC, respectively.
Length [ edit ]
Most classical cannabinoids are 21-carbon compounds. However, some do not follow this rule, primarily because of variation in the length of the side-chain attached to the aromatic ring. In THC, CBD, and CBN, this side-chain is a pentyl (5-carbon) chain. In the most common homologue, the pentyl chain is replaced with a propyl (3-carbon) chain. Cannabinoids with the propyl side chain are named using the suffix varin, and are designated, for example, THCV, CBDV, or CBNV.
Cannabinoids in other plants [ edit ]
Phytocannabinoids are known to occur in several plant species besides cannabis. These include Echinacea purpurea, Echinacea angustifolia, Acmella oleracea, Helichrysum umbraculigerum, and Radula marginata.[31] The best-known cannabinoids that are not derived from Cannabis are the lipophilic alkamides (alkylamides) from Echinacea species, most notably the cis/trans isomers dodeca-2E,4E,8Z,10E/Z-tetraenoic-acid-isobutylamide.[31] At least 25 different alkylamides have been identified, and some of them have shown affinities to the CB 2 -receptor.[32][33] In some Echinacea species, cannabinoids are found throughout the plant structure, but are most concentrated in the roots and flowers.[34][35] Yangonin found in the Kava plant has significant affinity to the CB1 receptor.[36] Tea (Camellia sinensis) catechins have an affinity for human cannabinoid receptors.[37] A widespread dietary terpene, beta-caryophyllene, a component from the essential oil of cannabis and other medicinal plants, has also been identified as a selective agonist of peripheral CB 2 -receptors, in vivo.[38] Black truffles contain anandamide.[39] Perrottetinene, a moderately psychoactive cannabinoid,[40] has been isolated from different Radula varieties.
Most of the phytocannabinoids are nearly insoluble in water but are soluble in lipids, alcohols, and other non-polar organic solvents.
Cannabis plant profile [ edit ]
Cannabis plants can exhibit wide variation in the quantity and type of cannabinoids they produce. The mixture of cannabinoids produced by a plant is known as the plant's cannabinoid profile. Selective breeding has been used to control the genetics of plants and modify the cannabinoid profile. For example, strains that are used as fiber (commonly called hemp) are bred such that they are low in psychoactive chemicals like THC. Strains used in medicine are often bred for high CBD content, and strains used for recreational purposes are usually bred for high THC content or for a specific chemical balance.
Quantitative analysis of a plant's cannabinoid profile is often determined by gas chromatography (GC), or more reliably by gas chromatography combined with mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Liquid chromatography (LC) techniques are also possible and, unlike GC methods, can differentiate between the acid and neutral forms of the cannabinoids. There have been systematic attempts to monitor the cannabinoid profile of cannabis over time, but their accuracy is impeded by the illegal status of the plant in many countries.
Pharmacology [ edit ]
Cannabinoids can be administered by smoking, vaporizing, oral ingestion, transdermal patch, intravenous injection, sublingual absorption, or rectal suppository. Once in the body, most cannabinoids are metabolized in the liver, especially by cytochrome P450 mixed-function oxidases, mainly CYP 2C9.[41] Thus supplementing with CYP 2C9 inhibitors leads to extended intoxication.[41]
Some is also stored in fat in addition to being metabolized in the liver. Δ9-THC is metabolized to 11-hydroxy-Δ9-THC, which is then metabolized to 9-carboxy-THC.[42] Some cannabis metabolites can be detected in the body several weeks after administration. These metabolites are the chemicals recognized by common antibody-based "drug tests"; in the case of THC or others, these loads do not represent intoxication (compare to ethanol breath tests that measure instantaneous blood alcohol levels), but an integration of past consumption over an approximately month-long window. This is because they are fat-soluble, lipophilic molecules that accumulate in fatty tissues.[43]
Research shows the effect of cannabinoids might be modulated by aromatic compounds produced by the cannabis plant, called terpenes. This interaction would lead to the entourage effect.[44]
Cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals [ edit ]
Nabiximols (brand name Sativex) is an aerosolized mist for oral administration containing a near 1:1 ratio of CBD and THC.[45] Also included are minor cannabinoids and terpenoids, ethanol and propylene glycol excipients, and peppermint flavoring.[46] The drug, made by GW Pharmaceuticals, was first approved by Canadian authorities in 2005 to alleviate pain associated with multiple sclerosis, making it the first cannabis-based medicine. It is marketed by Bayer in Canada.[47] Sativex has been approved in 25 countries; clinical trials are underway in the United States to gain FDA approval.[48] In 2007, it was approved for treatment of cancer pain.[46] In Phase III trials, the most common adverse effects were dizziness, drowsiness and disorientation; 12% of subjects stopped taking the drug because of the side effects.[49]
Dronabinol (brand name Marinol) is a THC drug used to treat poor appetite, nausea, and sleep apnea.[50] It is approved by the FDA for treating HIV/AIDS induced anorexia and chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting.[51][52][53]
The CBD drug Epidiolex has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of two rare and severe forms of epilepsy,[54] Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndromes.[55]
Separation [ edit ]
Cannabinoids can be separated from the plant by extraction with organic solvents. Hydrocarbons and alcohols are often used as solvents. However, these solvents are flammable and many are toxic.[56] Butane may be used, which evaporates extremely quickly. Supercritical solvent extraction with carbon dioxide is an alternative technique. Once extracted, isolated components can be separated using wiped film vacuum distillation or other distillation techniques.[57] Also, techniques such as SPE or SPME are found useful in the extraction of this compounds.[58]
History [ edit ]
Cannabinoids were first discovered in the 1940s when CBD and CBN were identified. The structure of THC was first determined in 1964.[citation needed]
Due to molecular similarity and ease of synthetic conversion, CBD was originally believed to be a natural precursor to THC. However, it is now known that CBD and THC are produced independently in the cannabis plant from the precursor CBG.[citation needed]
Endocannabinoids [ edit ] Further information on the roles and regulation of the endocannabinoids: Endocannabinoid system 1 and CB 2 Anandamide, an endogenous ligand of CBand CB
Endocannabinoids are substances produced from within the body that activate cannabinoid receptors. After the discovery of the first cannabinoid receptor in 1988, scientists began searching for an endogenous ligand for the receptor.[7][59]
Types of endocannabinoid ligands [ edit ]
Arachidonoylethanolamine (Anandamide or AEA) [ edit ]
Anandamide was the first such compound identified as arachidonoyl ethanolamine. The name is derived from the Sanskrit word for bliss and -amide. It has a pharmacology similar to THC, although its structure is quite different. Anandamide binds to the central (CB 1 ) and, to a lesser extent, peripheral (CB 2 ) cannabinoid receptors, where it acts as a partial agonist. Anandamide is about as potent as THC at the CB 1 receptor.[60] Anandamide is found in nearly all tissues in a wide range of animals.[61] Anandamide has also been found in plants, including small amounts in chocolate.[62]
Two analogs of anandamide, 7,10,13,16-docosatetraenoylethanolamide and homo-γ-linolenoylethanolamine, have similar pharmacology. All of these compounds are members of a family of signalling lipids called N-acylethanolamines, which also includes the noncannabimimetic palmitoylethanolamide and oleoylethanolamide, which possess anti-inflammatory and anorexigenic effects, respectively. Many N-acylethanolamines have also been identified in plant seeds[63] and in molluscs.[64]
Another endocannabinoid, 2-arachidonoylglycerol, binds to both the CB 1 and CB 2 receptors with similar affinity, acting as a full agonist at both.[60] 2-AG is present at significantly higher concentrations in the brain than anandamide,[65] and there is some controversy over whether 2-AG rather than anandamide is chiefly responsible for endocannabinoid signalling in vivo.[1] In particular, one in vitro study suggests that 2-AG is capable of stimulating higher G-protein activation than anandamide, although the physiological implications of this finding are not yet known.[66]
2-Arachidonyl glyceryl ether (noladin ether) [ edit ]
In 2001, a third, ether-type endocannabinoid, 2-arachidonyl glyceryl ether (noladin ether), was isolated from porcine brain.[67] Prior to this discovery, it had been synthesized as a stable analog of 2-AG; indeed, some controversy remains over its classification as an endocannabinoid, as another group failed to detect the substance at "any appreciable amount" in the brains of several different mammalian species.[68] It binds to the CB 1 cannabinoid receptor (K i = 21.2 nmol/L) and causes sedation, hypothermia, intestinal immobility, and mild antinociception in mice. It binds primarily to the CB 1 receptor, and only weakly to the CB 2 receptor.[60]
N-Arachidonoyl dopamine (NADA) [ edit ]
Discovered in 2000, NADA preferentially binds to the CB 1 receptor.[69] Like anandamide, NADA is also an agonist for the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (TRPV1), a member of the vanilloid receptor family.[70][71]
Virodhamine (OAE) [ edit ]
A fifth endocannabinoid, virodhamine, or O-arachidonoyl-ethanolamine (OAE), was discovered in June 2002. Although it is a full agonist at CB 2 and a partial agonist at CB 1, it behaves as a CB 1 antagonist in vivo. In rats, virodhamine was found to be present at comparable or slightly lower concentrations than anandamide in the brain, but 2- to 9-fold higher concentrations peripherally.[72]
Lysophosphatidylinositol (LPI) [ edit ]
Recent evidence has highlighted lysophosphatidylinositol as the endogenous ligand to novel endocannabinoid receptor GPR55, making it a strong contender as the sixth endocannabinoid.[73]
Function [ edit ]
Endocannabinoids serve as intercellular 'lipid messengers', signaling molecules that are released from one cell and activating the cannabinoid receptors present on other nearby cells. Although in this intercellular signaling role they are similar to the well-known monoamine neurotransmitters such as dopamine, endocannabinoids differ in numerous ways from them. For instance, they are used in retrograde signaling between neurons. Furthermore, endocannabinoids are lipophilic molecules that are not very soluble in water. They are not stored in vesicles and exist as integral constituents of the membrane bilayers that make up cells. They are believed to be synthesized 'on-demand' rather than made and stored for later use. The mechanisms and enzymes underlying the biosynthesis of endocannabinoids remain elusive and continue to be an area of active research.
The endocannabinoid 2-AG has been found in bovine and human maternal milk.[74]
A review by Matties et al. (1994) summed up the phenomenon of gustatory enhancement by certain cannabinoids.[75] Recently, a paper by Yoshida et al. showed a selective stimulation of sweet receptor (Tlc1) by indirectly increasing its expression and suppressing the activity of leptin, the Tlc1 antagonist. It is proposed that the competition of leptin and cannabinoids for Tlc1 is implicated in energy homeostasis.[76]
Retrograde signal [ edit ]
Conventional neurotransmitters are released from a ‘presynaptic’ cell and activate appropriate receptors on a ‘postsynaptic’ cell, where presynaptic and postsynaptic designate the sending and receiving sides of a synapse, respectively. Endocannabinoids, on the other hand, are described as retrograde transmitters because they most commonly travel ‘backward’ against the usual synaptic transmitter flow. They are, in effect, released from the postsynaptic cell and act on the presynaptic cell, where the target receptors are densely concentrated on axonal terminals in the zones from which conventional neurotransmitters are released. Activation of cannabinoid receptors temporarily reduces the amount of conventional neurotransmitter released. This endocannabinoid-mediated system permits the postsynaptic cell to control its own incoming synaptic traffic. The ultimate effect on the endocannabinoid-releasing cell depends on the nature of the conventional transmitter being controlled. For instance, when the release of the inhibitory transmitter GABA is reduced, the net effect is an increase in the excitability of the endocannabinoid-releasing cell. On the converse, when release of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate is reduced, the net effect is a decrease in the excitability of the endocannabinoid-releasing cell.[citation needed]
Range [ edit ]
Endocannabinoids are hydrophobic molecules. They cannot travel unaided for long distances in the aqueous medium surrounding the cells from which they are released and therefore act locally on nearby target cells. Hence, although emanating diffusely from their source cells, they have much more restricted spheres of influence than do hormones, which can affect cells throughout the body.[citation needed]
Synthetic cannabinoids [ edit ]
Historically, laboratory synthesis of cannabinoids was often based on the structure of herbal cannabinoids, and a large number of analogs have been produced and tested, especially in a group led by Roger Adams as early as 1941 and later in a group led by Raphael Mechoulam. Newer compounds are no longer related to natural cannabinoids or are based on the structure of the endogenous cannabinoids.[77]
Synthetic cannabinoids are particularly useful in experiments to determine the relationship between the structure and activity of cannabinoid compounds, by making systematic, incremental modifications of cannabinoid molecules.[78]
When synthetic cannabinoids are used recreationally, they present significant health dangers to users.[79] In the period of 2012 through 2014, over 10,000 contacts to poison control centers in the United States were related to use of synthetic cannabinoids.[79]
Medications containing natural or synthetic cannabinoids or cannabinoid analogs:
Other notable synthetic cannabinoids include:
Table of plant cannabinoids [ edit ]
Table of plant cannabinoids Cannabigerol-type (CBG) Cannabigerol
(E)-CBG-C 5 Cannabigerol
monomethyl ether
(E)-CBGM-C 5 A Cannabinerolic acid A
(Z)-CBGA-C 5 A Cannabigerovarin
(E)-CBGV-C 3 Cannabigerolic acid A
(E)-CBGA-C 5 A Cannabigerolic acid A
monomethyl ether
(E)-CBGAM-C 5 A Cannabigerovarinic acid A
(E)-CBGVA-C 3 A Cannabichromene-type (CBC) (±)-Cannabichromene
CBC-C 5 (±)-Cannabichromenic acid A
CBCA-C 5 A (±)-Cannabivarichromene, (±)-Cannabichromevarin
CBCV-C 3 (±)-Cannabichromevarinic
acid A
CBCVA-C 3 A Cannabidiol-type (CBD) (−)-Cannabidiol
CBD-C 5 Cannabidiol
momomethyl ether
CBDM-C 5 Cannabidiol-C 4
CBD-C 4 |
financial crisis, as parallel economies outside the traditional monetary system have emerged in countries such as Spain, Mexico and Brazil. These systems are flourishing because the unemployed can either trade skills for local currency or swap their time for other services.
Supporters of local currency in the United States say they are founding these systems here because they believe in the “buy local” movement and want to strengthen their neighborhoods and reduce reliance on large corporate banks.
“Obviously the idea of local currency has been around for a long time and historically they do pop up in times of economic uncertainty,” said Julie Gouldener, 40, program coordinator of the Baltimore Green Currency Association. “We view the complementary currency as a win-win. It’s not meant to replace the U.S. dollar. It’s meant to exist alongside it and build more local wealth.”
Gouldener’s group launched a currency called the BNote in April 2011. Locals can trade real dollars for BNotes at eight “cambios” around the city, including Zeke’s Coffee in Northeast Baltimore, and use them at 175 businesses. So far, there are about 28,000 BNotes in circulation.
“It’s going great. We’ve had steady growth since the launch,” Gouldener said.
The slick green notes are printed on currency-grade paper with the faces of prominent Baltimore figures — think Edgar Allan Poe — and each has a gold, engraved serial number. Gouldener said the association is exploring whether to partner with the Baltimore Time Bank — another bartering group in which people swap services for time credits, rather than local currency — to provide a reward or incentive in BNotes.
Ed Collom, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine, said local currencies had their first heyday during the Great Depression, when users traded notes called scrip — essentially IOUs made of paper, wood or even clamshells — that replaced scarce federal dollars.
There are now about a dozen local currency systems around the country, including Ithaca Hours, one of the largest that was founded in New York in 1991. The idea seems to appeal to people from a wide political spectrum — from Green Party progressives campaigning against globalization to libertarians suspicious of big government.
“It’s become much more mainstream. Localization cuts across the political spectrum — Republicans and libertarians are supportive of independent small businesses, too,” Collom said.
But there are rules.
Taxes should be paid. The currency can’t look like U.S. dollars and the government frowns on anybody minting coins.Bernard von NotHaus, a free thinker, famously got into trouble in 2007 for minting millions of “Liberty Dollars” that he said was a kind of private monetary system backed by precious metal. (Some of the copper coins featured the head of former libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, who has long advocated abolishing the Federal Reserve.) The government didn’t see it that way; von NotHaus was convicted of counterfeiting.
Collom said that currency systems are more likely to falter because organizers find it difficult to sustain momentum. Even the Ithaca Hours has seen a decline in usage, with the number of participating businesses falling from about 500 at its height to about 200 now. Its new board president, Paul Strebel, a financial adviser, said he hopes to reinvigorate the system and is exploring using virtual bills on smartphones.
Feeling like he needed to do something to help in the country’s economic downturn, District artist Larry Chang, 63, began making local money he called Potomacs in 2009, currency that eventually was accepted in places such as Qualia Coffee in Petworth. But after a good start, the movement lost steam, Chang said.
“It hasn’t caught on very well,” he said. “In D.C. it was very hard to put something across that’s alternative.”
In the neighborhoods surrounding Mount Rainier, however, the Anacostia Hours program has been a small but steady presence since it was founded in 2006. There are now 76 members, who pay $5 each in annual dues and provide everything from yardwork to pet-sitting to nutritional consulting, Williams said.
Williams, 62 and a land conservationist, said that the idea for a local currency in Mount Rainier and Hyattsville was sparked in 2006 by a Japanese American woman who has since moved to Japan. Williams began attending community meetings and potlucks with his wife and other like-minded citizens who thought that a system of local exchange would help strengthen their community.
“One of the things you notice is that transactions become a lot more personal,” Williams said. “Instead of going to some big-box store or supermarket, running through the cashier’s line, you’re having an exchange and conversation with the person you’re dealing with.”
Williams said the name “Anacostia Hours” was a tribute to the Indian term for “trading center” from the tribes that used to live along the Anacostia River. One “Hour” is equivalent to $10, and members get two Hours when they sign up and list their names and services in the directory.
When the group approached Cheryl Harrington, who opened her Shortcake Bakery in Hyattsville last year, she agreed to join. She has had 15 or so Hours transactions at her bakery since then, and in turn uses the bills at the Glut to buy ingredients.
“It’s working out well,” she said. “I think it’s a great idea, keeping money in a particular community.”Learn how to make a game like Space Invaders in this 2-part Sprite Kit tutorial!
Update Note 10/29/2014: Check out the updated version of this tutorial using iOS 8 and Swift!
Space Invaders is one of the most important video games ever developed. Created by Tomohiro Nishikado and released in 1978 by Taito Corporation, it earned billions of dollars in revenue. It became a cultural icon, inspiring legions of non-geeks to take up video games as a hobby.
Space Invaders used to be played in big game cabinets in video arcades, chewing up our allowances one quarter at a time. When the Atari 2600 home video game console went to market, Space Invaders was the “killer app” that drove sales of Atari hardware.
In this tutorial, you’ll build an iOS version of Space Invaders using Sprite Kit, the 2D game framework newly introduced in iOS 7.
This tutorial assumes you are familiar with the basics of Sprite Kit. If you are completely new to Sprite Kit, you should go through our Sprite Kit tutorial for beginners first.
Also, you will need an iPhone or iPod Touch running iOS 7 and an Apple developer account in order to get the most out of this tutorial. That is because you will be moving the ship in this game using the accelerometer, which is not present on the iOS simulator. If you don’t have an iOS 7 device or developer account, you can still complete the tutorial — you just won’t be able to move your ship.
Without further ado, let’s get ready to blast some aliens!
Getting Started
Apple provides an XCode 5 template named Sprite Kit Game which is pretty useful if you want to create your next smash hit from scratch. However, in order to get you started quickly, download the starter project for this tutorial. It’s based on the Sprite Kit template and already has some of the more tedious work done for you.
Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped the project, navigate to the SKInvaders directory and double-click SKInvaders.xcodeproj to open the project in Xcode.
Build and run the project by selecting the Run button from the Xcode toolbar (the first button on the top left) or by using the keyboard shortcut Command + R. You should see the following screen appear on your device or your simulator:
Creepy – the invaders are watching you already! However, if you see the screen above, this means you’re ready to move forward.
The Role of GameScene
To complete your Space Invaders game, you’ll have to code several independent bits of game logic; this tutorial will serve as a great exercise in constructing and refining game logic. It will also reinforce your understanding of how Sprite Kit elements fit together to produce the action in a game.
Most of the action in your game takes place in the stubbed-out GameScene class. You’ll spend most of this tutorial filling out GameScene with your game code.
Let’s take a look at how the game is set up. Open GameViewController.m and scroll down to viewDidLoad. This method is key to all UIKit apps and runs after GameViewController loads its view into memory. It’s intended as a spot for you to further customize your app’s UI at runtime.
Take a look at the interesting parts of viewDidLoad below:
- (void)viewDidLoad { //... omitted... SKView * skView = (SKView *)self.view; //... omitted... //1 Create and configure the scene. SKScene * scene = [GameScene sceneWithSize:skView.bounds.size]; scene.scaleMode = SKSceneScaleModeAspectFill; //2 Present the scene. [skView presentScene:scene]; }
The section of code shown above creates and displays the scene as follows:
First, create the scene with the same dimensions as its containing view. scaleMode ensures that the scene is large enough to fill the entire view. Next, present the scene to draw it on-screen.
Once GameScene is on-screen, it takes over from GameViewController and drives the rest of your game.
Open GameScene.m and take a look at how it’s organized:
#import "GameScene.h" #import "GameOverScene.h" #import <CoreMotion/CoreMotion.h> #pragma mark - Custom Type Definitions #pragma mark - Private GameScene Properties @interface GameScene () @property BOOL contentCreated; @end @implementation GameScene #pragma mark Object Lifecycle Management #pragma mark - Scene Setup and Content Creation - (void)didMoveToView:(SKView *)view { if (!self.contentCreated) { [self createContent]; self.contentCreated = YES; } } - (void)createContent { //... omitted... } #pragma mark - Scene Update - (void)update:(NSTimeInterval)currentTime { } #pragma mark - Scene Update Helpers #pragma mark - Invader Movement Helpers #pragma mark - Bullet Helpers #pragma mark - User Tap Helpers #pragma mark - HUD Helpers #pragma mark - Physics Contact Helpers #pragma mark - Game End Helpers @end
You’ll notice that there are a lot of #pragma mark - Something or Other type lines in the file. These are called compiler directives since they control the compiler. These particular pragmas are used solely to make the source file easier to navigate.
How do pragmas make source navigation easier, you ask? Notice the area in the bar next to GameScene.m that says “No Selection”, as below:
If you click on “No Selection”, a little menu pops up, as so:
Hey — that’s a list of all of your pragmas! Click on any pragma to jump to that section of the file. This feature doesn’t look like it has much value at present, but once you’ve added a bunch of invader-killing code, these pragmas will be a really…er… pragmatic way of navigating through your file! :]
Creating the Evil Invaders from Space
Before you start coding, take a moment to consider the GameScene class. When is it initialized and presented on screen? When is the best time to set up your scene with its content?
You might think the scene’s initializer, initWithSize: fits the bill, but the scene may not be fully configured or scaled at the time its initializer runs. It’s better to create a scene’s content once the scene has been presented by a view, since at that point the environment in which the scene operates is “ready to go.”
A view invokes the scene’s didMoveToView: method to present it to the world. Navigate to didMoveToView: and you’ll see the following:
- (void)didMoveToView:(SKView *)view { if (!self.contentCreated) { [self createContent]; self.contentCreated = YES; } }
This method simply invokes createContent using the BOOL property contentCreated to make sure you don’t create your scene’s content more than once. This property is defined in an Objective-C Class Extension found near the top of the file, as below:
#pragma mark - Private GameScene Properties @interface GameScene () @property BOOL contentCreated; @end
As the pragma points out, this class extension allows you to add “private” properties to your GameScene class, without revealing them to other external classes or code. You still get the benefit of using Objective-C properties, but your GameScene state is stored internally and can’t be modified by other external classes. As well, it doesn’t clutter the namespace of datatypes that your other classes see.
Just as you did in your private scene properties, you can define important constants as private definitions within your file. Navigate to #pragma mark - Custom Type Definitions and add the following code:
//1 typedef enum InvaderType { InvaderTypeA, InvaderTypeB, InvaderTypeC } InvaderType; //2 #define kInvaderSize CGSizeMake(24, 16) #define kInvaderGridSpacing CGSizeMake(12, 12) #define kInvaderRowCount 6 #define kInvaderColCount 6 //3 #define kInvaderName @"invader"
The above type definition and constant definitions take care of the following tasks:
Define the possible types of invader enemies. You can use this in switch statements later when you need to do things such as displaying different sprite images for each enemy type. The typedef also makes InvaderType a formal Objective-C type that is type-checked for method arguments and variables. This ensures that you don’t pass the wrong method argument or assign it to the wrong variable. Define the size of the invaders and that they’ll be laid out in a grid of rows and columns on the screen. Define a name you’ll use to identify invaders when searching for them in the scene.
It’s good practice to define constants like this rather than using raw numbers like 6 (also known as “magic numbers”) or raw strings like @"invader" (“magic strings”) that are prone to typos. Imagine mistyping @"Invader" where you meant @"invader" and spending hours debugging to find that a simple typo messed everything up. Using constants like kInvaderRowCount and kInvaderName prevents frustrating bugs — and makes it clear to other programmers what these constant values mean.
All right, time to make some invaders! Add the following method to GameScene.m directly after createContent :
-(SKNode*)makeInvaderOfType:(InvaderType)invaderType { //1 SKColor* invaderColor; switch (invaderType) { case InvaderTypeA: invaderColor = [SKColor redColor]; break; case InvaderTypeB: invaderColor = [SKColor greenColor]; break; case InvaderTypeC: default: invaderColor = [SKColor blueColor]; break; } //2 SKSpriteNode* invader = [SKSpriteNode spriteNodeWithColor:invaderColor size:kInvaderSize]; invader.name = kInvaderName; return invader; }
makeInvaderOfType:, as the name implies, creates an invader sprite of a given type. You take the following actions in the above code:
Use the invaderType parameter to determine the color of the invader. Call the handy convenience method spriteNodeWithColor:size: of SKSpriteNode to allocate and initialize a sprite that renders as a rectangle of the given color invaderColor with size kInvaderSize.
Okay, so a colored block is not the most menacing enemy imaginable. It may be tempting to design invader sprite images and dream about all the cool ways you can animate them, but the best approach is to focus on the game logic first, and worry about aesthetics later.
Adding makeInvaderOfType: isn’t quite enough to display the invaders on the screen. You’ll need something to invoke makeInvaderOfType: and place the newly created sprites in the scene.
Still in GameScene.m add the following method directly after makeInvaderOfType: :
-(void)setupInvaders { //1 CGPoint baseOrigin = CGPointMake(kInvaderSize.width / 2, 180); for (NSUInteger row = 0; row < kInvaderRowCount; ++row) { //2 InvaderType invaderType; if (row % 3 == 0) invaderType = InvaderTypeA; else if (row % 3 == 1) invaderType = InvaderTypeB; else invaderType = InvaderTypeC; //3 CGPoint invaderPosition = CGPointMake(baseOrigin.x, row * (kInvaderGridSpacing.height + kInvaderSize.height) + baseOrigin.y); //4 for (NSUInteger col = 0; col < kInvaderColCount; ++col) { //5 SKNode* invader = [self makeInvaderOfType:invaderType]; invader.position = invaderPosition; [self addChild:invader]; //6 invaderPosition.x += kInvaderSize.width + kInvaderGridSpacing.width; } } }
The above method lays out invaders in a grid of rows and columns. Each row contains only a single type of invader. The logic looks complicated, but if you break it down, it makes perfect sense:
Loop over the rows. Choose a single InvaderType for all invaders in this row based on the row number. Do some math to figure out where the first invader in this row should be positioned. Loop over the columns. Create an invader for the current row and column and add it to the scene. Update the invaderPosition so that it's correct for the next invader.
Now, you just need to display the invaders on the screen. Replace the current code in createContent with the following:
[self setupInvaders];
Build and run your app; you should see a bunch of invaders on the screen, as shown below:
The rectangular alien overlords are here! :]
Create Your Valiant Ship
With those evil invaders on screen, your mighty ship can't be far behind. Just as you did for the invaders, you first need to define a few constants.
Add the following code immediately below the #define kInvaderName line:
#define kShipSize CGSizeMake(30, 16) #define kShipName @"ship"
kShipSize stores the size of the ship, and kShipName stores the name you will set on the sprite node, so you can easily look it up later.
Next, add the following two methods just after setupInvaders :
-(void)setupShip { //1 SKNode* ship = [self makeShip]; //2 ship.position = CGPointMake(self.size.width / 2.0f, kShipSize.height/2.0f); [self addChild:ship]; } -(SKNode*)makeShip { SKNode* ship = [SKSpriteNode spriteNodeWithColor:[SKColor greenColor] size:kShipSize]; ship.name = kShipName; return ship; }
Here's the interesting bits of logic in the two methods above:
Create a ship using makeShip. You can easily reuse makeShip later if you need to create another ship (e.g. if the current ship gets destroyed by an invader and the player has "lives" left). Place the ship on the screen. In Sprite Kit, the origin is at the lower left corner of the screen. The anchorPoint is based on a unit square with (0, 0) at the lower left of the sprite's area and (1, 1) at its top right. Since SKSpriteNode has a default anchorPoint of (0.5, 0.5), i.e., its center, the ship's position is the position of its center. Positioning the ship at kShipSize.height/2.0f means that half of the ship's height will protrude below its position and half above. If you check the math, you'll see that the ship's bottom aligns exactly with the bottom of the scene.
To display your ship on the screen, add the following line to the end of createContent :
[self setupShip];
Build and run your app; and you should see your ship arrive on the scene, as below:
Fear not, citizens of Earth! Your trusty spaceship is here to save the day!
Adding the Heads Up Display (HUD)
It wouldn't be much fun to play Space Invaders if you didn't keep score, would it? You're going to add a heads-up display (or HUD) to your game. As a star pilot defending Earth, your performance is being monitored by your commanding officers. They're interested in both your "kills" (score) and "battle readiness" (health).
Add the following constants at the top of GameScene.m, just below #define kShipName :
#define kScoreHudName @"scoreHud" #define kHealthHudName @"healthHud"
Now, add your HUD by inserting the following method right after makeShip :
-(void)setupHud { SKLabelNode* scoreLabel = [SKLabelNode labelNodeWithFontNamed:@"Courier"]; //1 scoreLabel.name = kScoreHudName; scoreLabel.fontSize = 15; //2 scoreLabel.fontColor = [SKColor greenColor]; scoreLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Score: %04u", 0]; //3 scoreLabel.position = CGPointMake(20 + scoreLabel.frame.size.width/2, self.size.height - (20 + scoreLabel.frame.size.height/2)); [self addChild:scoreLabel]; SKLabelNode* healthLabel = [SKLabelNode labelNodeWithFontNamed:@"Courier"]; //4 healthLabel.name = kHealthHudName; healthLabel.fontSize = 15; //5 healthLabel.fontColor = [SKColor redColor]; healthLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Health: %.1f%%", 100.0f]; //6 healthLabel.position = CGPointMake(self.size.width - healthLabel.frame.size.width/2 - 20, self.size.height - (20 + healthLabel.frame.size.height/2)); [self addChild:healthLabel]; }
This is boilerplate code for creating and adding text labels to a scene. The relevant bits are as follows:
Give the score label a name so you can find it later when you need to update the displayed score. Color the score label green. Position the score label near the top left corner of the screen. Give the health label a name so you can reference it later when you need to update the displayed health. Color the health label red; the red and green indicators are common colors for these indicators in games, and they're easy to differentiate in the middle of furious gameplay. Position the health label near the top right corner of the screen.
Add the following line to the end of createContent to call the setup method for your HUD:
[self setupHud];
Build and run your app; you should see the HUD in all of its red and green glory on your screen as shown below:
Invaders? Check. Ship? Check. HUD? Check. Now all you need is a little dynamic action to tie it all together!
Adding Motion to the Invaders
To render your game onto the screen, Sprite Kit uses a game loop which searches endlessly for state changes that require on-screen elements to be updated. The game loop does several things, but you'll be interested in the mechanisms that update your scene. You do this by overriding the update: method, which you'll find as a stub in your GameScene.m file.
When your game is running smoothly and renders 60 frames-per-second (iOS devices are hardware-locked to a max of 60 fps), update: will be called 60 times per second. This is where you modify the state of your scene, such as altering scores, removing dead invader sprites, or moving your ship around...
You'll use update: to make your invaders move across and down the screen. Each time Sprite Kit invokes update:, it's asking you "Did your scene change?", "Did your scene change?"... It's your job to answer that question — and you'll write some code to do just that.
Insert the following code at the top of GameScene.m, just below the definition of the InvaderType enum:
typedef enum InvaderMovementDirection { InvaderMovementDirectionRight, InvaderMovementDirectionLeft, InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenRight, InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenLeft, InvaderMovementDirectionNone } InvaderMovementDirection;
Invaders move in a fixed pattern: right, right, down, left, left, down, right, right,... so you'll use the InvaderMovementDirection type to track the invaders' progress through this pattern. For example, InvaderMovementDirectionRight means the invaders are in the right, right portion of their pattern.
Next, find the class extension in the same file and insert the following properties just below the existing property for contentCreated :
@property InvaderMovementDirection invaderMovementDirection; @property NSTimeInterval timeOfLastMove; @property NSTimeInterval timePerMove;
Add the following code to the very top of createContent :
//1 self.invaderMovementDirection = InvaderMovementDirectionRight; //2 self.timePerMove = 1.0; //3 self.timeOfLastMove = 0.0;
This one-time setup code initializes invader movement as follows:
Invaders begin by moving to the right. Invaders take 1 second for each move. Each step left, right or down takes 1 second. Invaders haven't moved yet, so set the time to zero.
Now, you're ready to make the invaders move. Add the following code just below #pragma mark - Scene Update Helpers :
// This method will get invoked by update: -(void)moveInvadersForUpdate:(NSTimeInterval)currentTime { //1 if (currentTime - self.timeOfLastMove < self.timePerMove) return; //2 [self enumerateChildNodesWithName:kInvaderName usingBlock:^(SKNode *node, BOOL *stop) { switch (self.invaderMovementDirection) { case InvaderMovementDirectionRight: node.position = CGPointMake(node.position.x + 10, node.position.y); break; case InvaderMovementDirectionLeft: node.position = CGPointMake(node.position.x - 10, node.position.y); break; case InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenLeft: case InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenRight: node.position = CGPointMake(node.position.x, node.position.y - 10); break; InvaderMovementDirectionNone: default: break; } }]; //3 self.timeOfLastMove = currentTime; }
Here's a breakdown of the code above, comment by comment:
If it's not yet time to move, then exit the method. moveInvadersForUpdate: is invoked 60 times per second, but you don't want the invaders to move that often since the movement would be too fast for a normal person to see. Recall that your scene holds all of the invaders as child nodes; you added them to the scene using addChild: in setupInvaders identifying each invader by its name property. Invoking enumerateChildNodesWithName:usingBlock: only loops over the invaders because they're named kInvaderName ; this makes the loop skip your ship and the HUD. The guts of the block moves the invaders 10 pixels either right, left or down depending on the value of invaderMovementDirection. Record that you just moved the invaders, so that the next time this method is invoked (1/60th of a second from now), the invaders won't move again till the set time period of one second has elapsed.
To make your invaders move, replace the existing update: method with the following:
-(void)update:(NSTimeInterval)currentTime { [self moveInvadersForUpdate:currentTime]; }
Build and run your app; you should see your invaders slowly walk their way across the screen. Keep watching, and you'll eventually see the following screen:
Hmmm, what happened? Why did the invaders disappear? Maybe the invaders aren't as menacing as you thought!
The invaders don't yet know that they need to move down and change their direction once they hit the side of the playing field. Guess you'll need to help those invaders find their way!
Controlling the Invaders' Direction
Adding the following code just after #pragma mark - Invader Movement Helpers :
-(void)determineInvaderMovementDirection { //1 __block InvaderMovementDirection proposedMovementDirection = self.invaderMovementDirection; //2 [self enumerateChildNodesWithName:kInvaderName usingBlock:^(SKNode *node, BOOL *stop) { switch (self.invaderMovementDirection) { case InvaderMovementDirectionRight: //3 if (CGRectGetMaxX(node.frame) >= node.scene.size.width - 1.0f) { proposedMovementDirection = InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenLeft; *stop = YES; } break; case InvaderMovementDirectionLeft: //4 if (CGRectGetMinX(node.frame) <= 1.0f) { proposedMovementDirection = InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenRight; *stop = YES; } break; case InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenLeft: //5 proposedMovementDirection = InvaderMovementDirectionLeft; *stop = YES; break; case InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenRight: //6 proposedMovementDirection = InvaderMovementDirectionRight; *stop = YES; break; default: break; } }]; //7 if (proposedMovementDirection!= self.invaderMovementDirection) { self.invaderMovementDirection = proposedMovementDirection; } }
Here's what's going on in the above code:
Since local variables accessed by a block are by default const (that is, they cannot be changed), you must qualify proposedMovementDirection with __block so that you can modify it in //2. Loop over all the invaders in the scene and invoke the block with the invader as an argument. If the invader's right edge is within 1 point of the right edge of the scene, it's about to move offscreen. Set proposedMovementDirection so that the invaders move down then left. You compare the invader's frame (the frame that contains its content in the scene's coordinate system) with the scene width. Since the scene has an anchorPoint of (0, 0) by default, and is scaled to fill its parent view, this comparison ensures you're testing against the view's edges. If the invader's left edge is within 1 point of the left edge of the scene, it's about to move offscreen. Set proposedMovementDirection so that invaders move down then right. If invaders are moving down then left, they've already moved down at this point, so they should now move left. How this works will become more obvious when you integrate determineInvaderMovementDirection with moveInvadersForUpdate:. If the invaders are moving down then right, they've already moved down at this point, so they should now move right. If the proposed invader movement direction is different than the current invader movement direction, update the current direction to the proposed direction.
Add the following code to determineInvaderMovementDirection within moveInvadersForUpdate:, immediately after the conditional check of self.timeOfLastMove :
[self determineInvaderMovementDirection];
Why is it important that you add the invocation of determineInvaderMovementDirection only after the check on self.timeOfLastMove? That's because you want the invader movement direction to change only when the invaders are actually moving. Invaders only move when the check on self.timeOfLastMove passes — i.e., the conditional expression is true.
What would happen if you added the new line of code above as the very first line of code in moveInvadersForUpdate:? If you did that, then there would be two bugs:
You'd be trying to update the movement direction way too often -- 60 times per second -- when you know it can only change at most once per second.
The invaders would never move down, as the state transition from InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenLeft to InvaderMovementDirectionLeft would occur without an invader movement in between. The next invocation of moveInvadersForUpdate: that passed the check on self.timeOfLastMove would be executed with self.invaderMovementDirection == InvaderMovementDirectionLeft and would keep moving the invaders left, skipping the down move. A similar bug would exist for InvaderMovementDirectionDownThenRight and InvaderMovementDirectionRight.
Build and run your app; you'll see the invaders moving as expected across and down the screen, as below:
Note: You might have noticed that the invaders' movement is jerky. That's a consequence of your code only moving invaders once per second — and moving them a decent distance at that. But the movement in the original game was jerky, so keeping this feature helps your game seem more authentic.
Adding Motion to your Ship
Good news: your supervisors can see the invaders moving now and have decided that your ship needs a propulsion system! To be effective, any good propulsion system needs a good control system. In other words, how do you, the ship's pilot, tell the ship's propulsion system what to do?
The important thing to remember about mobile games is the following:
Mobile games are not desktop/arcade games and desktop/arcade controls don't port well to mobile.
In a desktop or arcade version of Space Invaders, you'd have a physical joystick and fire button to move your ship and shoot invaders. Such is not the case on a mobile device such as an iPhone or iPad.
Some games attempt to use virtual joysticks or virtual D-pads but these rarely work well, in my opinion.
Think about how you use your iPhone most often: holding it with one hand. That leaves only one hand to tap/swipe/gesture on the screen.
Keeping the ergonomics of holding your iPhone with one hand in mind, consider several potential control schemes for moving your ship and firing your laser cannon:
Single-tap to move, double-tap to fire:
Suppose you single-tapped on the left side of the ship to move it left, single-tapped on the right of the ship to move it right, and double-tapped to make it fire. This wouldn't work well for a couple of reasons.
First, recognizing both single-taps and double-taps in the same view requires you to delay recognition of the single-tap until the double-tap fails or times out. When you're furiously tapping the screen, this delay will make the controls unacceptably laggy. Second, single-taps and double-taps might sometimes get confused, both by you, the pilot, and by the code. Third, the ship movement single-taps won't work well when your ship is near the extreme left- or right-edge of the screen. Scratch that control scheme!
Swipe to move, single-tap to fire:
This approach is a little better. Single-tapping to fire your laser cannon makes sense as both are discrete actions: one tap equals one blast from your canon. It's intuitive. But what about using swipes to move your ship?
This won't work because swipes are considered a discrete gesture. In other words, either you swiped or you didn't. Using the length of a swipe to proportionally control the amount of left or right thrust applied to your ship breaks your user's mental model of what swipes mean and the way they function. In all other apps, swipes are discrete and the length of a swipe is not considered meaningful. Scratch this control scheme as well.
Tilt your device left/right to move, single-tap to fire:
It's already been established that a single-tap to fire works well. But what about tilting your device left and right to move your ship left and right? This is your best option, as you're already holding your iPhone in the palm of your hand and tilting your device to either side merely requires you to twist your wrist a bit. You have a winner!
Now that you've settled on the control scheme, you'll first tackle tilting your device to move your ship.
Controlling Ship Movements with Device Motion
You might be familiar with UIAccelerometer, which has been available since iOS 2.0 for detecting device tilt. However, UIAccelerometer was deprecated in iOS 5.0, so iOS 7 apps should use CMMotionManager, which is part of Apple's CoreMotion framework.
The CoreMotion library has already been added to the starter project, so there's no need for you to add it.
Your code can retrieve accelerometer data from CMMotionManager in two different ways:
Pushing accelerometer data to your code
In this scenario, you provide CMMotionManager with a block that it calls regularly with accelerometer data. This doesn't fit well with your scene's update: method that ticks at regular intervals of 1/60th of a second. You only want to sample accelerometer data during those ticks — and those ticks likely won't line up with the moment that CMMotionManager decides to push data to your code.
Pulling accelerometer data from your code
In this scenario, you call CMMotionManager and ask it for data when you need it. Placing these calls inside your scene's update: method aligns nicely with the ticks of your system. You'll be sampling accelerometer data 60 times per second, so there's no need to worry about lag.
Your app should only use a single instance of CMMotionManager to ensure you get the most reliable data. To that effect, add the following property to your class extension:
@property (strong) CMMotionManager* motionManager;
Now, add the following code to didMoveToView:, right after the self.contentCreated = YES; line:
self.motionManager = [[CMMotionManager alloc] init]; [self.motionManager startAccelerometerUpdates];
This new code creates your motion manager and kicks off the production of accelerometer data. At this point, you can use the motion manager and its accelerometer data to control your ship's movement.
Add the following method just below moveInvadersForUpdate: :
-(void)processUserMotionForUpdate:(NSTimeInterval)currentTime { //1 SKSpriteNode* ship = (SKSpriteNode*)[self childNodeWithName:kShipName]; //2 CMAccelerometerData* data = self.motionManager.accelerometerData; //3 if (fabs(data.acceleration.x) > 0.2) { //4 How do you move the ship? NSLog(@"How do you move the ship: %@", ship); } }
Dissecting this method, you'll find the following:
Get the ship from the scene so you can move it. Get the accelerometer data from the motion manager. If your device is oriented with the screen facing up and the home button at the bottom, then tilting the device to the right produces data.acceleration.x > 0, whereas tilting it to the left produces data.acceleration.x < 0. The check against 0.2 means that the device will be considered perfectly flat/no thrust (technically data.acceleration.x == 0 ) as long as it's close enough to zero ( data.acceleration.x in the range [-0.2, 0.2] ). There's nothing special about 0.2, it just seemed to work well for me. Little tricks like this will make your control system more reliable and less frustrating for users. Hmmm, how do you actually use data.acceleration.x to move the ship? You want |
industry will start to crumble.”
“Industry needs major new pipelines to make expansion profitable and they simply are not getting them... Unless they can overcome spectacular political, public and legal opposition – expansion is not a profitable prospect.”
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (Capp) has acknowledged its difficulties in finding new outlets for oil exports: in January it spoke of “challenging times” and stressed it needed “all forms of transportation in all directions – pipelines in particular”.
The lobby group recently slashed its growth forecasts, although it maintains that Canada’s oil industry will increase output in 2015 and 2016.
However, investment in new infrastructure is expected to fall to C$46bn (£24bn) in 2015, down from C$69bn last year, while the number of wells set to see a “significant reduction” goes beyond a 30% fall forecast in January.
As the economics move against oil sands, the political tectonic plates are also shifting.
Canada’s ruling Conservative party, facing federal elections in October, has been hit by a political earthquake in the oil heartland of Alberta. The New Democratic Party swept to victory in Alberta’s state elections earlier this month, overturning 44-years of Conservative-dominated rule. Rachel Notley, Alberta’s new premier, has pledged to withdraw provincial support for the Keystone pipeline and hike taxes on the oil industry.
Her victory raises the stakes for Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister since 2006. Harper, who worked for Imperial Oil in Alberta, has been an ardent advocate for tar sands, overseeing a regime of generous subsidies.
The most recent authoritative study estimated that Canada’s oil industry, including offshore oil, was aided by US$2.8bn (£1.8bn) in federal and regional subsidies. Canada, as a member of the G20, has pledged to phase out fossil fuel subsidies in the medium-term.
But the most immediate problem for the tar-sands industry is the slump in world crude prices. Most of Canada’s untapped bitumen requires an oil price of $95 a barrel to be worth extracting, according to to the thinktank CarbonTracker - around $30 higher than current values.
Canada must deal with tar sands emissions, says Clinton campaign chief Read more
Falling prices have raised pressure on Canada’s oil sands industry, a mix of Canadian companies, big oil majors, such as Shell and ExxonMobil, and Chinese investors, who rushed into the market just before the boom began to fizzle.
In the last 12 months, three of the world’s biggest oil companies - Shell, Total and Statoil - have shelved or postponed plans for tar-sands projects that would have added another 400,000 bpd to Canada’s output.
Another company, Canada’s Southern Pacific Resource Corp filed for bankruptcy in January, after warning it was struggling to repay its debts.
But the industry insists it has a long-term future. A Capp spokeswoman said “oil and gas is, and will continue to be, a key part of the Canadian economy for decades”.
McKinnon said oil producers are assuming efforts to restrict climate change will fail. “They are essentially banking on nothing changing over the next few decades and we think that is problematic.”As was the case when the sexual abuse stories started coming out in the American Catholic Church, European Catholics are finding that they have a far bigger problem than they anticipated:
An abuse hotline set up by the Catholic Church in Germany melted down on its first day of operation as more than 4,000 alleged victims of paedophile and violent priests called in to seek counselling and advice.
The numbers were far more than the handful of therapists assigned to deal with them could cope with.
In the end only 162 out of 4,459 callers were given advice before the system was shut down.
Andreas Zimmer, head of the project in the Bishopric of Trier, admitted that he wasn’t prepared for “that kind of an onslaught’.
The hotline is the Church’s attempt to win back trust in the face of an escalating abuse scandal that threatens the papacy of German-born Pontiff Benedict XVI in Rome.
Earlier this week it was alleged that an ally of the Pope, Bishop Mixa, beat children – a charge he has subsequently denied.
Former girls and boys testified that he beat them with fists and a carpet beater which screaming; ‘The devil is in you and I will drive him out!’
Also, the bishopric of Trier reported that 20 priests are suspected of having sexually abused children between the 1950s and 1990s.
Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who was appointed last year, said on Monday that three of the cases had been passed on to public prosecutors, with two more soon to follow.
German media are calling the scandal ‘the hour of the children’. Silent, often for decades after pressure was applied to both them and their families by the Church, they are now finding the courage to speak out.
The effect on the Catholic Church in Germany has been profound; people are leaving in droves, de-registering with the government department that levies an annual tax of 800 pounds each on worshippers to fund it.
A quarter of Catholics in Germany said in a recent survey they had lost faith in the Church leadership.Looking for news you can trust?
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This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
New York City’s politics can seem bizarre, and even more so when it comes to the environment. For the last 12 years, New York’s mayor has been a self-funding billionaire who has transcended his Republican roots to end up left of the national Democratic Party on social issues such as gun control. Once a member of a party that seems intent on denying the reality of human-caused climate change, the now independent Mike Bloomberg is one of the most outspoken and aggressive crusaders against it.
Perhaps Bloomberg’s most controversial progressive reforms came in the realm transportation and public health. He sought to clean the air and citizens’ lungs through smoking bans and planting trees; he tried to ban giant, sugar-laced sodas, and when that failed, ran an advertising blitz against soft drink companies; and he encouraged New Yorkers to get out of their cars by pushing a congestion-pricing plan, creating pedestrian plazas, and expanding bike lanes—creating some 450 miles of them during his three terms.
The Democrats vying to succeed Bloomberg, meanwhile, have often landed to Bloomberg’s right on transportation policy in the past. New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who says he is “an unapologetic progressive alternative to the Bloomberg era,” once balked at Bloomberg’s plan to charge people who drove cars into downtown Manhattan. Bill Thompson, the former city comptroller, criticized Bloomberg from the left in general, but he ran on a car-oriented transportation platform.
Such is the strange world of New York City, where many wealthy Manhattanites such as Bloomberg support gay rights and bikeshares while pushing heavy-handed (and some say racist) police tactics and backing Wall Street, and some liberal populists defend the prerogatives of the more car-dependent outer-borough middle class.
Following the city’s primary election yesterday, de Blasio is the likely Democratic mayoral nominee, though there is a chance there will be a runoff. (As of this writing, with 98 percent of precincts reporting, de Blasio is just barely over the 40 percent he needs to avoid a runoff with Thompson, who won 26 percent of the vote.) De Blasio would be the prohibitive favorite in a runoff, and the Democratic nominee is virtually guaranteed to win the general election, given Democrats’ 6-1 registration advantage over Republicans. The circumstances that have elected Republicans in the past—high crime, a self-funding candidate, and the attacks of September 11—do not apply this year.
Whoever lands in the mayor’s office next has big shoes to fill when it comes to combating climate change. Bloomberg has been one of the country’s—and the world’s—most visionary politicians when it comes to slowing climate change and mitigating its effects. Bloomberg’s comprehensive plan, called PlaNYC 2030, aims to build a greener metropolis and includes improved energy efficiency standards for buildings, transit-oriented development of new housing, and claims credit for a 13 percent reduction in the city’s greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels. In July, Bloomberg announced a plan to spend $20 billion on floodgates and other defenses against the rising tides.
“Bloomberg has done great work with his recent climate plan, to mitigate the impacts of climate and reduce emissions,” Eric Whalen, a field organizer with Environment New York, said on Tuesday afternoon. “We’re hopeful the winning candidate will continue Bloomberg’s work to mitigate global warming and increase energy efficiency.”
De Blasio gives Bloomberg high marks for these policies and pledges to continue them. During the campaign, he praised Bloomberg’s vision, but cautioned that the city must address the specific needs of low-income residents who suffered the worst effects of Sandy. (De Blasio’s campaign message was a critique of racial and socioeconomic inequality and injustice during the Bloomberg years: He opposed the excessive use of police tactics such as “stop and frisk,” and bemoaned the lack of affordable housing and consequent loss of diversity.)
But de Blasio’s record on transportation has at times been reactionary: He opposed congestion pricing and criticized the construction of a high-profile bike lane in his own neighborhood. Complete streets advocates hoped that, as public advocate, he would promote alternative transportation. He largely disappointed them. As Streets Blog notes, de Blasio “professed skepticism about street transformations like the proposed 34th Street busway, the pedestrianization of Times Square, and protected bike lanes.”
But it turns out that running for mayor as the most progressive Democrat requires forward-thinking policies on transportation and urban planning. De Blasio hails from the famously crunchy, liberal bastion of Park Slope, Brooklyn. While his city council district had included more conservative Orthodox Jewish areas of central Brooklyn, a fact that may have guided his past pro-car stances, de Blasio is now running citywide. His constituency draws heavily from young urban professionals who are famously fond of their bicycles, and his policies have shifted accordingly. De Blasio’s campaign policy book contained several progressive transportation proposals:
Creating more than 20 bus rapid transit lines
Pedestrian safety measures, such as lowering speed limits in residential areas to 20 mph
Expanding the bike lane network and bikeshare, which currently only covers a small swath of the city
Enacting the city’s Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan, which would reduce truck traffic in poor neighborhoods where exhaust has contributed to pollution and high rates of asthma
These new stances helped de Blasio win the endorsement of Streets PAC, a complete-streets advocacy group.
One area where de Blasio has been consistent, and strongly pro-environment even though it is rarely thought of as an environmental issue, is real estate development. De Blasio has supported allowing developers to build taller buildings in centrally located areas by increasing the density allowed in the zoning code. Some political reporters and simple-minded critics see this as a contradiction with his posture as a champion of the middle-class and affordable housing. But as Matthew Yglesias explained in Slate, increasing supply of housing should reduce its price.
But this is an environmental issue as much as an economic one. Tall apartment buildings are also more energy efficient than detached single-family homes. And de Blasio says he’ll work to focus new housing and high-density development near transit hubs. That means increasing the number of New York City residents who can rely on mass transit instead of driving.
While the election is still undecided, one thing is clear: Climate change awareness and smart growth will live in New York well beyond Bloomberg’s tenure. No major candidate ran on a platform of reversing Bloomberg’s climate or transportation policies. Republican nominee Joe Lhota has suggested eliminating some bike lanes, but he did not broadly condemn Bloomberg’s record on transportation. While Thompson did not propose major expansions of Bloomberg’s complete streets agenda, he reversed the position of his 2009 campaign and endorsed keeping the bike lanes, possibly even adding some, and he called for mass transit expansions. De Blasio shifted even more than Thompson, and complete streets advocates are now an essential part of his coalition.
Just as banning smoking in bars or allowing gays to marry were once controversial and are now subjects of bipartisan agreement in progressive cities, so too is supporting mass transit, biking and walking, increased energy efficiency, and adapting to the effects of climate change. It is not often that environmentalists can feel confident that the arc of history is steadily bending in their direction—just look at how national Republicans have backslid on climate change since 2008—but in New York City, it is.You can use the terms "and" & "or" in your search; "or" phrases are resolved first, then the "and" phrases. For example, searching for "black hole and galaxy or universe" will find articles that have the phrase "black hole" in them and also have either "galaxy" or "universe" in them. Please note that other search syntax like quote marks, hyphens, etc. are not currently supported.When you view web pages with matches to your search, the terms you searched for will be highlighted in yellow.
If you are aware of an interesting new academic paper (that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or has appeared on the arXiv), a conference talk (at an official professional scientific meeting), an external blog post (by a professional scientist) or a news item (in the mainstream news media), which you think might make an interesting topic for an FQXi blog post, then please contact us at forums@fqxi.org with a link to the original source and a sentence about why you think that the work is worthy of discussion. Please note that we receive many such suggestions and while we endeavour to respond to them, we may not be able to reply to all suggestions.Please also note that we do not accept unsolicited posts and we cannot review, or open new threads for, unsolicited articles or papers. Requests to review or post such materials will not be answered. If you have your own novel physics theory or model, which you would like to post for further discussion among then FQXi community, then please add them directly to the "Alternative Models of Reality" thread, or to the "Alternative Models of Cosmology" thread. Thank you.To call Sarah Marquis a ‘tough cookie’ is a severe understatement, she is a thoroughbred adventurer through and through.
Over the past three years, Sarah has been walking around the world, covering about 10,000 miles on foot! Her adventure started in Siberia and took her through the Gobi Desert, China, Laos and Thailand. She then took a cargo ship over to Brisbane, to begin the final leg across Australia.
Marquis grew up in a tiny village in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, in what she describes as “not the nice part”. As a child, she lived as part of a large family, but preferred her own company. Her wanderlust and longing for adventure was impossible for her parents to ignore.
This incredible three year journey from Siberia to Australia has been the latest in a long line of trips for Marquis. Since aged seventeen, she has crossed Turkey on horseback; explored Canada by canoe; hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (4260 kilometers in four months and six days); and walked on the land of the Incas, from Chile to Peru, among visits to many other countries across the world.
To prepare for her latest mammoth expedition, Marquis hiked or snow-shoed 20 miles a day, wearing 75 pounds (34 Kg), for two years. In order to even stand a chance of completing the journey alone, Sarah had to put a lot of thought into this preparation and meticulously assemble her kit and supplies that she would carry with her. She decided to pack, among other things, a large pocket knife, antibiotics, tea-tree oil, a solar-powered charger, a beacon, a BlackBerry (which was later stolen by some Chinese children she had been teaching how to put up a tent), a satellite phone, a compass, a tiny emergency stash of amphetamines (“that’s the backup backup backup of the backup; in case you lose a foot and you need to get out and not feel a thing”) and a luxury pair of pink merino-wool PJs (“you put them on and you feel good, you feel gorgeous”).
Marquis talks explicitly about how difficult the expedition was. She describes it as “the washing machine”: endless agitation, physical and emotional pain, and nonstop internal bargaining. In Mongolia she faced a number of obstacles, from extreme weather conditions, to Mongol horsemen raiding her camp night after night. As Marquis passed out of Mongol territory, her mind-set changed, and the washing machine cycle ended. Her concept of time disappeared. “Intellect doesn’t drive you anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore. You become what nature needs you to be: this wild thing.”
The biggest setback came seven months into the walk, when Marquis lost a tooth and got an infection that spread. She needed to be evacuated, but she returned as soon as possible, to the exact G.P.S. coordinates, and continued on with her trek. In Laos, she had to battle further health problems, when she contracted dengue fever. She ended up having to tie her leg to a tree to make sure she wouldn’t wander off in her delirium and drown herself in a river. After this, however, the trip became much smoother. She crossed Thailand with no issues, and despite the intense heat, reached her final point in Australia.
Here’s a National Geographic phone interview with Sarah recorded during her adventure.
Marquis has already planned to return to northwest Australia in 2016, where she said it’s her “dream to go with just a sarong and a knife”. This will be the ultimate test of survival, and will undoubtedly result in this incredible woman sharing even more amazing stories with the world!
Check out Sarah Marquis’s website and show your support.
Via: New York TimesJanuary 30th UPDATE: BlackBerry 10 will have Skype after all.
You could argue that four-thousand flashlight apps is really just a bunch of failed attempts at a really good flashlight app.
You could argue that many of the apps created for iOS really wouldn’t be necessary if the Apple devices had Adobe Flash.
You could argue that the truly great and useful apps are often lost in a virtual mountain of junk.
You could argue all these things, but the idea that certain consumers will not buy a BlackBerry because of its lack of apps has stuck. And in the fast moving world of mobile, perception is sometimes as good as reality. This applies even in the sometimes bizarro world of Apple which, as tech guru Tim O’Reilly pointed out recently, has filed patent suits to prevent others from using multitouch, even though they didn’t invent it.
We are nearing the stage where product cycle pendulum looks like it is swinging back, at least in a minor way, towards the BlackBerry. And the news of late has mostly been of the decidedly non-dire kind, that is to say, unlike most any of the reportage over the past three years. Even RIM’s share price has perked up.
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Now, just a couple weeks before the launch of BlackBerry 10, on January 30th in New York, comes information that probably won’t convert the harshest of RIM’s critics, but will satisfy most everyone else.
In an interview with website Fierce Wireless at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, new RIM Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben said BlackBerry 10 devices will support approximately 90% of the top 600 iOS and Android apps.
Bouldben said BlackBerry will launch with 70,000 applications. So what apps will BB10 have an what will it be missing? We know there will be Twitter, Facebook and Angry Birds. Plus, many of the apps it doesn’t have might be bested by native applications that replicate another service like Instagram, or simple hack-like apps that allow you to view sites like Pinterest (app for Pinterest) and Netflix (Flix) in the native BlackBerry browser, taking us back into the rhealm of the whole “did this necessarily need to be an app?” debate.
What will be missing? Right now, it looks like the one glaring omission, although we have no official word on this either way, will be Skype. The video conferencing app is available for certain BlackBerry 7 devices with some carriers, but there has been some concern that there has yet to be an announcement about its availability for BlackBerry 10.
This may be a dealbreaker for some consumers, but the reverse could be said for Android and Apple devices that do not have Blackberry’s sole smash hit product, BBM. BBM, by the way, is rumoured to be adding video chat in its new iteration.
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_______________________At the same time, state energy-efficiency mandates would force it to reduce generation, while new measures liberalizing the electricity market meant PG&E would lose much of its customer base to other providers. With PG&E having to shoehorn more renewable power into a shrinking sales base, existing capacity would have to close to make room.
The obvious choice was Diablo, which would not be as adept at backing up new wind and solar power as nimble gas turbines are. California already has to curtail solar power surges on some days, and PG&Es projections showed that rising solar capacity would make surges bigger and more frequent.
Increasingly, not only PG&E's gas plants but Diablo itself would have to ramp down to accommodate surges that would otherwise crash the grid. That’s a difficult operation for a nuclear plant, as is ramping back up when the sun sets.
Of course, the problem of solar oversupply could be solved by simply curtailing excess solar power during surges—it doesn’t help to replace clean nuclear power with clean solar power—but PG&E has a renewables quota to meet. The company foresaw that it would have to curtail Diablo more and more often and that swelling intermittent overcapacity would more generally depress electricity markets, pushing the marginally profitable plant into the red.
So to comply with the state’s decarbonization rules PG&E agreed to shut down a zero-emissions plant and replace it with a mix of gas and renewables with much higher carbon emissions. That seemingly irrational decision was perfectly rational from the utility’s viewpoint, because California does not recognize nuclear power as low-carbon energy nor discourage a utility for replacing it with fossil fuels.
All of this was spelled out in the Joint Proposal and in press conferences by PG&E and anti-nuclear groups. The only obfuscations were the breezy assurances from all parties that Diablo would be replaced pristinely by renewables and demand reduction. Almost none of the former was specified, and much of the latter is an illusion of the anticipated offloading of PG&Es customers to other companies.
In fact, PG&Es own scenarios show that closing Diablo to make way for solar is a serious blunder from a decarbonization standpoint.
The company’s 2030 forecast shows that with its program of closing Diablo, increasing renewables and reducing demand through efficiency and customer defections it would still generate 24,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity from natural gas.
But if it kept Diablo open and did not build any new renewables, it could reduce natural-gas generation by 25 percent to 18,000 gigawatt-hours—with a reduction of 2.4 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.
A Diablo closure would be a boon for the market share of the renewables sector, but a set-back for decarbonization.
Can Nuclear Survive?
Gas prices look to remain low for a long time, but even if they rise there is no way out of the dynamic of over-capacity and plunging electricity prices as long as subsidizing wind and solar is the government’s main energy initiative.Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweeddale
Scotland’s lone Conservative MP David Mundell will be fighting to hold on to his seat. If he loses and the Tories fail to gain any other seat north of the Border the result will be deeply symbolic and could leave the country without a single Tory representative in the Commons. Mundell, who is also the Scottish Secretary, regained the seat in 2015 with a slim majority of just 798 votes over the SNP’s Emma Harper, elected to the Scottish Parliament last year.
Labour was third behind Mundell in May 2015, with Ukip fourth and the LibDems fifth while the Scottish Greens came sixth with 839 votes.
Edinburgh South
Labour’s Ian Murray became the “last man standing” of Scottish Labour when the party lost 40 of its 41 seats in the May 2015 General Election. A critic of Jeremy Corbyn, he stood down as shadow Scottish secretary during the parliamentary coup against the UK leader which followed the EU referendum.
Murray held on to his seat in 2015, beating the SNP’s Neil Hay by 2637 votes with the Conservatives coming in third.
In an election dominated by the themes of Brexit and the prospect of a second independence referendum Murray will be vulnerable.
Renfrewshire East
In one of the many surprises of the 2015 General Election, the SNP’s Kirsten Oswald beat the then Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy by 23,013 to 19,295 votes. The Tories came third with 12,465 seats.
Jackson Carlaw took the roughly parallel Holyrood seat of Eastwood for the Tories at last year’s Scottish Parliament elections, and the Tories will be campaigning hard to win it in June.
Glasgow East
The SNP took this seat off Labour’s Margaret Curran in 2015 with a 30 per cent swing, giving them a majority of 10,387. However, their winning candidate Natalie McGarry has been charged with with several alleged offences, including embezzlement of funds, breach of trust and an offence under the Scottish Independence Referendum Act 2013.
The Crown Office are still considering the case.
McGarry will not be the SNP’s candidate in June. A few names have come forward. Ex-North Lanarkshire councillor Rosa Zambonini, activist and assistant to Alison Thewliss, and David Linden have put themselves forward. The National understands other potential names being discussed are Yes Bar owner Suzanne McLaughlin and Duncan Ross, who lost out to McGarry at the last selection by a handful of votes.
Edinburgh West
Michelle Thomson has also taken leave from the SNP. She too has been reported to Scottish prosecutors after a police investigation into alleged mortgage fraud. Christopher Hales, who is being investigated by Police Scotland, was struck off by the Scottish Solicitors’ Discipline Tribunal in 2014 in connection with several transactions carried out by a property company in which Thomson was a partner from 2010 to 2011. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service say the report remains under consideration.
Orkney and Shetland
Alistair Carmichael, the only sitting MP to be found guilty of lying to his constituents, is to ask those same voters to trust him this time and give him their support.
He repeatedly lied about the leak of a civil service memo meant to damage Nicola Sturgeon’s credibility during the last election campaign. He only told the truth after winning by just 817 votes. The resulting court case cost the MP £150,000.
Yesterday, as the dust settled on Theresa May’s surprise announcement he was one of the key faces, appearing on radio and TV, asking voters to choose the LibDems.
Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
The SNP’s Calum Kerr has the smallest majority in Scotland. There were just 328 votes between him and Tory candidate John Lamont.
This has long been fighting ground between the Liberals and the Tories. Even in their wildest dreams the SNP didn’t expect to win here in 2015.
Kerr, a local boy whose dad was the headmaster at Peebles High School, is standing again. He will have the fight of his life.Thursday, October 6th, 2016. Heart revving. Mind blackening. Bones liquid. Chills. Aches. Slight fever. The works.
As soon as we got to the Denver Marriott Tech Center, the anxiety began. I am not normally an anxious mess, but this was a special occasion: I was about to attend my first major audio show, the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival 2016. (I did attend the 2015 New York Audio Show, but that doesn't compare to the size of RMAFeven taking into account this year's construction-induced compaction.)
AudioStream's Michael Lavorgna and I made the 50-minute ride from Boulder to Denver in a compact UberX. (We had arrived in Boulder the day before to visit Ayre Acoustics; a A full report will soon be available on AudioStream.com.)
Upon entering the hotel, I was welcomed by Dennis, a kind man at the front desk. Dennis is the best. We briefly bonded over both being Filipino, and I attempted to converse with him in my broken Tagalog. He kept my anxiety at bayfor the moment, at least.
After dropping off my bags in the hotel room, I headed toward the mezzanine to meet fellow Stereophile writer Jason Victor Serinus. Nothing crazy, I told myself. No need to get worked up. I'm just meeting Jason in person for the first time. We're probably going to have a quiet chat over some snacks and tea. Then I'll head back to my room, listen to Debussy, put on a moisturizing Korean facemask, and pass out early. Lovely.
False.
The mezzanine is packed with maybe thirty or forty industry people, chatting, drinking the free alcohol, and having a good time. What to do? These are esteemed audiophile professionals: people whom I deeply respect, and whose ranks I aspire to join. Will we get along? Will they like me? Do I smell?
There's no scotch in sight! There's no side stairway in sight! I've reached the point of no return. I must go on.
I spot friendly faces of Internet acquaintances I've never before met in person: Michael Fremer (one of my four bosses!), Mat Weisfeld of VPI, Bill Leebens of PS Audio, Brian Hunter of Audio-Head, and of course the one and only Jason Victor Serinus.
As we begin chatting, and as I keep gulping down the cheap rosé, I realize: it's alright. This isn't so bad. They're really cool audiophiles, but they're still just mortals. I still feel shy and slightly out of place because I don't know most of the people there but I begin to feel comfortable.
Some time passes, then a small group of us begins to leave for dinner at Shanahan's, a nearby steakhouse. (The wagyu rib eye satay was so tasty!) The group consisted of Philip O'Hanlon (On A Higher Note), George Vatchnadze (Kyomi Audio), Dominique Brulhart (Merging Technologies) and his wife Irene, John Atkinson, Jason Victor Serinus, and myself.
During the dinner, I learned that, in addition to being an audio-shop owner in Chicago, George is also a renowned classical pianist who plays a mean Rachmaninoff 2!
Somehow, the conversation started to lean toward the topic of whiskeyas it usually does (and should). Philip, the confident ball of Irish energy, proudly states that Irish whiskey is the best.
He begins to tell me the story of the Irish: "While we taught our cousins [the Scots] how to make whiskey, we didn't teach them how to make the best whiskey. We left a few small things out." And from there, he proceeds to elaborate on why Irish whiskey is superior to all others.
So of course, I must have a taste for myself after hearing Philip's Irish whiskey spiel!
Philip (right), George (left), and I return to the Marriott, and enter Philip's showroom on the mezzanine level, where his stash of (then-) unopened whiskey was hidden. (I'm quite proud to be the first room visitor to experience this!)
Philip first poured me a dram of Green Spot (a single pot still Irish whiskey) and we listened to Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet. I found the Green Spot to be soft and creamy with slight vanilla but wasn't completely sold on Irish whiskey from that single dram.
We listened on a TechDAS AirForce 3 turntable ($29,750) with a Graham Elite tonearm ($12,500) and TechDAS TSD TCd01 Ti cartridge ($15,000), installed on an Artesania Krion turntable platform ($3,390), with a Luxman EQ-500 tube phono stage ($7,500), Artesania Exoteryc four-shelf rack ($7,990), Artesania Aire amplifier stand ($3,790), Luxman C-900u control amplifier ($19,900), Luxman M-900u stereo amplifier ($19,900), Merging Technologies NADAC Multichannel-8 music ServerDAC ($14,000), Shunyata Research Denali line conditioner ($6,000), and Magnan Cables of varying lengths (ranging in price from $2050-3400). (Jason will report on this room in the days to come.)
Philip then handed me a dram of Jameson Select Reserve Black Barrel, and we switched from Miles to London Grammar. At this point, I learned that I preferred the wider range of flavors (and probably the added sugar) in the Jameson over the Green Spot. But unfortunately (for the Irish), I am still a die-hard peat girl at heart. Nothing can compare to the smoky, peaty finish of an Islay malt! I also learned that I actually enjoy London Grammar. I had not disliked them before, but I had just never got around to listening to them much.
What I thought was going to be a quiet, early evening before the start of RMAF turned into a night of meeting new peopleand Irish whiskeys.If ever there was an only-in-the-CFL moment, it would be former Ottawa Redblacks' running back Jonathan Williams apparently finding out three months after the fact that the team didn't intend to bring him back this year. Williams' name was on the league's free agency tracker, and there was no news of him signing a new deal with Ottawa or joining another club around the start of free agency on May 10. Thus, most CFL fans figured his time in the league was over. However, Williams himself apparently didn't get the news until Monday, as shown from his tweets:
Just finding out was released by @REDBLACKS Lied, say they been told me also hung up the phone when I started kickin facts real professional — Jonathan Williams (@Jon_Williams23) May 11, 2015
RB Jonathan Williams apparently didn't know he's been a free agent since FEB or that the Redblacks had moved on. https://t.co/E3H3NzeQ5B — Steve Warne™ (@TSNSteve) May 11, 2015
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If Jonathan Williams didn't know he's been a free agent since Feb. 10th, then it may be time for a new agent #CFL https://t.co/HdDt9PoGnE — Redblack Renegade (@RedBlackGade) May 11, 2015
Story continues
Have no agent and do not have an Ottawa news paper rolling threw my crib. So no wasn't informed @RedBlackGade — Jonathan Williams (@Jon_Williams23) May 11, 2015
To my knowledge due to surgery I was headed back up for therapy. brock, you hell for that @cbcjlong @REDBLACKS — Jonathan Williams (@Jon_Williams23) May 11, 2015
It's easy to laugh at this from the outside, but this is a highly unfortunate way for Williams to find out he doesn't have a CFL job any more. Keep in mind that the former East Carolina Pirate was an important piece for Ottawa at times last year, with his 229 rushing and receiving yards proving crucial to their second (and last) win of the year over Winnipeg in October, which earned him a league-wide first star nod from us as well as the CFL's offensive player of the week selection. Yes, injuries plagued Williams, and yes, there are always plenty of import running backs out there, so the Redblacks' decision to move on may have some merit. Still, given that the guy was a key part of half their victories in 2014, you'd think the team would at least do him the courtesy of telling him he wasn't in their future plans. (Methods of communication here may be part of what went wrong here; a phone call or even an e-mail is better than only mailing something, especially given that many CFL players return to the U.S. for the winter and may not still be at the address the team has on file for them. It's possible the Redblacks thought they'd informed him even if they really hadn't.)
The timing here is also unfortunate. Williams is finding this out after most teams (both in the CFL and in other pro football leagues) have already signed a new crop of players, limiting his options. Granted, you'd think he would know his contract status, but that's not necessarily the case; keep in mind what we've seen before with controversial team options. Perhaps the Redblacks gave Williams the impression he was signing for two years instead of a year with a team option (if that's what his contract actually was; from the outside, we don't know). Keep in mind that those CFL free agent lists are an odd, convoluted process generated by the league with high team involvement and players occasionally left off, too, as Arash Madani reported about Solomon Elimimian earlier this offseason.
Also, early public free agent lists (however imperfect the current ones are) are a relatively new development. Keep in mind that as recently as December 2010, only two of the CFL's then-eight teams planned to release a full list of their pending free agents. Public pressure caused the league to eventually put out a league-wide list that December, and that model's generally been followed since, but the CFL and its teams have often been big on secrecy, as we've seen with everything from undisclosed salaries to closed practices. None of that should necessarily apply to Williams, as he could have found out he was a free agent just by looking at the CFL's list, but perhaps he wasn't aware the league posted one given how relatively recent that development is.
There are a few key takeaways from this to avoid such awkwardness in the future. First, teams need to be forthright and clear with their players. If the Redblacks had simply told Williams they were planning to go in a different direction back in February, this would have been avoided. On the players |
Glen Canyon, Twin Peaks and even near Lombard Street, so just because you’re not in Golden Gate Park doesn’t mean you might not run into one.
So remember, never feed a coyote, as coyotes are wild animals and not domesticated pets. Keep your dog on a leash and do not leave small children unattended. If you do encounter a coyote, make loud noises, throw something, and/or wave your arms to frighten them; that’s vexing, which is an important step to maintain both you and the coyote’s safety.
Coyotes do tend to exhibit assertive behavior that borders on the aggressive. Some examples of these behaviors include attacking off-leash dogs, showing signs of curiosity towards humans, and vocalizing alone or in groups. If a coyote starts exhibiting predatory behavior towards humans who don’t have pets with them or displays unprovoked aggression, then it’s a problem.
For animal emergencies, call Animal Care and Control at (415) 554-9400.After much tinkering with RPI’s CAS (Central Authentication System) in PHP, I thought I would put together a guide to make it easy for anyone to put together a site that uses it. This would work for anyone at another location with a CAS server, but this example is for RPI.
Get the CAS Library https://wiki.jasig.org/display/CASC/phpCAS Download the tar file under “Current Version” Extract the contents, using a program such as 7-Zip, and put it in the root of whatever web folder you want Download the latest CA bundle for SSL http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html
Download “cacert.pem”, and put it in root of web project Create a index.php, login.php, logout.php The index has to load the library, check if the user is logged in, then print out text. <?PHP include_once(“./CAS-1.3.2/CAS.php”);
phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,’cas-auth.rpi.edu’,443,’/cas/’);
// SSL!
phpCAS::setCasServerCACert(“./CACert.pem”);//this is relative to the cas client.php file if (phpCAS::isAuthenticated())
{
echo “User:”. phpCAS::getUser();
echo “<a href=’./logout.php’>Logout</a>”;
}else{
echo “<a href=’./login.php’>Login</a>”;
}?>
First we load the library for CAS from the subfolder
Then we select which will be our central server
We have to select our ca bundle, setCasServerCert does this
Now we have fully loaded and configured the library
Finally, I can ask CAS if a user has logged in, if so writeout some options, if not others This is the login page <?PHP include_once(“./CAS-1.3.2/CAS.php”);
phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,’cas-auth.rpi.edu’,443,’/cas/’);
// SSL!
phpCAS::setCasServerCACert(“./CACert.pem”);//this is relative to the cas client.php file if (!phpCAS::isAuthenticated() )
{
phpCAS::forceAuthentication();
}else{
header(‘location:./index.php’);
}?>
Similar setup of authentication as before
Now we check if the user is NOT authenticated, if the user is not authenticated we force login
authenticated, if the user is not authenticated we force login If the user already is logged in, then we redirect to the index The logout page: <?PHP include_once(“./CAS-1.3.2/CAS.php”);
phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,’cas-auth.rpi.edu’,443,’/cas/’);
// SSL!
phpCAS::setCasServerCACert(“./CACert.pem”);//this is relative to the cas client.php file if (phpCAS::isAuthenticated())
{
phpCAS::logout();
}else{
header(‘location:./index.php’);
}?>
Same configuration (this can be done by including a core file that everything else calls, but for this example I wanted to keep it simple)
If they are not logged in, then we push the user back to login
That is the basic configuration, the example is available for download below. If there are any questions feel free to post a comment.
Download: https://github.com/daberkow/daberkow.github.io/blob/master/CASExample.zip
Extra Notes:
If you want to save server space, the docs folder under the CAS folder can be removed
I have ran into problems with CAS on a Windows Apache server, and CAS on a Linux Apache server reference the CACert.pem file differently One example of CAS on Windows is the timetracker software One example of CAS on Linux is QuickLogsAfter a 13-year hiatus, Red Dwarf is definitely back for a full series with all the old familiar faces, according to the reddwarf.co.uk website.
Red Dwarf X will be filmed in front of a studio audience at Shepperton Studios next month and in January 2012.
The official blurb for the series reads:
Red Dwarf returns for its first full series since 1999. Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten face six exciting new adventures from the pen of Doug Naylor. The classic crew, the classic ship... with a brand new vision. The universe will never be the same...
And when they say Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryton are back, they do mean that Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn will return to the mining spaceship three million years into deep space.
Rumours had been circulating for some time that series 10 was on the way. You might be feeling a little confused about that as the last series back in 1999 was series eight. But this one's not series nine because of some sort of alternate reality mess in the mini-series Back to Earth, much discussed on this forum here.
You missed Red Dwarf, didn't you?
Free tickets for the studio audience went on offer at 2pm on Friday from Lost in TV and promptly got snapped up faster than you can say/sing "I'm gonna eat you little fishy...", at least as far as El Reg can tell from some mad refreshing for 30 mins or so on the day.
The series is tentatively slated for broadcast in September 2012 and will be shown on Dave. ®CAIRO: Every year, millions of Muslims converge on the Saudi holy cities of Makkah and Medina for the annual Haj pilgrimage, with the massive ceremonies representing a major security and logistical challenge for the kingdom's authorities.
On occasion, Haj and events surrounding it have been marred by accidents and tragedies, such as Thursday's stampede in Mina that killed more than 700 people.
Read: At least 717 killed, 863 injured in Haj stampede at Mina
Here is a look at some of the deadliest Haj-related accidents which have occurred over the past three decades.
1990 : The worst Haj-related tragedy claims the lives of 1,426 pilgrims in a stampede in an overcrowded pedestrian tunnel leading to holy sites in Makkah.
1994: Some 270 pilgrims are killed in a stampede during the stoning ritual at Mina.
1997 : At least 340 pilgrims are killed in a fire at the tent city of Mina as the blaze was aided by high winds. More than 1,500 were injured.
1998 : About 180 pilgrims are trampled to death in panic after several of them fell off an overpass during the final stoning ritual at Mina.
2001 : A stampede at Mina during the final day of the pilgrimage ceremonies kills 35 Haj pilgrims.
2004: A crush of pilgrims at Mina kills 244 pilgrims and injures hundreds on the final day of the Haj ceremonies.
Saudi workers with bodies of pilgrims caught in a bottleneck and trampled near Makkah in January 2006. — AP/fileTruth is supposed to be stranger than fiction, except when it comes to House of Cards The power couple Frank & Claire Underwood are back in business. Zee Cafe - the destination for the best in English entertainment in India – presents the World Television Premiere of House of Cards Season 5 on Saturday, 3rd June, 5 PM onwards.The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning political drama will premiere on Zee Café with a Season 5 weekend marathon, giving fans a perfect opportunity to binge watch the entire series at a go.Crafting fake narratives and throwing away long-time allies are all part of the game for the Underwoods. Their thirst for power is unquenchable.After the roaring success of the first four seasons, in Season 5, the homemade terror will take over the world and viewers will witness more conniving drama and backroom deals that will have them on the edge of their seats.Award winning actors Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright will be seen this season not just as husband and wife but also as running mates campaigning together for the upcoming US Presidential elections which will add an interesting new dynamic to their relationship.Executive Producer of the show Melissa James Gibson says, “They are a couple of survivors, and power is the Underwood’s religion.That’s something the show has been building towards for quite some time now. Francis wasn’t elected president, so this is the real test: What is the will of the people, and can he work his Machiavellian magic on them?”Along with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, House of Cards- Season 5 also stars Michael Kelly, Jayne Atkinson, Neve Campbell, Derek Cecil, Paul Sparks and Joel Kinnaman.The Cephalopoda
Squids, octopuses, nautilus, and ammonites
FUN FACT: From the dark abyss to shallow tide pools, research has recently revealed some of the mysterious behaviors of two famed cephalopods, the Giant Squid and the deadly Blue-ringed octopus (click image below for an enlargement).
Fossil record
More familiar to us in the fossil record are the nautiloids, ammonoids, and belemnites.
Nautiloids and ammonoids
Nautiloids are the earliest cephalopods found in the fossil record, appearing by the Late Cambrian. The earliest forms were orthoconic (having straight shells), but during the Ordovician the nautiloids experienced a rapid diversification and evolved a planispiral (coiled in a single plane) shell shape. All have shells with nacre and interconnected internal chambers, similar to what we see in the modern nautilus. This morphology is very similar to many of the ammonoids, which first appear in coiled form in the Devonian Period. Though nautiloids and ammonoids may appear the same, they are easily distinguished by the location of their siphuncle and the shapes of their sutures.
The siphuncle is an internal tube that runs through and connects the chambers of the shell. In nautiloids, it runs through the center of the shell chambers, while in almost all planispiral ammonoids, it is found along the shell's outer edge (above left). Sutures are contact lines between shell chamber walls (called septa) and the inner shell wall of nautiloid and ammonoid shells. In nautiloids these lines are straight and are called simple sutures (above center and right). In contrast, ammonoid sutures dip and fold in undulations called lobes and saddles (below left). The most undulated, complex sutures are found in the prolific ammonoids of the Cretaceous, the ammonites (below right). One pattern of change in the evolution of ammonoids as a clade is that their suture morphology became more complex with time. That is, ammonoids from the Cretaceous have sutures with more intricate lobes and saddles than those of their relatives from the Permian 200 million years earlier.
FUN FACT: Ammonoids, like belemnites, have also played a notable role in folklore. During the Middle Ages, their coiled shells were interpreted by the English, who encountered them in Jurassic-aged rocks exposed throughout Great Britain, as lithified snakes (called "snake stones"). Similarly, ammonite fossils encountered by the early Romans were mistaken for horns, and termed "ammonites" for the coiled horns of the Egyptian ram-god Ammon.
Shell morphology: Another characteristic unique to ammonoid cephalopods is that although most were planispiral, the shells of some species were wide, open-coiled, kinked, twisted, or hooked. The implications of these shapes on the animals' behavior and lifestyle could be profound, but how could it be tested? The answer is through inference. One way paleontologists infer function from an organism's shape or form, is through experimentation and comparison with living animals. In this case, paleontologists measured buoyancy and hydrodynamic characteristics of Nautilus, and compared their results to actual tests of ammonoid shells and models in a water flume. They found that planispiral shell shapes (like a discus) were able to move through the water quickly, while wider and more open shell shapes moved more slowly. These morphologies could mean that planispiral cephalopods lived an active, pelagic lifestyle and wider shelled ammonoids lived near the ocean bottom and were slow movers. Dramatic curves, twists, as well as highly ornate ammonoid shells also suggest that those animals were relatively slow movers inhabiting a quiet marine environment.
Belemnites
Life history & ecology
Three main clades are typically identified within the Cephalopoda (cladogram B, left): the Ammonoidea (an extinct and shelled clade), Nautiloidea (with only one living shelled genus, Nautilus) and Coleoidea (squids, cuttlefish, octopuses, the Ram's Horn Squid, the "paper nautilus," and an extinct clade, the belemnites). The ammonoid lineage survived for 300 million years in the oceans of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. Most had planispiral (coiled in a single plane) external shells, and throughout their evolutionary history these plentiful predators shared the seas with the nautiloids, a clade of less diverse shelled cephalopods. By the end of the Cretaceous Period however, extinction had wiped out the ammonoids entirely and left only one surviving nautiloid clade, the genus Nautilus. Today, the only living representatives of shelled cephalopods are a few species of Nautilus. These molluscs are slow-moving, restricted to deep water, and have coiled shells that are similar to those of their fossil ancestors.
FUN FACT: In 2006, a UC Berkeley graduate student reported that the Indonesian Coconut Octopus, Octopus marginatus, can move along the ocean floor using only the tips of its arms, almost like "walking." See Crissy Huffard's "Walktopus."
More on morphology
The eye. No presentation of cephalopods would be complete without a discussion of the cephalopod eye. This structure is probably the most sophisticated eye of all invertebrates and is as complex as the vertebrate eye, though the two are not homologous. For their body size, cephalopod eyes are relatively large. They contain an iris, pupil, and lens, but not necessarily a cornea. Octopuses are the only cephalopods with a completely protected "closed" cornea. That means that the eyes of squids and sepioids (cuttlefish, etc.) are in direct contact with sea water! The pupil in cephalopods is unique in that its morphology is different in octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. Octopuses have a slit-shaped rectangular pupil. In cuttlefish it is W-shaped, and in squid it is round (see below). In Nautilus the eye is much simpler. It is mounted on a stalk, has no lens, and has a very small pupil (1-2 mm). It can narrow and widen in different brightnesses but resolves images poorly, so probably is useful only to detect light.
Arms and tentacles. Arms and tentacles are another distinguishing cephalopod characteristic. All cephalopods have arms, but not all cephalopods have tentacles. Octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid have eight non-retractable arms, but only cuttlefish and squid (Sepioidea and Teuthoidea) have tentacles (two each). Arms usually have cirri (fleshy papillae/palps), often suckers, and sometimes hooks (modified suckers) along their undersides. These can be attached to the arm directly or by a flexible stalk and are used to adhere to substrates and catch prey. Tentacles are longer than arms, are retractable, and usually have a blade-shaped or flattened tip, called a club, which is covered in suckers. Squid and cuttlefish have one pair of tentacles and they use these to strike quickly at prey.
FUN FACT: The largest cephalopod Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, (Fig. 17) called the colossal squid, is longer than a city bus, while the smallest cephalopod, Idiosepius notoides, the pygmy squid, could fit on your fingernail.
FUN FACT: A hectocotylus is a cephalopodic arm of a male, modified to deliver a spermatophore (sperm-containing sac) to a female. In some taxa, part of this arm can detach from the male and remain inside the female. In 1829, the famous naturalist George Cuvier first identified and described a hectocotylus in the paper nautilus (an octopus of the genus Argonauta) but, at the time he thought that this detached arm was a parasitic worm! He named it Hectocotylus octopodis. When it was discovered that the "worm" was really a cephalopod arm, the name "hectocotylus" was kept but its meaning changed to refer to the spermatophore-transferring arm of any male cephalopod.
Some pelagic squids possess an additional color-changing structure; the light organ. A pair of these light organs is located within the mantle cavity on the underside of the squid. Each contains a crypt and a lens. A crypt is a small sac that houses luminous bacteria and a lens is a complex stack of tiny reflecting plates that controls the luminescence of this bacteria. Light from the bacteria projects downward and the squid can manipulate its intensity to match any light coming from above. This masks the squid's own silhouette, protecting it from potential predators.
The brain. Finally, one of the most intriguing aspects of cephalopods is their intelligence. With a centralized brain, the largest of all invertebrates, and highly developed eyes and other sense organs, they are able to remember and learn by example or through trial and error.
References and resources
Daniel, T.L., B.S. Helmuth, W.B. Saunders, and P.D. Ward. 1997. Septal complexity in ammonoid cephalopods increased mechanical risk and limited depth. Paleobiology 23(4):470-481.
23(4):470-481. Lee, P.N., P. Callaerts, H.G. de Couet, and M.Q Martindale. 2003. Cephalopod Hox genes and the origin of morphological novelties. Nature 424:1061-1065.
genes and the origin of morphological novelties. 424:1061-1065. Lindgren, A.R., G. Giribet, and M.K. Nishiguchi. 2004. A combined approach to the phylogeny of Cephalopoda (Mollusca). Cladistics 20(5):454-486.
20(5):454-486. Mangold (1922-2003), K.M., and R.E. Young. 1996. Idiosepiidae Appellof, 1898. Pygmy squids. http://tolweb.org/Idiosepiidae/19985/ in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org.
Ruppert, E.E., R.S. Fox, and R.D. Barnes. 2004. Invertebrate Zoology : A Functional Evolutionary Approach. Brooks Cole, California. 963 pp.
Sual, L.R., and C.J. Stadum. 2005. Fossil Argonauts (Mollusca: Cephalopoda: Octopodida) from late Miocene siltstones of the Los Angeles basin, California. Journal of Paleontology 79(3):520-531.
Wei, S.L., and R.E. Young. 1989. Development of symbiotic bacterial bioluminescence in a nearshore cephalopod, Euprymna scolopes. Marine Biology 103:541-546.
Web resourcesFarming and Gardening are not trivial jobs. There is a range of crops and plants and numerous varieties of each plant or crop. Different plants and crops have different requirements of water, fertilizer, and sunshine. The fertility of soil for any farming or gardening effort is usually judged by the level of nutrients and moisture in it. A number of times the farmers or gardeners are not able to nourish the soil with sufficient fertilizer or water while at many times they just over do it. This project is to help farmers and gardeners keep a check on the soil health by real-time tracking the moisture level of their soil.
The project utilizes DHT sensor to keep a track of ambient temperature and humidity and a moisture sensor to record soil moisture. The RTC DS1307 is used keep track of real time so that the moisture rating could be logged and relayed over fixed interval of time in a real-time fashion. The project sends out the real-time alert of inappropriate moisture levels through SMS using a GSM/GPRS modem to a registered mobile number of the farmer or caretaker. The system is able to automatic control a water pump which can be switched on through SMS in response to the real-time alert. Once the water pump is switched on through SMS it automatically switches off after the appropriate moisture level is attained.
Fig.1 : Prototype of Arduino based Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
The farmer or caretaker can also switch off the water pump in between by sending an SMS or manually operating the project interface. The data log of message alerts can also be cleared through the project interface. The human interface attached to the project consists of a 16X2 LCD display which runs the mobile registration process on the start of the system and allows mobile registration update and display of current soil health readings when prompted. The input to the system is fed through a numeric keypad and all the instructions feed to the system are also numeric codes.
The project has the following execution cycle-:
1) As the system is powered on, it prompts the user for mobile number registration by displaying initial messages on the LCD display. The user has to press "*", enter his mobile number and press "#" to complete the mobile number registration. If the user has already registered his mobile number on the device, he can cancel the process by pressing "#" without entering the mobile number.
2) The registered mobile number is saved to the internal memory of the Arduino Mega.
3) After the mobile number registration, the Arduino board fetch the real time from RTC module, humidity, and temperature using DHT11 sensor and moisture level through the moisture sensor and start displaying all the readings on LCD display.
4) Once the system is initialized, the user needs to set the time interval for SMS alerts of the moisture level. The system can accept any time duration as required by the user for SMS alerts of moisture level.
5) When the system will find the moisture level below the set level, warning SMS alert is sent to the registered mobile number.
6) The user can respond to the warning SMS alert by replying back an SMS "ON MOTOR" which will switch ON the water pump for a duration until the moisture level increases to the set level. The water pump automatically switches OFF once the required moisture level is attained.
7) The user can also turn OFF the water pump manually if finds that suitable.
Once the project is initialized after mobile number registration and it starts displaying moisture, date-time, and temperature and humidity readings, it is ready to accept the following numeric instruction codes.
• Run time phone number update: When the device starts it always prompts the user to register the phone number. The phone number can also be updated during the run time of the project which can be initiated by pressing “0”. Thereafter, the user has to enter the new mobile number for renewing registration and press "#" to complete the registration process.
• Deleting SMS log: By pressing ‘*’ during runtime the user can delete all the messages saved to the SIM card inserted in GSM/GPRS module.
• Setting time interval for SMS alerts: By pressing hash ‘#’ user can initiate setting the time interval in seconds and pressing ’#’ again saves the entered time interval to the internal memory of the board.
• Manual Moisture Level Check: User can check the moisture level manually by pressing ‘1’ on the keypad.
• Registered Mobile Number Check: User can check the registered mobile number pressing '2' on the keypad.
• Time Interval Check: User can check the time delay set to wait for the response by pressing ‘3’ on the keypad.
Components Required
• Arduino Mega2560
• GSM/GPRS Module SIM900
• RTC module-DC1307
• Moisture sensor with analoge output.
• DHT11 humidity and temperature sensor
• 16x2 LCD
• Capacitor 25v, 4700uF
• Transformer 18-0, 2Amp -1pc
• 1N4007 diode -4pcs
• 12v Relay-1pc
• BC 547 transistor-1pc
• 1K ohm resisters -3pcs
• 4x3 keypad-1pc
• Voltage regulator -7805 and 7812
• LED -5mm RED- 2
• Wire to carry 2A, 230v AC
• Two pin Plug
Fig. 2: Block Diagram of Arduino based Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
Circuit Connections
As is clear from the block diagram the heart of the project is Arduino Mega board and all other circuit sections are connected to it. There are following sections of the project circuit -:
1) Power Supply Regulator
2) Relay Circuit as Power Switching Unit.
3) RTC Module DS1307
4) LCD Display
5) 4x3 Keypad
6) GSM/GPRS Module
7) DHT11 sensor
8) Moisture Sensor
The Arduino Board is the programmable Unit controlling the entire functionality of the project and every module is interfaced to it. The circuit is connected in the following manner -:
1) Power Supply: While the water pump will need AC supply, the project circuit needs 12V and 5V DC supply. The 12V supply is provided via 7812 voltage regulator and supplied to the 12V relay and 7805 voltage regulator. The other components need a 5V DC supply which is provided through 7805 voltage regulator that is converting the input 12V supply to 5V DC.
2) Relay Circuit: The water pump is connected to the circuit through a 12V relay. The relay is connected to the pin 24 of Arduino Mega board and have a BC547 transistor circuit of a common emitter configuration for interfacing with the board.
3) DHT11 connection: The data pin of temperature and humidity sensor DHT11 is connected to pin 10 of the Arduino Mega and ground and VCC connected to the relevant pins.
4) RTC Module: DS1307 RTC module is used in the circuit. The 5V DC supply and ground to the RTC module are provided by the 7805 voltage regulator. The SDA and SCL pins of the RTC are connected to the SDA and SCL pins of Arduino Board respectively. Learn more about RTC and its interfacing with Arduino UNO. The standard library of Arduino for RTC is used in the program code to run RTC specific project code.
5) GSM/GPRS MODULE: Here Arduino Mega is using TX1 and RX1 from its three USART ports. Vcc and ground are provided with the external power supply of 12v, 2Amp, and common ground. The TX terminal of GSM module is connected to the pin 19 (RX1) of Arduino Mega and its Rx terminal is connected to the pin 18 (TX1) of Arduino mega. Read more.
6) LCD Display: The 16X2 LCD display is connected to the Arduino board by connecting its data pins to pins 3 to 6 of the Arduino board. The RS and E pin of LCD is connected to pins 13 and 12 of the Arduino Mega respectively. The RW pin of the LCD is grounded.
Fig. 3: Table listing circuit connections between Arduino Uno and Character LCD The standard code library for interfacing Arduino is used in the project to program LCD with the Arduino board. Learn more about LCD interfacing with ARDUINO 4x3 Keypad: This is a numeric keypad having 12 input buttons arranged in 3 columns and 4 rows. In the keypad, 4 wires are used as ROWS and three wires are used as COLUMNS. The wire number can be count from the left-hand side to the right-hand side. The row and column wires are interfaced to the Arduino pins in the following manner.
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How the Circuit Works
The circuit works in following stages -:
1) Initialization of the circuit
As the circuit is switched on Arduino loads the imported libraries of LCD display, DHT library, EEPROM library, keypad library and RTC library. First Initial messages are flashed on the display screen prompting to complete mobile number registration. The user needs to enter his phone number and press "#" to complete the registration process. After that the current date and time are fetched from the RTC and humidity and temperature readings are fetched from the DHT11 sensor and they are displayed on the LCD screen.
2) After phone number registration, the user is prompted to enter a time interval for SMS alert of real-time soil health and the system goes into the operating mode. The device starts sending SMS containing details like moisture level, ambient temperature, and relative humidity by the interval set by the user.
3) Low moisture level detection: System checks the moisture level on a polling basis and whenever the system detects low-level moisture, it sends a warning SMS to the user. The device waits till the user switches ON the water pump or until the moisture level resumes to its best level.
4) SENDING SMS: When the user gets the warning SMS, he has to reply back by sending SMS “ON MOTOR” to the device in order to switch the water pump ON and he can send “OFF MOTOR” SMS to switch the water pump OFF.
Programming Guide
The code utilizes standard libraries of the Arduino. Therefore, first of all, predefined libraries for LCD display, DHT sensor, EEPROM library, keypad library and RTC library are imported in the code. An LCD object is instantiated and mapped to pins 13, 12, 6, 5, 4 and 3 of the Arduino. An object of RTC type and an object dht of DHT type is declared. For keypad interfacing, two constants representing a number of rows and columns of the keypad are defined and used in the declaration of arrays for representing individual keys of the keypad. The keys are mapped to Arduino pins as mentioned in the table given above. The variables to hold values of temperature, relative humidity, and moisture level are declared. A string object is declared to hold SMS text and a flag is set to check the status of SMS alert. A'relay' variable is declared and assigned to the pin 24 where relay has been connected. The numeric representation of keys is assigned by a two-dimensional array and variables to hold time and phone number are declared. A keypad object is declared and assigned key map.
Fig. 4: Screenshot of initialization in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
The baud rate for the Arduino and the GSM module is set to 9600 bits per second. The pinMode() and digitalWrite() functions are used to set the input/output mode and pin status of the Arduino IC pins. The LCD object is initialized and initial messages are flashed on the display screen. The RTC is tested to fetch current date and time.
Fig. 5: Screenshot of Setup Function in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
A loop() function is called where the key pressed by the user is detected and messages are flashed on the LCD screen prompting user to register mobile number. The registered mobile number is saved using saveNUM() function and the display screen is cleared by detecting the "#" pressed.
Fig. 6: Screenshot of Loop Function in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
A function moistureAlertSMS() is declared where the analog reading from moisture sensor is fetched and the reading is saved as an SMS in proper format to GMS module.
Fig. 7: Screenshot of Moisture Alert SMS Function in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
A lowalertSMS() function is called where the mobile number is fetched from the EEPROM and an SMS for low moisture level is pushed to the GSM module.
Fig. 8: Screenshot of LowAlertSMS Function in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
A processSMS() function is called which detects the reply SMS and operates the relay to switch the water pump on or off. The current status of the motor pump is displayed on the LCD screen simultaneously.
Fig. 9: Screenshot of ProcessSMS Function in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump Controller
Finally a function matchTIM() is declared where the time interval to send the SMS alert is set and the SMS is pushed out according to the set time interval. The message "TIME MATCHED" is displayed on the LCD screen at the instant SMS is sent to the registered mobile number.
Fig. 10: Screenshot of matchTIM Function in Arduino Code for Soil Moisture Detector and Mobile operated Automatic Water Pump ControllerL/Cpl Joe Glenton was absent for two years and six days A soldier who refused to return to Afghanistan because he opposes the war has been jailed after admitting going absent without leave (Awol). L/Cpl Joe Glenton, 27, from York, joined the Army in 2004 but absconded in 2007 after serving with the Royal Logistic Corps in Afghanistan. He handed himself in after two years and six days' absence. Glenton, based in Oxfordshire, was jailed for nine months in Colchester and reduced to the rank of private. He was told he would serve two-thirds of his sentence at a military corrective training centre. The court martial was told that Glenton, who later campaigned against the conflict, was discovered to be absent on 11 June 2007, when he was due to return to Dalton Barracks in Abingdon. When he first raised with his staff sergeant his reluctance to be deployed again... it resulted in the sergeant at the time bullying and intimidating
Nick Wrack, mitigating He returned to barracks 737 days later on 16 June 2009, when he was charged. During that time Glenton went to south-east Asia and Australia. He had previously performed a seven-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. When he returned he was ordered to go back to the conflict zone. Nick Wrack, in mitigation, told the court martial that this was nine months after his previous tour had finished, even though military guidelines suggest soldiers should not be deployed again within 18 months. Mr Wrack said Glenton had suffered from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after his first tour of duty. 'Coward and malingerer' He told the court that when Glenton raised concerns about going back he suffered bullying. "When he first raised with his staff sergeant his reluctance to be deployed again, instead of being dealt with in a sensible way, it resulted in the sergeant at the time bullying and intimidating L/Cpl Glenton," he said. "He was called a coward and a malingerer. "When this information was brought to his commanding officer, the sergeant was spoken to, but this reinforced the bullying." Consultant psychiatrist Lars Davidsson told the court Glenton may have reacted the way he did because of PTSD. Glenton took part in an anti-war protest in October last year. After the hearing a spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition said: "Joe Glenton is not the person who should be facing a jail sentence. "It should be the politicians who have led us into disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." His mother, Sue Glenton, said: "I am extremely angry. The court barely paid lip service to justice. "The judge clearly didn't listen to the arguments or if she did she ignored them. The lawyers are considering an appeal. "The Ministry of Defence will be hearing a lot more from me."
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Age: 24
Per-Game Stats: 19.2 points, 5.0 rebounds, 1.5 assists, 0.8 steals, 0.2 blocks
Advanced Metrics: 16.3 PER, minus-0.27 RPM, minus-102.3 TPA
Rank in Top 100 Article: No. 100
Harrison Barnes is not the savior of the Dallas Mavericks. He shouldn't be considered the central building block of the post-Dirk Nowitzki era. Even after remembering his torrid start to the 2016-17 campaign—his first in a featured role and not serving as a quaternary option for the Golden State Warriors—he should be considered a supplementary piece best suited for a lengthy career as a No. 2 scorer.
But that wasn't the popular take early. Not when he started off his Dallas career on fire, averaging 22.9 points during his first 10 appearances in a new uniform.
Even then, his points were fool's gold.
Not only did the scoring outbursts come while the Mavericks accumulated a 2-8 record, but they were earned while he shot 49.2 percent from the field, 31.3 percent from downtown and 88.6 percent from the stripe—good for a 56.6 true shooting percentage that only beat the league average (55.2) by a meager amount. Throw in his limited contributions elsewhere, his inability to record more |
90M low-income Filipinos could use in areas and situations where the traditional systems have otherwise failed them. They could start sending and accepting Bitcoin immediately with just their mobile phones, with no upfront costs, and without having to ask for permission from anyone.
8, 4, 1
Bitcoin turbocharges a set of financial enablers that these socio-economic tiers have never had access to. Imagine 150 people from all over the world chipping in a dollar each to put an underprivileged child through school for a year. Or 50 people putting together $20 to help an aspiring street vendor buy enough inventory to start an ad hoc business. Micro-lending on this scale has never been possible before due to transmission costs, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Philippines is one of the few places in the world where you can buy 8 individual sheets of paper, 4 teaspoons of vinegar, or a single cigarette. (In USD, those would all cost less than 10 cents.) Fiat currencies often have a hard time supporting the granularity that entrepreneurship at this level requires, but Bitcoin is divisible to an almost infinite degree.
∞
It’s difficult to speculate what kind of effect cryptocurrency will eventually have on our population over the next few years. What’s certain is that it already provides us with the tools necessary to make some big changes on all levels of the socio-economic strata.
It will all start with education and distribution. We need to get BTC into the hands of as many people as possible, and then support the ideas that naturally come about as a result of diverse adoption. In that respect, at least, Bitcoin is exactly like any other nascent technology: it’s all about the numbers.2018 Aquarius Horoscope: Money, Career and Business
This is the 2018 Aquarius horoscope, based on the most important planetary transits and aspects. Until November 8th, Jupiter in Scorpio and the tenth house will help Aquarius to make a good impression at work, to make progress in career. At the beginning of December, Mercury retrograde may cause some misunderstandings in the workplace and it is important to resolve any conflict as soon as possible.
January 1st-March 8th: Jupiter direct in tenth house – Professional Success
Jupiter, the planet of growth, prosperity and good fortune, transits the tenth house, astrological house of career and public appearance. There is increased public recognition and professional success, for Aquarius men and women, in the first two months of 2018 (and the first week of March). Aquarius employees make a good impression and they are recognised for the work that they have done. Doors in the area of career open with ease, during this transit – there could be a promotion, new job opportunities or a diploma. Now, you are happy with your occupation and its earning potential, your work is challenging and fulfilling and you are constantly setting new and exciting goals. All these are signs of being successful. This period of time is particularly beneficial for those Aquarius having jobs in public relations, administration, politics, performing arts and showbiz – it will be expanded audience and acknowledgement for their work.
March 8th-July 10th: Jupiter retrograde in the tenth house – Need Self-Improvement
During these four months, Aquarius men and women have to improve their professional skills, in order to fulfil their projects and their professional goals. Aquarius employees discover that they need to complete their studies and to expand their knowledge. So, between March and July 2018 it is a good time to take some college courses online, to participate in conferences and workshops, to read more (remember that all the billionaires are doing it!) and to try to become the best in your domain of expertise. In just two words: self-improvement. Or, if you like it better, personal development. Then, you will be able to create new goals for yourself, that are bigger and more daring than you would have previously thought possible.
June, 18th-November 24th: Neptune Retrograde in Second House – Risk of Being Scammed
Neptune, planet associated with idealism and imagination, but also with illusions and confusion, is moving backward through Aquarius’ second house. There is a major risk of being scammed, during this period of time, so that you should be very careful with money and avoid, during summer and autumn, risky speculative investments. Remember to keep your personal information to yourself, to keep all the passwords, account numbers and sensitive paperwork in a safe place. If you have doubts regarding a business proposal, consult only people you trust. And, if you have been scammed, the first thing you need to do is contact your local police department and to report the fraud. On the other hand, there are two other possible mistakes, when Neptune goes retrograde: regretting the past and being afraid of future. Remember what Roy T. Bennett said: „No amount of regretting can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future“.
July 10th-November 8th: Jupiter direct in the tenth house – Increased Public Recognition
For the second time this year, Jupiter transits your tenth house, bringing increased public recognition and professional success. Like in January and February, there could be a raise, a promotion, new job opportunities, maybe a major award. You have almost four months to take advantage of this beneficial astrological transit.
December 2nd-December 6th: Mercury retrograde in tenth house – Avoid Meetings
Retrograde Mercury transiting the tenth house may indicate miscommunications in the professional sector and misunderstandings in the workplace. This is not a good time for professional meetings and for job interviews. But, if can’t avoid them, there are some things you can do, to improve communication. Firstly, when writing or speaking to someone, you have be clear about your goal or message. People shouldn’t have to make assumptions and read between the lines – be concise! You also need to be friendly, open and honest. Avoid hidden insults or passive-aggressive tones! Take the blame out of your words and communicate your feelings in a positive manner. So, you’ll gain more confidence in yourself and people will respect you more.
December 6th-December 12th: Mercury direct in the tenth house – Resolve any Conflict
If you made some mistakes between December 2nd and December 6th, (when Mercury was moving backward through your house of career), now it is a good time to fix them. Conflict among colleagues can’t be avoided or totally eliminated. Left unheeded, it is associated with significant stress, health problems and poor productivity. If you had a conflict in the previous 5 days, resolve it right now! Carrying a grudge or harbouring thoughts of revenge about a colleague or boss will never help you. On the contrary, you need to remember to not make a work issue a personal issue. Find some common ground with the person, discover some things you agree upon and concentrate on them! it will be better, for both of you.A 30-year-old Portland woman who botched a home circumcision of her 3-month-old son was sentenced today to five years of probation.
Keemonta Peterson pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal mistreatment. She also must undergo mental health treatment and work with a mental health probation officer as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors. The other two charges of abuse were dismissed.
Peterson was arrested in April after a lengthy investigation into the October 2010 incident. Peterson, inspired after reading the Old Testament, decided she wanted her son to be circumcised.
But because she believed he was too old to be circumcised by doctors, she decided to do it herself, after watching YouTube videos. She called 911 after the botched circumcision left her son bleeding uncontrollably and in great pain.
Doctors completed the circumcision and the boy has fully recovered, said Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney John Casalino. The boy and his three siblings are in the state's care, although Peterson can see them under supervision.
The circumcision was "an aberration during a down period in her life," said Peterson's court-appointed lawyer, Scott Raivio. She has shown herself to be "a very natural, caring and loving mother" by all accounts, he said.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Eric Bergstrom agreed that there would be no benefit in sentencing Peterson to any more time in jail than the 28 days she has already served.
Despite the "sensational-sounding facts," said Bergstrom, "the reality is you love your children and had absolutely no intent to harm your child."
As Peterson thanked the judge, she choked up, apologizing for her actions. She added that she was grateful for the chance to still be with her family.
--by David Sep 11th, 2012
Message sent! 121,227 of us signed and thousands of us donated. Today, when the new health minister Jeremy Hunt looks through his morning newspapers, this is what he will see:
Thank you for being part of this. Together we’ve shown Jeremy Hunt just how determined we are to protect our NHS. We’ve got our message to him when it matters most – just as he’s starting his new job. That should make him think twice about pushing through further dangerous changes, cuts or privatisation.
It’s two years since 38 Degrees members first voted to make protecting the NHS top priority. Since then, we’ve done a huge amount together. Petitions, local meetings, messages to our MPs, billboard advertisements, legal submissions, newspaper ads, the list goes on! Now we’ve made it clear to the new minister that we’re not about to give up: we’ll keep campaigning as long as the NHS is at risk.
38 Degrees members know how important it is to have a decent health service which we can all rely on, whether we’re rich or poor. We know that the NHS is something Britain can be proud of. And each of us knows that we’re not alone – there are thousands of other 38 Degrees members, all across the UK, all ready to work together to protect our health service.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.England captain Alastair Cook has warned Pakistan fast bowler Mohammad Amir he can expect a hostile reception from home crowds this summer.
And Cook is perfectly fine with fans targeting Amir following his conviction for spot-fixing during the Lord's Test on Pakistan's 2010 tour, saying the fast bowler must live with it.
"I'm sure there will be a reaction, and that is right," Cook told reporters.
"It is part and parcel: when you do something like that there are more consequences than just the punishment.
"That is something for him to cope with, whatever comes his way."
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There is little sympathy for Amir and Pakistan in the England dressing room, with Stuart Broad this week detailing how he was still bitter that his sole Test century in the 2010 Lord's Test had been overshadowed by the spot-fixing scandal.
"Of course it annoys me that that game will always be connected with what went on. Lord's is the home of cricket. It's a wonderful place to play and that Test match will always be remembered for the wrong reasons," Broad told the Mail on Sunday.
"It was my best-ever innings, my only Test century and coming in tough circumstances as well. It was a good battle and I'll never forget the feeling I got running through for that hundred.
"From what we know, the three Pakistan players weren't actually fixing the game as a whole — a no-ball doesn't affect if I hit a four or not — so I can still look back with a lot of pride on scoring that hundred. But of course it was tarnished by what happened."
Broad and Cook have both said they believe anyone convicted of any fixing should be handed an automatic life ban, but both have also said they have no issue with Amir playing in the forthcoming series.
"Whether I agreed or disagreed with the punishment, he got it, served his time and he is absolutely right to come back," Cook said.
"You'd have to speak to him. What he did wasn't good but he served his punishment then. The ICC haven't made any big statements, but if I was in charge, if you got caught once that would be it — one strike and you're out."
Media attention surrounding Amir's return "to the scene of the crime" has been high, with the fast bowler's every move watched and name mentioned in every press conference.
But for Cook and the England team, the machinations of the Fleet Street machine and intense spotlight it brings are nothing new.
"Whatever Test match you are playing in, there is always something off the field, whether it is political or something like this," Cook said.
"It won't affect us as a side. We will concentrate on what we can concentrate on."Final Fantasy XIII-2 Characters Model Prada Clothing By Pete Haas Random Article Blend Prada has decided to hire a few virtual models to show off its new duds. In the latest issue of British fashion mage Arena Homme +, characters from Final Fantasy XIII-2 are modeling Prada's 2012 Spring/Summer men's collection.
"Our Spring issue focuses on a world of direction and escapism, and having a visually stunning videogame franchise such as FINAL FANTASY work alongside us and a leading fashion brand like Prada to create something so unique is incredible," said Max Pearmain, Arena Homme+'s editor. "I've always been interested by the power of videogames and their place in society, and the amount of work that's gone into this project blows my mind. We're incredibly pleased with the result."
The CGI images of the characters and clothing were made by Square Enix's Visual Works studio. The character designers from the FF games also contributed.
"The Final Fantasy series is known for its creativity and innovation; so working with Prada, a renowned fashion house with such beautiful clothing, was a very exciting opportunity. The images we have been able to create together are vibrant and unique," said FFXIII-2 producer Yoshinori Kitase.
A few images from the 12-page feature are below. The issue of Arena Homme+ goes on sale on April 12th. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
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The Champions League is set to undergo a major revamp to try to keep Europe’s big clubs happy.
The proposed new format for European football's No 1 competition would see clubs compete in a seeded knock-out round before advancing to the group stage.
Qualifying teams would then be split into two groups of eight, with the winners and runners-up from those pools facing each other in the semi-finals, instead of the current last-16 and quarter-final rounds.
The overhaul is being planned in conjunction with European football's governing body UEFA, who are aware the big clubs are unhappy with the current structure.
Clubs such as Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool want change to head off declining interest and falling revenues.
The motive behind the change is to make the Champions League more attractive to match-going fans, sponsors and TV audiences all over the world.
The big clubs feel there are too many “unappealing” fixtures under the current format, with Barcelona’s group games against BATE Borisov of Belarus this season cited as an example.
(Image: David Ramos/Getty)
The idea behind the new format is to ensure only 16 elite clubs make it through to the group stage, delivering more box-office matches with huge commercial appeal.
In the current format, 32 teams contest the group phase.
UEFA accept the Champions League needs to remodelled and will look to introduce changes in a bid to appease the big clubs and head off the potential threat of a breakaway European Super League.
The new format could be announced as early as September, when UEFA will begin the process of putting out to tender the TV rights for the next three-year cycle of the Champions League.
The best photos as Barcelona win the 2015 Champions League final:
The Premier League’s new £5.1billion domestic broadcasting deal, which kicks in next season, has maintained its status as the richest league in Europe, causing a headache for UEFA.
Clubs in Spain, Italy, Germany and France make significantly less than their English counterparts from TV, with the Premier League becoming even more lucrative as a global brand.
Even the bottom team in the Premier League next season will earn around £140m — three times more than a club such as Sevilla, winners of the Europa League for the past two seasons, illustrating the gulf in revenues between English sides and those on the continent.Santa battles the Illuminati, Skrulls invade chimneys and werewolves defend Christmas in this year's Marvel Digital Holiday Special, which debuts December 17.
And that's just the start of the mayhem that Marvel Comics will unleash online this year, according to John Cerilli, director of content for Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited. After the holidays, gritty normalcy will return to Marvel's online comics, as will favorite characters like Iron Man and Wolverine.
(The adamantium supersoldier looks like gold, no matter the platform: Logan is already a superstar on television in the impressive Wolverine and the X-Men, and he's scheduled to go supernova once the blockbuster film X-Men Origins: Wolverine goes widescreen in May 2009. Let's hope he's spared the Gossip Girl treatment of X-Men: First Class, however, which Variety reports will feature younger, hotter mutants. We'll pass. We like Wolverine old and pissed off.)
Logan's back story will be explored in the forthcoming Marvel digital comic Wolverine: Agent of Atlas, which sets him loose in the jungles of Cuba during the 1958 revolution. Wired.com talked with Marvel's Cerilli about that bit of revisionism, Wolverine's upcoming death match with The Punisher, the future of print comics and more.
Wired.com: What's cooking in the holiday special? The X-Men in San Francisco?
John Cerilli: This is personally one of my favorite projects. I used to love the Marvel holiday stories as a kid, so I'm thrilled to be producing the very first one to premiere in a digital format.
The Marvel Digital Holiday Special has four holiday tales and, yes, the X-Men will be spending their first holiday season by the Bay. They moved there midyear, so the magnificent mutants are still getting used to life out there. The story is written by Marvel's longtime marketing guru and What If? House of M writer Jim McCann. It will fill readers with pangs of warmth and longing. Isn't that what any good holiday story is about?
Wired.com: Well, I always thought it was about the presents. Speaking of, Santa versus the Illuminati?
Cerilli: That is being written by current Ms. Marvel scribe and New Avengers: Illuminati co-writer Brian Reed. It is pretty much how you imagine it: a knock-down, drag-out battle between Father Christmas and Marvel's supersmart secret collaborators.
Wired.com: I heard the Skrulls get in on the holiday action. Don't Skrulls celebrate holidays of their own?
Cerilli: I'm not sure if the Skrulls have a Santa of their own, but they can always shape-shift into him, if they really want to. But I'm pretty certain they all celebrate Festivus. You know, for the rest of us.
Wired.com: Nicely done. Who's penning that one?
Cerilli: Ryan Penagos, who asks, "What's a holiday season without Skrulls?" Before the invasion, there was infiltration, and that included Skrulls assimilating human holidays in their own special way.
Wired.com: Let's talk Wolverine. He is getting serious love in 2009, especially from digital, which has him battling with the Punisher and landing in 1958 Cuba. Does he have enough love to spread around?
Cerilli: Wolverine is the best at what he does, and we definitely didn't want to answer to him should his presence not be felt on Marvel Digital. Wolverine and The Punisher kick off our digitally exclusive Astonishing Tales title, written by C.B. Cebulski with art by Kenneth Rocaforton, on Dec. 3. Logan and Frank Castle will be beating on each other for the greater good. As for Wolverine's operations inside Cuba circa 1958, that's highly classified material. We do know the FBI dispatched the Agents of Atlas and we do know that Wolverine takes them on, but the rest will be revealed starting Dec. 31.
Wired.com: Let's talk turkey. What role does the webcomics division play for Marvel? What are its goals?
Cerilli: The ultimate goal of Marvel Digital is to get more people reading our comics. Through digital distribution, we can expose our stories to the widest audience possible, which is essentially anyone connected to the internet.... With our characters successfully reaching well beyond the printed page nowadays in film, animation, videogames and licensed products, many people may be coming to Marvel.com for the first time having never actually read a comic. We want to make sure they get the chance to do that.
Wired.com: You're a digital guy. Do you foresee a day when comics go out of print and move online?
Cerilli: It's so far in the future that apes will be ruling the planet and humans will have colonized Mars. Seriously, we won't see it in our lifetimes. Those of us, like me, who have grown up reading comics love our printed editions and will continue purchasing them. But because of the proliferation of handheld telecommunications, music, gaming and electronic reader devices – not to mention the tens of millions of laptops – reading comics digitally will absolutely become easier and much more widespread very rapidly. This is good for the digital comics business, as well as the paper comics business, and will only continue to grow and nurture awareness of graphic storytelling.
Images courtesy Marvel Comics
See also:Pancake day is here and with it the last chance to put on a few pounds before lent starts. So why not make the most of it and go for the bold American style instead of the wafer thin ones?
It’s also the perfect time to learn how to prepare this convenient and practical single serving batter. It’s so quick it will become your new 3am craving go-to recipe, I would bet on that.
Once you’ve got the base down you can pretty much drop in whatever you fancy. From strawberries and chocolate chips, to goat’s cheese and caramelised onions, the possibilities are endless. As I couldn’t make up my mind on just one recipe I’ve decided to share two with you: one savory, one sweet. Why pick only one when you can have both in one sitting?
Salty, cheesy and with a kick of spice, we have the savory courgette, carrot and feta pancake.
The other has a pop of freshness and a lashing of maple syrup. It’s the sweet blueberry
and mascarpone pancake.
The batter couldn’t be simpler to make, just ask my husband who self-proclaimed himself a poorly-trained cook (I swear it does not come from me!). It’s just a matter of putting the ingredients in a bowl and mixing until smooth. He whisks up this recipe in no time for his solo mid-afternoon snack and they turn out great every time.
Even without fruits to pimp up the base, adding a dash of vanilla extract and a sprinkle of sugar will give you an excellent traditional plate.
If you’d rather experiment with savory options, then it’s important to remove as much excess water from the grated vegetables as possible to avoid a soggy result. Try not to over mix the batter too. The outcome will be hard and compact cakes when what you aim for is light and airy.
Cooking standard recipes when eating alone always leaves you with leftover sitting in the fridge until the next craving kicks in. And as, once cooked, pancakes get passed their prime time in about 30 minutes I tend to keep the batter raw until needed. But let’s be honest, I rarely feel like putting a pan on the stove on a Monday morning.
With this single serving recipe, however, there is no leftover. So whether it be for breakfast, brunch or dinner, there is no reason not to dig in.Chick Productions announced Monday that their founder Jack Chick has died at 92, which is big news for anyone who’s ever been fascinated, horrified, and occasionally delighted by his comic books. Chick was the creator of Chick Tracts, a long-running series of evangelical mini comics designed to bring people to Jesus through a combination of insane, bizarre, fairly campy storylines and extremely middling art. You’ve accidentally sat on one at a bus stop, or had one thrust into your Halloween bag by your worst neighbor.
David W. Daniels, an author for Chick Publications, wrote on Facebook that Chick died in his sleep Sunday night; we saw the news via our friends at Christian Nightmares.
Chick was a bit of a mysterious figure, and gave almost no interviews throughout his career. The most complete biography we have comes from his own website, which talks about his early years as a bad boy artist that no Christians wanted to try to save:
From early childhood, it was obvious that Jack Chick had an ability to draw. He even failed the first grade because he was so busy drawing airplanes in battle. As he grew, Jack was constantly drawing, and honing skills that God would later use in a great way. While in high school, none of the Christians would have anything to do with him because of his bad language. They all agreed not to witness to him, convinced that he was the last guy on earth who would ever accept Jesus Christ.
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All that changed when he met his wife Lynn Priddle, who Chick’s official bio says was “instrumental in his salvation.” A radio program he heard on his honeymoon sealed the deal:
While visiting Lynn’s parents in Canada on their honeymoon, Jack’s mother-in-law insisted that he sit and listen to Charles E. Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour radio program. Jack recalls, “God was already working on my heart, but when Fuller said the words, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” I fell on my knees and my life was changed forever.”
It was a big win for Jesus Christ and for the world, because Chick soon got the idea to make illustrated gospel tracts, which he began drawing and self-publishing in 1974. They reflected his conviction that hellworthy offenses are all around us. He inveighed against homosexuality, of course, but also Dungeons and Dragons, Halloween, Islam, Roman Catholics, abortion, evolution, drugs, and a very broad and generous definition of “the occult.” One tract shows how Ouija boards, astrology books, “hallucinatory drugs” and fortunetellers are all tools of literal demons, who sit around a conference table in Hell, talking about how all those things advance their plans for “One World Government.” (Many evangelical groups teach that in the latter days, a hellish, cruelly dominating one world government will take over the globe, part of the rule of the Antichrist in the last days before Jesus returns to battle him and Satan on earth.)
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Twitter is marking Chick’s passing by celebrating some of his most eyebrow-raising works. They are truly extraordinary:
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It is, in a way, extraordinary to consider what an immense influence Chick and his kooky tracts had on American culture. The Southern Poverty Center designated Chick Publications as a hate group, accusing them of waging a “militaristic, vitriolic propaganda war,” while influential comics artists like Daniel Clowes parodied the tracts. An independent 2008 documentary on Chick, God’s Cartoonist, calls him “the best-selling underground artist and publisher in the world.”
While much of Jack Chick’s life is still a mystery, and may remain that way with his death, we’re fortunate that his bizarre, unique, utterly wacky thoughts on witchcraft and Masonry will endure.Amy Lawson, a teacher at Silver Lake Elementary School in Middleton, Del., teaches language arts to her class of fifth graders. (AP/Steve Ruark)
An experiment in which high school teachers were paid more based on their students' test results suggests that the bonuses didn't simply lead teachers to teach to the test, undermining one of the main objections to basing teacher compensation on test scores.
The study does not conclusively answer why merit-pay programs seem not to have worked in the United States, however. Nor does it solve a crucial puzzle in public education: whether there is a better way to pay teachers, and if so, what it is.
A study based on new data from the experiment, conducted 14 years ago in about 100 middle-of-the-road Israeli schools, appears to be the first of its kind -- examining the consequences of an alternative model of teacher compensation over the long term. Victor Lavy, the author and an economist at the University of Warwick, found that those students whose teachers were were paid more didn't just score higher on the tests. They went on to complete more years of postsecondary education and to earn more than their peers whose teachers were paid conventionally.
Those results suggest that the teachers provided the students with knowledge or habits that served them well later on life, rather than just, say, teaching them when to guess on a multiple-choice question.
"There is a big concern about whether teachers behave strategically and they only manipulate the test-taking skills of students," Lavy said. "You don't care per se about test scores."
At the end of high school, Israeli students spend a few months doing nothing but preparing for a demanding test called the Bagrut. Their results on the test determine where they can apply for college. Lavy's program offered significant bonuses to teachers if their students showed improvement in their grades on the test. Close to half of the 629 teachers in the experiment received awards, which ranged in value from $1,750 to $7,500.
Offering bonuses to teachers improved their students' scores on the test and increased the number of students attending one of Israel's seven elite research universities by more than a quarter. Lavy found that people who had been involved in the experiment in high school are now earning about 7 percent more than those who didn't, and are 2 percent less likely to claim unemployment benefits.
In interviews after the experiment, teachers told Lavy the bonuses encouraged them to stay after school to help students study or to change their lesson plans, not just to train them in how to take the test.
It shouldn't come as a surprise if teachers work harder when money is on the line, Lavy argued.
"It's very nice to say that being a teacher is a destiny, a mission. That’s all nice," he said. "You really want to motivate people with financial compensation. Teachers are not different from other people."
The study, however, is unlikely to persuade skeptics of pay for performance. Even if the teachers were simply teaching to the test, their students still would have benefited over the long term from being able to attend more selective schools. With slightly better test scores, they had a chance to earn more impressive degrees, so perhaps it's no surprise that these students were earning more a decade later.
If so, then the merit-pay program wouldn't have any effect if implemented nationally in Israel, since the universities would have to respond to higher average test scores by raising the bar for admission. "This could all be a zero-sum game," said Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University. "It's coming at the expense of other students."
Meanwhile, there is no equivalent to the Bagrut in the U.S. system, and in contrast to other countries, studies conducted here have not produced convincing evidence on the whole that the programs result in higher test scores even in the short term.
Harris praised Lavy's work as "quite significant," but disagreed with his assessment of teachers' motivations, saying that financial bonuses might not mean much to them. "Most teachers aren't going into it for the money," he said. "They're very much focusing on what they think is in the interest of children."
Lavy also criticized pay-for-performance programs in U.S. schools. In order for them to work, he said, they must be transparent enough for teachers to understand what they have to do to receive a bonus. Teachers receiving ratings based on their students' test scores in places like Houston and Ohio have complained they don't understand why their marks fluctuate from year to year.
"Teachers should know, they should feel with their own hands and fingers, their chances in what they do," Lavy said.
A survey of teachers in Minneapolis found widespread misconceptions about how their merit-pay program was supposed to work. And a recent review of federal grants given to districts for experiments in pay for performance found that half of the teachers in the experiments didn't even know they were eligible for bonuses.
"Teacher pay-for-performance programs are incredibly complex and difficult to implement," Vanderbilt University's Matthew Springer said. "Buy-in from teachers into the program itself is going to be critically important."
Springer and other researchers in the United States are now less interested in competitive merit-pay systems like the one that Lavy designed than they are in simply offering better teachers higher salaries or bonuses to transfer into disadvantaged schools. How those teachers should be identified is still a point of debate, but that kind of system is easier for teachers to understand.
It's the sort of reform that appeals to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, who argues that teachers' pay shouldn't fluctuate with their children's scores from year to year.
"The real issue for the profession is you need to pay highly effective teachers higher salaries," she said, citing six figures. "What's wrong with the profession is that talented people look at it and say, 'I'm not going to do this because no matter how long I do this, I'm going to get paid just as much people who aren't that good, and not only that, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to buy a house on this salary."
For his part, Lavy does not advocate for any particular model of pay for performance, or one based exclusively on test scores. After all, placing so much important on a single test like the Bagrut can be unfair to students, since a single bad day can damage their chances of getting into the college of their choice and pursuing their academic interests. In another recent study, Lavy and two collaborators showed that taking a test on a day with bad air pollution reduced students' earnings fifteen years later by about 2 percent.
Rather, Lavy says his results show the benefits of offering administrators and policymakers more flexibility in compensating teachers, even if they don't rely on noisy test scores to make their judgments.
"Paying individuals based on their productivity is what drives the American economy," he said. "Why not for teachers?"We went so long without comically long names, but Sephora Teint Infusion Ethereal Natural Finish Foundation makes two this month.
This is foundation I mentioned in my New and Noteworthy at Sephora post last month – the one that I was super excited to try? I wanted it, and in fact almost ordered it when I ordered my Silk’n Flash & Go Freedom – but being unsure of my coloring, I decided not to (yes, I know I can return/exchange it – but if I can also make a little effort before buying to see if its the right color, I’d like to. I don’t want stores to have to trash products because I was lazy. Don’t be that guy, that guy sucks).
During my most-recent Sephora trip I mentioned, before they used ColorIQ to, “match,” me, I mentioned that I was interested in the new Sephora Teint Infusion Ethereal Natural Finish Foundation and lamented its online-only status. One of the bubbly SA’s chimed in that they carried it.
What?! Are you sure?!
She was sure. Her friendly team-mates were sure.
Okay, they carry it. That is fantastic…and probably definitely meant I’d be making an unplanned (for that trip, anyway) purchase. ColorIQ matched me to 16 – Linen, which was comically inappropriate for my ghastly-for-me complexion. I had a friend with me and she was highly amused by the, “Oh, no – no no no,” face I made when I tried to blend it out. It probably matches the skin I’m in when I’m, you know, not in winter hibernation mode…but not now. I shook the tester for 12 – Ecru, and dispensed a single drop onto the back of my hand. Like all the other serum foundations out there (YSL Fusion Ink [costs 2.5x as much], Perricone No Foundation-Foundation Serum [more than 2x as much], bareMinerals BareSkin [$5 more, so-so reviews]), it has a very thin consistency. But don’t be dissuaded – one drop went so. damn. far. just on the back of my hand.
Insert whatever choir of angels audio springs to your mind by default. Yeah, I bought it. Is that a question?
The next morning I actually got up and had enough time to properly do foundation instead of hastily smearing on the Ponds product I’ve been using, so I got out the trusty Sigma F80 Flat Top Kabuki. I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to go about this process, so after violently shaking the Sephora Teint Infusion Ethereal Natural Finish Foundation, I dispensed three drops straight onto the bristles of the brush. This is uncharted territory. My world is changing.
I started from the center of my face as the product suggested and worked outwards rather than, you know, wherever the hell I felt like. As I went, I added 3-4 more drops to the brush just to balance my skin out. Finished up, immediately loved it. The way I applied it resulted in a light coverage but you could easily use less and get a really sheer finish, or more and get to medium without a struggle. I really do feel that it looks like skin.
Sephora Teint Infusion Ethereal Natural Finish Foundation is an extremely lightweight product – friends who accidentally get heavy handed with foundation? You want this. You will seriously have to be trying to make it look cakey or otherwise screwy. I feel nothing on my skin. If you read my review of NARS Sheer Matte, you’ll know that I hate heavy-feeling foundations. In comparison to that, Urban Decay Naked foundation is barely there. But in comparison to Naked Skin? This is truly weightless. Looking in the mirror threw me off because I’m like, “I look like I should feel something, anything,” but…no, not a damn thing. And it was glorious.
I checked it three hours in. Great! Five hours in. Still great. End of the workday (approximately ten hours after initial application) – still REALLY good – though let it be known that I didn’t bother to prime, I didn’t set with powder or spray. I wanted to see how this sucker wore entirely on its own. Ten hours after a relatively hasty, half-conscious application without any prep or setting? Out of a $24 foundation? Absolutely yes |
Strike, Cryptolocker, Dell SecureWorks, Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, Gameover Trojan, Gameover ZeuS, mcafee, Microsoft Windows, Operation Tovar, p2p botnet, Pollingsoon, Saarland University, Slavik, UK National Crime Agency, US-CERT, VU University Amsterdam, ZeuS AuthorBrian Banks was a 16 year old high school football star in Long Beach, California, when a lying girl and the government collaborated to ruin his life. He was falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson after the two had kissed in a stairwell. Gibson concocted an elaborate story claiming that Banks dragged her across campus and raped her. Even though Banks did not commit the crime and in fact there had been no rape at all, his attorney advised him to seek a plea bargain to get a lighter sentence as the government was threatening him with 41 years to life in prison. Choosing what he saw as the lesser of two bad options after his lawyer suggested he would be convicted because he is black, Banks plead “no contest” and was imprisoned for over five years was then put on probation. Upon release, he was forced to wear a GPS monitor, register as a violent sex offender, and was restricted from living near or going near schools.
False accuser Wanetta Gibson is the real rapist (as in financial rape) in this story. She and her family got a large settlement (variously reported as either being $750,000 or $1.5 million) from the Long Beach School District on the basis of her lies and claims that lax school security contributed to causing her “rape”.
Gibson this year admitted Banks did not rape her, but was worried she might have to repay the fraudulently obtained settlement. Students, investigators, and attorneys associated with the California Innocence Project helped to obtain evidence that Gibson had falsely accused Banks which resulted in the overturning of his conviction on May 24, 2012.
As the California Innocence Project web page on the Banks case explains:
Banks was faced with an impossible decision at the time – either fight the charges and risk spending 41 years-to-life in prison, or take a plea deal and spend a little over 5 years of actual prison confinement. Although it would mean destroying his chance to go to college and play football, a lengthy probationary period, and a lifetime of registration as a sex offender, Banks chose the lesser of two evils when he pleaded no contest to the charges.
Teri Stoddard of SAVE (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) is calling for the prosecution of Wanetta Gibson as part of their effort to quash the epidemic of false allegations of crime and violence that are ruining the lives of many innocent people. She reports that roughly ten percent of Americans have been falsely accused of child abuse, domestic violence, or sexual assault and there are very few protections for such people.
Gibson should be prosecuted for perjury. But that doesn’t go far enough. She should also be prosecuted for criminal fraud that cost taxpayers and insurers an enormous settlement plus legal fees in this case featuring a lying girl and an irresponsible government that encourages more liars to level false allegations by failing to prosecute such crimes.
Significant financial restitution and assistance to Brian Banks and his family is also warranted. It should be paid by the LA County District Attorney, the State of California, and Gibson to Banks and his family.
This boy was placed into prison at the age of 16 years old for 5 years for a rape that did not occur simply because a girl lied against him and the government failed to do its job to determine the truth, instead preferring to bully an innocent child into letting himself be steamrolled by the government because he was male and black and therefore was assumed to be guilty based merely upon a disputed accusation and his race and gender.
Brian Banks is a poster case for the injustices against men and African-American men in particular. If his accuser had been of some other racial group (she is African-American, too), you can get her crime would be the fuse in a powder keg of a potential racial uprising in Los Angeles. There is no doubt that racial bias played a part in the success of the State of California coercing Banks into pleading no contest.
Quoted from Onetime top Calif. football prospect exonerated after serving 5 years on rape charge: Banks said his defense attorney told him, “‘When you go into that courtroom the jury is going to see a big black teenager and you’re automatically going to be assumed guilty.’ Those are her exact words.”
Many falsely accused people in Los Angeles County have learned the hard way that often the function of a public defender (the lawyer provided by the government to the accused) is to work on behalf of the DA to get a plea bargain using a “no contest” please so the DA can claim a conviction victory while the public defender can “manage” his or her many cases. If you are not rich or politically connected and cannot be paraded about as a “victim” for the government to use to manipulate the public’s opinions, then you are not allowed due process or justice in the United States.
Perhaps these are some of the reasons why the LA District Attorney is resisting prosecuting Gibson. Such a prosecution would draw further media attention to how they collaborated with Gibson in falsely prosecuting and imprisoning Banks and how men and African-American men in particular are routinely denied due process and justice by a government that places more emphasis on punishing somebody severely than on identifying the criminal. The Los Angeles government has a lot to lose here because Los Angeles is known for police brutality and corruption, misconduct in criminal investigations including fabrication of evidence and tampering with witnesses, and terrorizing and tormenting targets of false allegations into pleading “no contest” so that the DA can claim a victory in court. If the general public truly understand how criminal LA’s government is, heads might roll. So it’s better for the DA and government to try to brush this case under the carpet as quickly as possible and trot forth people such as Deputy District Attorney Brentford Ferreira to offer “Justice has been served” as part of the cover-up.
For there to be any semblance of justice, false accusers must be held accountable for their crimes. The penalties for making a false criminal accusation against another person should be at least the same as the penalty associated with the false accusation. However, very few false accusers are ever prosecuted despite causing enormous damage to innocent people. As a result, false accusations are rampant in our society.
The average citizen who knowingly engages in a false accusation resulting in a criminal investigation or prosecution should face double the penalty for the falsely claimed crime. But when it is a government employee who level false accusations at others, the penalty should be even more severe as these people are capable of causing far more damage and should know very well what they are doing is criminal. And when malice can be proven, the penalties should be at least doubled.
In some cases, such as the 20 years of false imprisonment of Clyde Ray Spencer of Clark County, Washington, over false allegations of child sexual abuse designed to help his ex-wife and her police boyfriend, even doubling the penalty for malice is not enough. In that case, the police fabricated evidence, tampered with witnesses, and rigged the investigation for purposes including gaining advantage in a child custody battle.
The death penalty in general is questionable policy as it is far too often applied to innocent people. But in cases like that of Clyde Ray Spencer, there is plentiful evidence that police officers with personal ties to the case engaged in severely abusive conduct that is so egregious that it warrants a death sentence. Often cases of government abuse feature substantial evidence of malicious wrongful conduct that goes beyond mere circumstance or hearsay statements, and the Spencer case is one of those.
Citizens willingly conspiring with the government to engage in such crimes as false prosecution and subversion of an investigation may also deserve the death sentence. In the Spencer case, Spencer’s ex-wife Shirley Hanson, her police boyfriend Sergeant Michael Davidson, and Detective Sharon Krause all should pay the ultimate penalty for their crimes. But as usual, nothing substantive happened to punish them for their crimes.
In the Banks case, it is not clear the government actually fabricated evidence or tampered with witnesses. It may have simply been a lying girl plus irresponsible and biased prosecutors rather than the apparent criminal conspiracy of the Spencer case. Given this, there must also be penalties for prosecutors who engage in false prosecutions because of negligence or bias. While prosecutors in the Banks case may have believed Gibson, they still had a moral duty to verify her story and to do due diligence prior to proceeding with a prosecution. But many prosecutors and law enforcement officials do not view a fair and impartial investigation to reach the truth as being part of their job duties. On the contrary, they view throwing somebody, anybody, into jail and keeping them locked up for years or having them killed via an act of state-sponsored murder as their central job duties.
There are many other cases in which the prosecutors have ample reason to doubt the guilt of the party they are prosecuting. In such cases, it is common practice to threaten to destroy the person with a long prison term in an effort to force the victim to take a plea bargain exactly like happened to Brian Banks. Prosecutors who engage in this conduct should at a minimum be fired and banned from the practice of law or from any government employment.
If you are an American man and particularly an African-American man, it is quite likely that all that stands in the way between you and a prison cell is the current lack of a false accuser. With the systemic avoidance of prosecution for false accusations and plentiful financial and other incentives (such as advantages in child custody battles) for false reports, we now have an epidemic of innocent people being persecuted for crimes that they did not commit and in many cases which never occurred at all.
Justice is not served by throwing innocent people into prison, nor is it served by rewarding malicious liars who severely and wrongfully harm others. Unfortunately, in today’s United States the operating mantra is “better to throw 100 innocent men in prison than to let one guilty man escape” because the politicians and the government can falsely claim they are “winning the war on crime” when they imprison or kill thousands of innocent people each year. Both the Banks and Spencer cases amply illustrate the results of the current government policies of letting perjury and false accusations go unpunished.
Further Reading
Father Imprisoned 20 Years on Fake Child Sex Abuse Charges
How Sociopathic Parents Use Police Reports for Defamation
Laws Against Audio and Video Recording Protect Liars, Abusers, and Government Criminals
Tonya Craft’s Ex, Parental Alienator Joal Henke, Shows Kids Will Lie About Sexual Abuse To Hurt Target Parent
Americans Don’t Believe in Innocent Until Proven Guilty
Our So-Called Rape Culture
False Allegations in Divorce and Custody Battles: The Personality Types of False Accusers and the Falsely Accused
As Victim Credibility Dwindles, SAVE Calls on Prosecutors to File Charges in Brian Banks False Rape Case
Woman who accused ex-football player of rape unlikely to face charges
Exonerated California man restarts life, dreams of playing in NFL
Brian Banks
The Brian Banks Story
California Innocence Project
Onetime top Calif. football prospect exonerated after serving 5 years on rape charge
Woman who recanted rape claim likely to keep $750,000 settlement
Ex-football player, wrongly jailed for rape, wants money from state
Wanetta Gibson: The True Face of Evil
Was She black? Ankle Recants “rape” charge that sent brotha for 5 years
Judge dismisses murder charges against man who spent more than 20 years in prison
Arguing Three StrikesMany market experts say the biggest reason for the shrinking volume is that traders and investors remain leery that the economy will suddenly turn on them in the wake of the financial crisis, the wild swings in stock prices and the European debt troubles.
Investors and financial industry professionals are struggling to understand what the decline could mean, particularly if it continues. Less rapid trading by short-term speculators could be a good thing for buy-and-hold investors tired of being burned by the market. But the decline could also signal a broader turn away from the domestic stock market by investors who want to hold less of their nest eggs in stocks and by companies that opt for raising capital in bond markets instead of issuing shares.
“My expectation was that we would see people go back to the stock market,” said Charles Rotblut, a vice president of the American Association of Individual Investors. “It remains to be seen whether there will be a core group of people that is just turned off of the stock markets altogether.”
The New York-based system of stock trading has been showing the strain of the slowdown. The New York Stock Exchange said last week that trading in the first quarter fell 23 percent from a year earlier. A few days earlier, Nasdaq announced that its first-quarter revenues from stock trading in the United States were down 7 percent from a year ago. Both exchange companies have aggressively moved to capture other businesses that do not rely on stock trading, but they have also embarked on cost-cutting programs.
“We can’t be certain as to when or whether the volume is going to recover,” said Lee Shavel, chief financial officer at the Nasdaq OMX Group.
The recent slowdown has occurred not only on the nation’s 13 official exchanges and trading platforms. Dozens of off-exchange operations have captured a larger proportion of all stock trades in recent years, but even their overall trading numbers have been trending down.
The decline in trading has not sent the prices of stocks down. Though there is less buying and selling, the people who have remained in the market are willing to pay higher prices, driving the value of the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up 102 percent since the market hit a bottom in the spring of 2009.
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But the recent falloff in trading is striking because data from the New York Stock Exchange shows that volumes have not declined for three consecutive years in records going back to 1960. For an explanation of the lower trading volumes, many market-watchers have looked to the high-speed traders, who use computers algorithms to take advantage of small price discrepancies and who have accounted for an increasing share of all trading in recent years.
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These firms have been curtailed slightly by recent regulations aimed at making the markets less volatile. But more fundamentally, industry participants say high-speed traders rely on transacting with slower, traditional traders like retail investors and mutual funds. When those groups pull back, the high-speed firms have little choice but to scale back as well.
“On a typical trade, two high-frequency trading firms will not trade against each other,” said Manoj Narang. His New Jersey high-speed trading firm, Tradeworx, is still growing, he said, but for most established firms, if ordinary investors “don’t want to trade, there’s really simply nothing for us to do.”
Among retail investors, the most reliable source of trading volume has been the day traders who were given access to cheaper trading by discount brokers like E*Trade and TD Ameritrade.
Steve Quirk, a senior vice president at TD Ameritrade, said these investors were still scarred by the financial crisis in 2008-9, which followed the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001. More recently, share prices have steadily risen but with jarring short-term reversals.
Stock trading now accounts for 16 percent fewer customer trades at TD Ameritrade than it did in 2009. “We’ve had instances where it looked like things were clearing up,” said Mr. Quirk. The company’s clients in some recent months tiptoed back into stocks, he said, “but then they rather surprisingly just quit.” Among the broader population, the most common investment in stocks has been through mutual funds. The most conspicuous sign that these investors have grown disenchanted with American stocks has been the flow of money out of domestic stock mutual funds, which were drained of more than $400 billion since the start of 2008, compared with an inflow of $52 billion in the four years before that, according to the Investment Company Institute. The outflow has continued into 2012.
The shift is partly attributable to the growing number of seniors moving from stocks to bonds, which is typical in retirement. But surveys by the institute have shown that investors young and old have grown less willing to invest in domestic stocks, even with interest rates on bonds at record lows in recent years.
Some of this money has flowed into increasingly popular exchange-traded funds, which are baskets of assets that trade like stocks. But even more has flowed into bonds. Some financial advisers worry that Americans preparing for retirement are giving up the investment gains that are possible in stocks and ignoring the possible future risks in bonds.
“We worry that our investors are trading one form of risk for another,” said Francis M. Kinniry Jr., a senior investment strategist at Vanguard.
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The departure of long-term investors does not always lead to lower trading volumes. When people are pulling money out it can lead to spikes in trading, as it did in August when the European debt crisis heated up. But when long-term players exit the market it can lead to a reduction in trading over time, which has many market participants watching the behavior of ordinary Americans like Fred Lines, a retired electrical contractor who lives on Long Island.
Mr. Lines, who is 75, said he used to trade stocks regularly, and had most of his money in stocks even after retiring and many of his peers pulled back. He started to retreat after the demise of the investment bank Bear Stearns in 2008 and has continued to retreat, most recently in December when he shifted funds from preferred stocks in blue-chip companies to corporate bonds. The recent positive returns have not dispelled his fears that the market will suddenly turn on him.
“If it goes up, I know it’s going to go down again,” Mr. Lines said. “I used to just buy the stock and hold it — after a few years it was always up. Now you can’t trust that.”WWE News
WWE News: JBL shoots hard on Ultimate Warrior for calling Droz a cripple, JBL fills in on radio
Oct 7, 2005 - 5:03:00 PM
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO BOOKMARK US & VISIT US DAILY
By Wade Keller, Torch editor
-JBL filled in for Jerry Doyle, a conservative nationally syndicated radio talk show host today.
-On this week's new Byte This show on WWE.com, Todd Grisham asked the former APAer what he thinks about the Ultimate Warrior. "He's a piece of crap," he shoots. "He's an unadulterated piece of crap. Ultimate Warrior couldn't make it nowadays. He was surrounded by talent. He was hidden in the fact that he couldn't wrestle. He couldn't do an interview. He came along at the right place at the right time. Ultimate Warrior couldn't make it through the curtain nowadays. I've never have a problem with the Ultimate Warrior. I knew him when he was here, he was a bit of an odd guy, but to call Droz a cripple - Droz, he's just a good human being and I hope he gets out of that wheelchair one day and I'll be one of the first ones to take him hunting - to call Droz a cripple, that shows me that the Ultimate Warrior is an absolute piece of sh--. Can't stand the son of a bitch. To do something like that for absolutely no reason is completely inexcusable. I have no feelings but hate toward the Ultimate Warrior. I think that is absolutely disgusting. You've got a problem with Vince McMahon, say something to Vince McMahon. I was on the road when he no showed all those events, that's the last reason he got fired. He chose to no-show the events. He broke his contract, to say anything else, he's a liar, if he says anything else. And to say something about Droz, to me it's pathetic. You know, you had your little career, you had your fifteen minutes in the sun, you don't get sixteen minutes. Go back to your little Warrior cave or whatever you want to do - the idiot actually changed his legal name to the Warrior. It shows you how stupid this guy is. It's pathetic."
-REMINDER: You can always quickly and easily catch up on the latest WWE News updates published here on the website that you might have missed by scanning down about two inches to the listing of the links to the latest 12 "WWE News" updates.
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CLICK HERE FOR EVEN MORE PW.NET HEADLINESAfter redesigning the structure from concrete to steel, the library was delayed.
Temple pushed back the completion date of the new $170 million library once again. It will reach “substantial completion” by May 2019, officials said.
Students are not expected to begin using it regularly until Fall 2019, said Jerry Leva, the vice president of planning and capital projects.
In January, Leva told The Temple News that he did not see “anything barring” the library’s completion in October 2018.
However, the building design and construction methods were changed this year, causing the completion date to be delayed, Leva said.
One of the most prominent alterations was the building’s structure being switched from concrete to steel. Building a steel structure is more cost effective, less labor intensive and allows “significant” savings on the project, he added.
By changing the structural components of the library, officials had to redesign portions of the structure, causing the delay.
The steel structure is being completed and is on track to be finished by winter break.
“The project is going very well, and we’re extremely happy,” Leva said. “It’s moving rather quickly now. It’s picking up momentum as projects of that nature do.”
The new library will have sustainable components, like a green roof and more efficient heating and cooling systems, he added.
Other features of the new library are robots that transport books to students on command and more computers and collaborative spaces.
“A new library seems pointless, because all the money that we spent on it could be used for other things and could go towards students who need it,” sophomore media studies and production major Ramata Kaba said. “The construction is annoying, and it feels like it’s taking forever. I’m not excited for it because we already have computers and collaborative spaces at the TECH Center. It just seems unnecessary.”
Some students are excited for the new collaborative spaces because many struggle to book breakout rooms in the TECH Center.
“The current library is outdated, so I am excited for what the future holds and how it differs from the TECH Center,” sophomore sports and recreation management major Matthew Ochoa said.
The plan for the future of Paley Library is still being explored, Leva said. Some of the possibilities include it being repurposed for classroom space.
“The library took years of thought, and we consider highly and deeply how [construction] affects [students] physically, mentally and emotionally,” Leva said.
“It’s a great fit for the future of the students and staff, who should be proud of it,” he added. “It’s going to enhance and step up the university standards for the entire country, if not internationally.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Ramata Kaba has taken photos for The Temple News. She had no part in the reporting or editing of this article.NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Step aside, VCU. Enjoy your memories, Butler. Ohio's ready to become the latest mid-major darling of March Madness.
Walter Offutt scored 21 points, D.J. Cooper had 19 and No. 13 seed Ohio beat South Florida 62-56 on Sunday night to advance to the Midwest Regional semifinals.
"This is amazing," said Offutt, a transfer from Ohio State by way of Wright State. "It's one thing to talk about it and one thing to actually do it. This has been unreal, but let's just continue the run."
Ohio is the seventh team seeded No. 13 or higher to advance to the regional semifinals and the first since No. 13 Bradley did it in 2006. None of those teams won its next game.
The Bobcats (29-7), who opened the tournament with an upset against fourth-seeded Michigan, will play No. 1 seed North Carolina in St. Louis on Friday in their first trip to the round of 16 since they lost to the Wolverines in the regional finals in 1964.
Ohio trailed by two when Offutt swished a 3-pointer, launching a 10-0 run for the Bobcats. A pair of free throws by Cooper made it 54-46 with 3:28 left.
The Bobcats had a 59-53 lead when Toarlyn Fitzpatrick connected for South Florida's first 3-pointer of the half. But Cooper went 3 for 4 from the line while the Bulls missed three shots in the final 36 seconds.BENGALURU: The ruling Congress and opposition BJP in Karnataka are heading for a showdown on the state government-sponsored Tipu Jayanti celebrations on November 10 for the third consecutive year. BJP leaders have announced their boycott of the event with Union minister Anant Kumar Hedge calling the 18th century ruler of Mysore a “brutal killer” and a “mass rapist”.BJP leaders said on Saturday they don’t want their names to be printed on the invitation cards for the celebrations.Hegde wrote to the Karnataka chief secretary asking him to drop his name from the official invites to the function and said he was boycotting the function. Quick to follow him were BJP MPs Shobha Karandlaje and Nalin Kumar Kateel who also decided not to attend the event.“Conveyed #KarnatakaGovt NOT to invite me to shameful event of glorifying a person known as brutal killer, wretched fanatic & mass rapist,” Hegde tweeted on Friday.CM Siddaramaiah told reporters here on Saturday that protocol requires the names of elected representatives to be printed on invitations of government functions. “It’s up to the member to attend the event or not,’’ he added.To this, Hegde retorted: “If the government prints my name on the invitation card, I’ll attend the function and raise slogans from the dais against Tipu. If Siddaramaiah has the guts, let him stop me.”State BJP president B S Yeddyurappa chose not to comment on Hegde boycotting the event, saying it is an individual’s decision.BJP spokesperson and MLA C T Ravi took to the social media to express his ire. “Communal Congress led by arrogant @siddaramaiah is repeatedly insulting Hindus by celebrating Tyrant Tipu Jayanti despite severe opposition... and thrive on anti-Hindu appeasement policies. There is no rule that demands Union minister has to attend Tipu Jayanthi celebrations just because @CMofKarnataka invites him,” he tweeted.Nearly two years after the end of Operation Protective Edge, the IDF has uncovered a Hamas attack tunnel crossing the border fence into Israel, which is believed to have been dug after the 2014 war, it was cleared for publication on Monday morning.
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The shaft was discovered inside Israeli territory, just a few dozens of meters from the border fence, in the Eshkol Regional Council, but not very close to nearby communities.
Officials in the defense establishment say the tunnel was likely meant to be used in a strategic attack against Israel, in which dozens of Hamas fighters from the elite "Nukhba" unit would participate.
Hamas fighters in an underground tunnel (Photo: Reuters)
Since the tunnel's discovery last week, IDF engineering forces and fighters from elite units have been working in the open area between Kisufim and Kerem to destroy it.
IDF forces destroying the tunnel (צילום חטיבת דובר צה"ל)
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The tunneling took place on both sides of the border, and the Palestinians in Gaza reported on it, but Hamas refrained from using the tunnel or taking other offensive steps against the IDF. And this despite the fact that according to Israeli officials’ estimations that Hamas was aware that the IDF had uncovered and destroyed the tunnel.
At the start of IDF operations, Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot and GOC Southern Command Eyal Zamir were present. Residents in the area were told that the matter was under IDF control and that there was no real danger, therefore life went on as usual. Even farmers in the area were updated and were given no special instructions.
A senior security source said last week around the time of the tunnel’s discovery, "We are not surprised by Hamas’s efforts as that is an opportunity for them to carry out a strategic attack. Hamas is not rushing to battle. We have identified other tunnels dug by Hamas, but they have not penetrated our territory."
(Photo: IDF spokesperson)
Hamas’s excavation of this tunnel appears to be have been done relatively fast compared to those dug in the years prior to Operation Protective Edge, pointing to their having learned lessons and invested an unprecedented amount of money – millions of shekels – in the project. Even the depth of the tunnel, about 30 meters, is considered unusual.
Nevertheless, in other respects, it is the same type of tunnel discovered before and during Operation Protective Edge - reinforced walls, digging pathways, branches and inner depth.
According to a senior Southern Command official, Hamas employs 800 tunnel diggers who enjoy high salaries compared to other operatives in the organization, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades chief, Mohammed Deif, considers the tunnels a flagship project highlighting the strengthening of the organization's military wing.
The fact that no weapons were found in the tunnel, and that Hamas realized that the tunnel was discovered almost instantaneously and yet chose not to use it to attack the IDF, reinforces the defense establishment’s opinion that the tunnel was not meant to send terrorists into Israel in the nearby future but rather in further down the line.
Not an Iron Dome-level success yet
Over the past year, after receiving intelligence on the matter, the IDF focused much of its efforts on finding tunnels along the Gaza Strip border. IDF forces have been seen scanning the area in past months, attempting to find shafts and tunnel openings. The IDF responded to any tip by residents of the Gaza border communities, who reported suspicious noise, even in cases involving towns relatively far from the border fence.
The new tunnel's discovery is the result of field action, intelligence work by both the military and the Shin Bet, and above all, the result of the IDF's new tunnel-discovery technology, which has been used along the border over the past year.
IDF forces destroying Hamas tunnel (Photo: IDF spokesperson)
The IDF is treating the discovery of this tunnel as an initial step, heralding the new system's full implementation in a few months. The new system is part of the IDF Southern Command's "Southern Glow" operational plan, which includes the fortification of border measures against a mass invasion by Palestinian forces, as well as the deployment of early warning trackers which should aid in the discovery of terrorists crossing into Israel. Assuming the planned receives the required budget, "Southern Glow" is expected to be implemented during the next two years, starting with higher-risk areas.
IDF officials expressed their approval of the new technology used in discovering the tunnel, but the security community prefers not to call this a revolutionary moment or compare it to the implementation of the Iron Dome missile defense system. Still, the results of Israel's investment in this technology over the past few years have led a number of other countries to send representatives to learn how to combat the tunnel threat from Israel.
"We need to make this discovery into a method, with the test coming in the next few months, in which we will try and find more tunnels," said a senior Southern Command officer. "This is an ability that allows the discovery of very small spaces at depths of 30-40 meters, down to the level of ground water. We are still developing our method of handling this system. What we thought would happen during a certain time period with this system is taking four times longer (than expected)."
The senior officer doesn't rule out the possibility that Israel's breakthrough in the anti-tunnel fight could cause an escalation of violence on Israel's southern border.
"We have defined the mission as being the destruction of all attack tunnels without reaching an escalation, but an escalation will not deter us. Hamas knows we've strengthened our defenses and that it will have a hard time surprising us. If we end up in a war over this – then so be it. This is a long, protracted struggle. Hamas is a sophisticated enemy. It learns lessons and implements them fast. Each one of these tunnels that we foil is a loss for it. Hamas will have to contend with the dilemma of whether or not to act if it sees itself losing other attack tunnels."vMotion is probably my favourite VMware feature ever. It is one of those features which revolutionized the world and just when you think they can’t really innovate anymore they take it to a whole new level. So what is new?
Cross vSwitch vMotion
Cross vCenter vMotion
Long Distance vMotion
vMotion Network improvements No requirement for L2 adjacency any longer!
vMotion support for Microsoft Clusters using physical RDMs
That is a nice long list indeed. Lets discuss each of these new features one by one and lets start at the top with Cross vSwitch vMotion. Cross vSwitch vMotion basically allows you to do what the name tells you. It allows you to migrate virtual machines between different vSwitches. Not just from vSS to vSS but also from vSS to vDS and vDS to vDS. Note that vDS to vSS is not supported. This is because when migrating from vDS metadata of the VM is transferred as well and the vSwitch does not have this logic and cannot handle the metadata. Note that the IP Address of the VM that you are migrating will not magically change, so you will need to make sure both the source and the destination portgroup belong to the same layer 2 network. All of this is very useful during for instance Datacenter Migrations or when you are moving VMs between clusters for instance or are migrating to a new vCenter instance even.
Next on the list is Cross vCenter vMotion. This is something that came up fairly frequent when talking about vMotion, will we ever have the ability to move a VM to a new vCenter Server instance? Well as of vSphere 6.0 this is indeed possible. Not only can you move between vCenter Servers but you can do this with all the different migration types there are: change compute / storage / network. You can even do it without having a shared datastore between the source and destination vCenter aka “shared nothing migration. This functionality will come in handy when you are migrating to a different vCenter instance or even when you are migrating workloads to a different location. Note, it is a requirement for the source and destination vCenter Server to belong to the same SSO domain. What I love about this feature is that when the VM is migrated things like alarms, events, HA and DRS settings are all migrated with it. So if you have affinity rules or changed the host isolation response or set a limit or reservation it will follow the VM!
My personal favourite is Long Distance vMotion. When I say long distance, I do mean long distance. Remember that the max tolerated latency was 10ms for vMotion? With this new feature that just went up to 150ms. Long distance vMotion uses socket buffer resizing techniques to ensure that migrations succeed when latency is high. Note that this will work with any storage system, both VMFS and NFS based solutions are fully supported. (** was announced with 100ms, but updated to 150ms! **)
Then there are the network enhancements. First and foremost, vMotion traffic is now fully supported over an L3 connection. So no longer is there the need for L2 adjacency for your vMotion network, I know a lot of you have asked for this and I am happy to be able to announce it. On top of that. You can now also specify which VMkernel interface should be used for migration of cold data. It is not something many people are aware off, but depending on the type of migration you are doing and the type of VM you are migrating it could be in previous versions that the Management Network was used to transfer data. (Frank Denneman described this scenario in this post.) For this specific scenario it is now possible to define a VMkernel interface for “Provisioning traffic” as shown in the screenshot below. This interface will be used for, and let me quote the documentation here, “Supports the traffic for virtual machine cold migration, cloning, and snapshot creation. You can use the provisioning TPC/IP stack to handle NFC (network file copy) traffic during long-distance vMotion. NFC provides a file-type aware FTP service for vSphere, ESXi uses NFC for copying and moving data between datastores.”
Full support for vMotion of Microsoft Cluster virtual machines is also newly introduced in vSphere 6.0. Note that these VMs will need to use physical RDMs and only supported with Windows 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2. Very useful if you ask me when you need to do maintenance or you have resource contention of some kind.
That was it for now… There is some more stuff coming with regards to vMotion but I cannot disclose that yet unfortunately.
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This tutorial will explain some of Known ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty Jackalope) bugs with workarounds
Bug Details
The permissions of the /dev/nvidia files cause errors when processes are launched with non-root privileges on my 64-bit 9.04 desktop system.
Workaround
Edit /etc/rc.local file from your terminal
gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local
Add the following before "exit 0":
chmod 666 /dev/nvidia* &
Save and exit the file
2) Camera doesn't mount when connected and switched on in Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty)
Bug Details
Camera doesn't mount when connected and switched on in Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty)
Workaround
Quick fix:
Run the command from your terminal
sudo killall gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor
then connect the camera.
Long-term fix:
Prevent the process from starting Using the following command
sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor
3) Remote Desktop (vnc) screen freezes when remote |
has to be emphatically relocated into the Information-driven integration and guidance system, which is provided at SQ level by the hyperdimensional Informational essences it involves. In turn, this process of integral personality-representing focal information-condensations, actualizes the sequentially higher-order organizational principles which are innately embedded in the all pervading cosmic harmony.
Memory Storage and Recall
Learning and memory are not functions of inter-neuron synaptic modeling effects, as currently held. Mnestic patterns actually correspond to Information field configurations, each stored in their own SQ domain. Evidently, their preset resolutions, are in the first place, a function of recurrent synaptic connectional patterning processes, which lead to an increased accuracy in the replications of the original Quantum maps, as presented to the observer by integrated sensory cues, during the learning process. Of course, biomechanical details of mnemonic replication effects are favored in this range, by the allosteric behaviors of presynaptic Ca channels and by the "habituation" of chreodic vectors, operating at biochemical levels.
Functional distributions of mnemonic traces, throughout the Brain, leads to their Quantum recalling, from any holographic storage module, by reference superposition attractors which are supplied as the symmetry components produced by an inquiring mind, in form of SQ patterns which generate field alignments to the, holographically-encoded, relevant Quantum activity components.
This view is consistent with Lashley's interference engram, if transposed to the Quantum level and beyond. Any structural or locational aspects, regarding neurally encoded memory patterns, must be abandoned as only of an historic value. The reactivation patterns in Quantum maps, related to specific memory constellations must be seen as SQ-triggered alignments of extended Brain energy substructures. Each time, the SQ attractor performs the selective regulations of Quantum mechanical processes, which are correlated to the recalling event. Information is not stored in the physical Brain. It is reactivated in Quantum states by global resonant replications, which are controlled by SQ induction filters. A very large number of neurons participate in this Quantum resonance. Topological tracking of activated modules and networks, in specific instances, may be the subject of future, more refined, fMRI investigations.
Changeux's "representations" are ultimately SQ configurations, patterned in a "matching/not matching" mechanism, by real time sensory Information inputs, in a wide correlation context, pattern-matched to identical SQ-essence memory-storage pools.
5. ANESTHESIA IN A NEW PERSPECTIVE
From all the previously introduced considerations, it clearly results that consciousness is in NO WAY a collective effect of conformational dynamics evolving at some lower hierarchic implication level. The SQ paradigm aligns these categories along a reversed causation vector, which is allowed by the fundamental time invariance applying to the Maxwell equations.
From this novel perspective, the anesthetic collective inhibition of dynamic conformal changes in Brain substructures exclude brain responses to available Quantum configurations, as supplied by the SQ processes which evolve in the conscious Self, and Brain mediations of environmentally-generated afferent signals, which are aimed, by the faculty of attention, towards the aforementioned ultimate SubQuantum processing structure - the individual Self. If there is no attention for the thing or event, that thing or event does not exist for the observer.
Phase transitional sequencing in the implemented Brain/Consciousness decoupling and re-coupling pathways, are eloquently related to multidimensional dynamics, exactly as illustrated in the recently published Walling-Hicks phase-space EEG transcriptions. Hyperdimensional integration gradients into SQ-mediated Information fields are locally dependent upon the determinational quantum states of Brain, which are in turn, hampered during anesthetic impairments of regulating London force effects, at the level of nanoscale biomolecular background events. This explains why lower subsets of organismic integrations, governing vital functions, are preserved during anesthetic depth values, which are able to disconnect biological ground processes, from their projective space consciousness correlates. As an unavoidable, absolutely compelling consequence, conscious processing of environmental events may freely evolve during this disconnected state, leading to SQ memory patterns which are being dynamically stored in the projective space-time, and subsequently re-supplied to the individual, for post-anesthetic recollections. Such recollection instances are abundantly described in the literature as "paranormal events" of the OBE and NDE kind.
Just as at biological resolution level, chemical energy patterns, have Information propagating efficiency, unimpaired conformal functionings of collective neural assemblies are required for up-scaled integrations of Qualia and provide meanings into the Self, during its coupled modus operandi to Brain. Anesthetic impairments at low integration levels, propagate in cascade-like dysfunctional arrays across the higher integration structures of Brain, resulting in Brain's transient functional dissociation from the self conscious entity. The duration of such instances may vary from consciously unperceived micro-blackouts in the stream of consciousness, through short-term neural hypoxic effects, controlled medication efficiency windows (anesthesia), to long-term so-called "vegetative" preservations of vital functions. Beyond this connectedness reversibility threshold, experimental and experiential evidence strongly supports observations of unimpaired cognitive functions, which are operating their own, separate, SQ integration domains, which are able to interfere with anesthetic influences, by lowering entropy states, in both biological and non-biological systems, which are capable of modulable random energy-pattern supplies.
During anesthetic interferences, short-term memory fixation components, with biomolecular background requirements, may be impaired. Complex peripheral Information inputs may circumvent this integration level, resulting in extra-sensorial transmissions and subsequent coherent patternings of SQ maps, occurring at the highest level of the observing Self. Such imprinted configuration patterns may act as induction fields for subsequent Quantum replication effects in the Brain, during the post-narcotic phase, resulting in long-term memory blueprints which may be recalled by accessing the proper Quantum connectivity pathways, which are normally involved in Consciousness/Brain coupling functions. Such memory contents preserve special integrated aspects from their non-neural extrasensory recording pathways, supplying the specific heterotopic recollection parameters which define OBE and NDE reports. Such reports gain phenomenal reliability from the perspective of our SQ integration concepts, which contradict consciousness-suppression effects which have been misleadingly ascribed exclusively to physiological or medication-induced, transient cortical dysfunction states.
6. RECENT SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTS SUPPORTING THE SUBQUANTUM MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
A. Hyperdimensional essence of Brain
Conformational and combinatorial structures at neural biomolecular level, obviously obey distribution orders far beyond their own structural codes. Direct photonic excitations by favored temporal penetration windows of the Right Temporal Lobe and its associated limbic system components, may contribute to Brain's biological interface with an interconnected Universe, as suggested by M. Morse (Univ. of Washington), such processes enhancing religious and NDE-type experiences. He suggests ascribing to the right temporal lobe, a biological vehicle value for morphic resonance-mediated control in post-genetical ontogenetic phase correlations.
In a personal communication dated back to 1997, J. Whinnery pointed to dreamlet-like experiences originating in hypoxic brain modules, as being similar to NDE reports. These kinds of experiences imply neural connectivity to non-local Quantum-Reality Information structures and corresponding configurational maps.
Extending the Rubner-Kleiber scaling computation laws, K.Togbey & All performed a fractal analysis of the relevant allometric exponents of the Brain, reaching a 4/5 law. This implies that a 5th dimensional function is present in resonant NN connectivities. This finding relates Brain's Information-coding abilities to the Golden Mean ratio, by equating EEG metrics to number of harmonics times 2φ. Wave packets, scaled in powers of the Golden Mean, exert a patterning action upon the time-lags separating neural firing events, over several orders of magnitude. Harmonic spectra below and above the brain's fundamental 2 φ frequency matrix, are involved. Neural networks operate according to powers of 2φ/2, efficiently using them for Fibonacci series related Information coding, involving Hausdorff dimensions which are implementing the fractal distribution patterns of SQ information structures.
Log-normal and power-Law distributions of variables are thus governing heritance and aberrance processes in biosystems, where the power-law distribution proves to accurately describe the Fokker-Plank equation, as applied to the discrete variables related to SQ Informational Units and their combinatorial matrices.
B. Non-physical signalization.
Our SQ model has received an important support, by the novel view on Quantum physics recently proposed by P.V.Kurakin (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), which addresses hidden variables as evolving in a hidden space/time, without violating Bell's theorem. This highly appealing model of non-physical signalization systems, running in "hidden-time", beyond normal physical time constraints, is strongly consistent with our infinite-velocity SQ signalization concept. Indeed, hidden-time dynamics - the ones occurring in Information fields - result in the best conceivable controls of the deterministic parameters which are at work between elementary events, such as photon emission and absorption, thus implementing informationally enfolded guidances of energetic phenomena. Standard QM offers nothing more then a few predicted probability amplitudes, for such elementary processes. Physical "quantum time" normally refers to the number of energy quanta, absorbed at a given point in Space, during a given time-span, as derived from normalizing experiment-related variables. The photon emission/absorption events themselves, are currently seen as running in a random, probabilistic framework.
The Kurakin Quantum model allows for a deterministic patterning of such events, rather than a probabilistic randomness, by introducing non-physical modes of Information signaling, which operate in the background, hidden-time, dimension. This involves complex interactions between "queries" and "confirmations", where queries and responses are operating non-locally as parallel vectors, composed of direct, and backwards-oriented, non-physical signals. These information signals, which are regulating Quantum processes, evolve as hidden variables, in the physically inaccessible domains, as defined in the Compton Radius Vortex, by a lower metric value then the Compton wavelength itself. This signalization control involves coaxial superpositions between contradicting time propagation vectors, thus involving retrocausation effectors originating in preselected SQ matrix fields of higher implicated orders. Such Information signals are displaying a physically detectable fractal integration amplitude, only at the levels of fragments of superposition, thus eliminating the need for any theoretically uncomfortable, and physically hard to demonstrate, backwards-flow patterns, in physical time.
According to this advanced concept, Quantum choice happens in no physical instant (zero time), as a result of Information-signal superpositions along their vacuum trajectories. As described in the Kurakin model,.Information propagation channels in the vacuum, are thus controlled by "virtual" guiding structures. Such structures might be mutually compensating pairs of Information-charged SQ units, organized in SQ condensates which are not signal-generating formations. These distribution patterns in the vacuum originate at a higher level of integration, aiming target-related conformal signal transmission blueprints which are reching various targets, in zero time. This results in an apparent retrocausation of the pure Informational essence, as implemented by the hidden-time symmetry of Informational vectors, which allow primary query signals to be propagated from detector to source - and not the other way around - as amply explained in Kurakin's model. relying upon Cramer's transactional interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
From this novel perspective, Objective Reduction events of Quantum superposition states are seen as instantly deriving from hidden-time signalization patterns and not at some random and undefinable pace, as seems to be implied by the previously conjectured "Quantum gravity control". This retro causative chain operates along a downward implication vector of Informational essences, modulating upward physical trends, as described in the Penrose Hameroff model, and thus exerting a perfectly coordinated deterministic control upon the overall orchestration of the physical processes involved in neural activity. This easily explains both, the "logical" overall outcome of consciousness-related Quantum processes, and the highly elusive feature of the phenomenal continuity of Consciousness. This view overcomes the various unavoidable statistical segmentation effects, which are commonly resulting from applications of classical Quantum mechanical views.
Brain operates in physical time at the Quantum level, but it also operates as an interdimensional resonator, one which is capable of coupling hidden-time SQ signal processing events, into biomolecular energy-related Quantum states. Time-patterning Quantum events prove to be but the statistical results of deterministic SQ processes, evolving in the hidden time frameworks, which we have associated to a projective space, whose limiting singularity is the Quantum-embedding Euclidian space. Our extended team reached by now a quite advanced stage of developing an infinite tetration and self-root related mathematical formalism able to express these kinds of interdimensional transitional geometries, involving non-integer hyperoperations, which expectedly will highlight the many new connections hereby suggested, between Informational 2D spinor spaces and the Euclidian space of Brain, putting in a new light, the Brain correlates which are addressed by the OrchOR model of Consciousness.
Countless far-reaching explanatory consequences derive from these novel concepts, extending from anesthesia-related topics, to free-will proactiveness, to remote phenomenal patterns. These understandings are related to statistically significant, experimental and experiential results, such as those reported during "paranormal" Information-processing research programs.
From the new perspectives opened by the SQ model we defend, we suggest to replace the currently held concepts of purely biochemically-induced consciousness-suppressing effects, as seen during narcosis, by a more accurate understanding, one which implies that, during narcosis, a transient decoupling effect is occurring between the individual self-conscious structure and the Brain (as the interaction tool of the Self), with relation to an energy-defined ambient reality. This decoupling occurs as a result of abnormal chemical influences on the normal biomolecular backgrounds which are required for setting up the various resonant Quantum maps involved in consciousness, in the normal waking state. Moreover, such disconnection states allow for continued and undisturbed cognitive functions running in projective space, despite any induced failures of the normal biochemical systems, leading to mnemonic configurations with the ability of triggering conformational Quantum maps in Brain, after the suppression of the chemical disturbance of the physical background during anesthesia. This effect is amply documented in a compellingly extended database which piles up in currently running investigation programs, with results which are confirming the endless chain of anecdotal post-surgical subjective reports which have been abundantly recorded (and routinely dismissed, as being events which are conceptually opposed to the standardized contents of the prevalent Consciousness-related theories).
Unfortunately, addressing various anomalous cognitive phenomena, from the perspective of the novel approach hereby proposed, would vastly exceed the scope of our current presentation. We hope to have future opportunities to extend upon these kinds of topics, which dearly need the canonical acceptance of the academic community, at this stage. We have tried to significantly contribute to this aim by bringing forward our currently achieved insights, as offered in this presentation, which hopefully will yield a future of experimentally supported developments, in these deserving fields.
By now, we can see that the fundamental rules of the game need to be changed, in order to bring Consciousness research, and the understandings derived from it, into an alignment with the reproducibly observable facts, which facts unfortunately tend to defy the explanatory ranges of current paradigmatic constraints. Such observables can't be dismissed any more, or ignored, or misinterpreted, by biased preconceived approaches and tendencies. Prof. Hameroff's expressions regarding a Brain-coupled Consciousness seem to be perfectly consistent with H.Stapp's Quantum-mediated "top-level control" paradigm, as well as being consistent with our SubQuantum concepts, which describe the details of this control's concrete implementation. Therefore, this novel view has to replace the obsolete one, which has proposed a Brain-based epiphenomenal approach. During the last few decades, the epiphenomenal approach has progressively degenerated, and thence stabilized into a most regrettable set of accumulations from the past, a unfortunately biased set of physically unverifiable, and conceptually egregious errors, in Consciousness Studies.
III.
SUMMARY OF THE MAIN SUBQUANTUM CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ORCH-OR MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
1. Conscious experience is "embedded in a fundamental space-time geometry", being accessed but NOT SELECTED by the OR process.
2. Our SQ model addresses the "non-computable" components of the Penrose sequences related to OR, which occur in Brain, not as "aspects" of Consciousness, but as correlates of Consciousness.
3. OR occurs not by cumulative Quantum superpositions by way of a random probabilistic Quantum mechanical effect, but due to purely deterministic sequences, imposed on the system by requirements which are originating from the Information fields.
4. Our SQ model provides the solution for the elusive determinism in specific 3-D configurations of amino acid chains in tubuline molecules (the "protein folding problem"), describing it as evolving along a teleological attractor-like vector.
5. Bose-Einstein type macroscopic Quantum coherent states, amplify the resulting Quantum effects, by sharing the thus selected wave function, and at the same time translating Informational configurations into the Brain's Quantum states.
6. SQ mediated Information Orchestration enters the Quantum domain via non-random van der Waals London dispersion forces, regulating Quantum superpositions of conformational states and aligning them for successful replications of SQ inductor maps.
7. Coherent Quantum superpositions in molecular hydrophobic enclaves are not a "prerequisite for consciousness". Such superpositions are simply supplying an orchestrating effect, which is resonant with Quantum maps in the Brain, thus tuned to SQ configuration information equivalents, which exist previously, in higher implication levels (Information determinacy).
8. Anesthetics may act in hydrophobic enclaves by obeying the Meyer-Overton correlation requirements, suppressing the fine-tuning effects between Quantum events occurring at this level, and their SQ-map counterparts, thus disrupting any afferent inputs into the conscious fields of subjective experience. At the same time, this process is suppressing Quantum neural resonance transcriptions with complex cognitive processes, which processes are meanwhile proceeding in their own projective space. In this way, anesthetics dissolve the physical Brain's correlations with the non-material Consciousness (mind), thus preventing noxious inputs from reaching the non-material Mind, by way of neural transmissions. Mind observably and instrumentally continues, even when the electrochemical mechanisms of the physical brain are turned off.
CONCLUSIONS.
1. We defend a novel approach which shows two distinct states of human consciousness:
A.) The condition of being a free, SubQuantum-related, cognitive complex, one which is evolving beyond physical space and time constraints, following an increasingly negentropic vector. Together with thermodynamical chains of increasing entropy in various energetic ranges, this state contributes, over time, to a total entropy-negentropy conservation law, as fundamental to our Universe.
B.) The brain-coupled functional variant of the above mentioned structure, with describable parametric correlates, as amply treated in the Orch-OR model.
2. At the level of its utmost morphogenetic complexity, brain is progressively patterned during its ontogenetic phases, for an increasing Information processing efficiency, with multitasking capabilities.
3. Our model is not reducible to previous dualistic or epiphenomenal concepts, as its approach to Information signalization and control apparatus is deeply rooted in modern, experience and experiment-supported, physical observations and their accompanying mathematical constructions.
4 We amply argument the "why" Brain is the ideal anchorage tool of organized Information fields, into ambient energetic Space-time dependent processes.Brain supplies the active components of this integration, by implementing symmetrical Information flows between the interconnected Quantum structures which are involved in the coupling process.
5. Our novel approach is rooted in an overwhelmingly deep pool of information, comprising an objective, experimental, and multi-disciplinary, extended database. This database includes in its explanatory range, both "normal" and "anomalous" Information-related phenomena, in a non-contradictory and coherent epistemological framework.
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Boyd R N (2003) Refutation of Heisenberg Uncertainty regarding monochromatic photons
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Nature, 311, 611-615With it looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump will secure the Republican nomination, the internet is wondering just what might happen if Trump wins the whole shebang and becomes the 45th president of the United States.
Some people suggested that Trump’s past might be one of the first places to look.
However, the overwhelmingly majority believe that Trump’s famous hair would become central to his administration.
#IfTrumpWins The President's Plane Will Now Be Known As "Hair Force One" pic.twitter.com/y7otcSVTbW — Sheikh Ebad (@eSHEIKH_) March 9, 2016
#IfTrumpWins Bad hair day will be a national holiday — Zachary (@Kyozamiss) March 9, 2016
Hair plugs will be outlawed. Glorious elaborate comb overs for everyone.#IfTrumpWins@midnight — Ryan Readman (@juster12) March 9, 2016
READ MORE: Trump goes meme: Butt plugs, cat photos starring The Donald
Others just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a decent pun. Nice.
As Trump’s new residence, the White House would, of course, be given a subtle makeover.
#IfTrumpWins, he'll build one of THESE. And Mexico will pay for it. @midnightpic.twitter.com/T3JZzsWORz — Bad Father Han Solo (@BadFatherHan) March 9, 2016
Many noted that Trump’s ascendancy to the Oval Office would be a case of life imitating art – and people find that frightening.
Comparisons were drawn with certain historical figures that certainly don’t reflect well on Trump – or on what direction some believe the country is heading.
I used to wonder how Germans let Hitler become there leader... Now I'm witnessing it in my own country #IfTrumpWins — Lukas (@NewYorkWar) March 9, 2016
#IfTrumpWins Turn in your neighbor before they turn you in pic.twitter.com/Go5XlkPh17 — Buh Bye GOP (@BuhByeGOP) March 9, 2016
It seems a lot of people would just pack up and leave.
#IfTrumpWins NASA will have to speed up that whole living on Mars thing. — Jake Farrell (@RealJakeFarrell) March 9, 2016
#IfTrumpWins The Statue of Liberty will swim back to France. @midnight — Rishabh Sharma (@im_srishabh21) March 9, 2016
Even those outside the US are considering what to do if Trump manages to win the presidential race.
#IfTrumpWins Canada will be forced to build a wall on the border to keep all the fleeing Americans out. — Glen Wien (@GlenWien) March 9, 2016
#IfTrumpWins Mexicans will build a roof over the US and call it an asylum — Will Black (@WillBlackWriter) March 9, 2016
Trump’s vision of what Americans have to fear was also looked into ‒ and it certainly is a long list.
However, some people’s view of a Trump victory is simple.In sports, there’s a way to be rich and famous that makes you want to stay poor and unknown. Ricky Williams has that. So do Chad Ochocinco, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick, and Ben Roethlisberger: this sense that the money and the celebrity and all their trappings (the drugs, the women, the spending, the access to reality-television producers) are just inducements to misery. It all sounds like so much fun. People tweet about you. The lucrative endorsements pile up. Maybe you date a Kardashian or present Best Kiss while onstage in the midst of a Rihanna–Jessica Biel sandwich. But watching it at home, fun isn’t what you feel. It’s stress. The success is heavy. It’s expensive.
On the other hand, there are guys who just can’t believe it. I mean, they just can’t. They’re rich and famous and playing record-breaking football on a team that rarely loses. They’re young. They’re popular. They’re living the dream. These are guys like Rob Gronkowski, the scalably tall, unstoppably exuberant 23-year-old New England Patriots tight end. In July, Gronkowski, his brother Gordie, and some friends made human wheelbarrows on the red carpet at the ESPY Awards. Rob dropped a People’s Elbow on Gordie. According to this site’s editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons, he then led a moment of group urination — “crossies” — in a men’s room stall, sprinted up a down escalator, and went wild with excitement when told he was, indeed, at an establishment that tolerates shirtless partying.
The whole evening might have been a stunt. But “stunt” isn’t what you feel with Rob Gronkowski. Brian Wilson showing up to 2011’s ESPYs in a spandex bodysuit made to look like a tuxedo — that’s a stunt, as amazing as it was. With Gronkowski, those metrics of intentionality don’t mean anything. This is who he is. Another player, at this point, might inspire people to come forward with accusations of harassment. We’d hear tales of disrepute, wantonness, and profligacy. There’d be dirt. That, of course, is Gronkowski’s singular feat. He’s an ass, not an asshole; a drinker, not a drunk. He became a star last year because there’s an enticing innocence to the naked photos and horseplay and group urinating. He appears to live life like a Nickelback cover of “Call Me Maybe.”
The NFL is long on stars, ones with problems and without. But Gronkowski is the only one who seems genuinely beside himself. Success hasn’t gone to his head. It’s gone to his arms and his pecs and his calves and his Twitter account. It’s gone to his party budget. He set NFL tight end records last year for receiving touchdowns, touchdowns, and receiving yards. These are achievements people watch in awe, yes. But you also watch Gronk stalk into the end zone and spike the football with hilarious too-muchness, and think about the way, in a teen comedy, the quarterback’s friend would hurl a keg or destroy a kitchen.
Isn’t that also part of what’s to be loved about Gronkowski? In the NFL, he’s singular. In culture, he’s a type. We call him “Gronk,” the way we call Seann William Scott “Stifler” or the WWE’s Mike Mizanin “The Miz.” He should seem scarier, rapey-er, frattier, loonier, cartoonier than he does. He’s like some of his forebears — Brian Bosworth and Jeremy Shockey, for instance — but minus the polarizing cockiness and behavioral extremity. It’s just hard to beware a guy who does a human wheelbarrow in a suit on his way into an awards show. You don’t see menace in those eyes. You see “TGIF.” You see the dude who brought Spuds MacKenzie to the party boat.
Despite his size, Gronkowski presents no threat. When he poses for the cover of ESPN The Magazine‘s body issue wearing a pair of enormous foam fists, it’s entirely possible to see the fists and never once think about any other anatomical correlation between the size of a man’s hands and the size of what’s in his jock strap. It would be entirely impossible to see, say, Vernon Davis, a tight end for the 49ers, and do the same. That owes more to how we perceive a strapping naked white guy versus how we perceive a strapping naked black one. But with Gronkowski, some of the reason for his fame is that he’s unloaded. There’s no baggage. He’s just a guy, one with freakish athleticism, sure. But off the field, the freak could also be in your pledge class. A lot of elite stars in the NFL are men you aspire to be (Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, to name two). Others are men you already are. For young guys and guys who remember being young, Gronkowski is one of the latter. He’s actually the ultimate example of those men.
He doesn’t seem vain or overly concerned with his appearance. He’s not insanely muscled or “manscaped.” At some point last year, he played in a Mohawk that looked cut by a Weed Whacker. I’ve never seen him in clothes that suggest a style greater than “I hear these make me look civilized.” He doesn’t have an image to promote or protect. He seems free.
For now. During the summer, the Boston Globe reported that the Patriots management rebuked Gronkowski. It seems they want the carousing and nudity and fun to end. It’s unsurprising. Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick run the sort of tight ship for which someone whose nationally known nickname sounds like an energy drink, a death metal sub-sub-genre, and an urban dance craze (“Kids. They’re Gronking!”) can, himself, seem mutinous. Was Gronkowski’s jock-jam summer a distraction or the sort of positive exclamation of individualism a place like New England needs? I don’t know that regulation is called for, even if it will further enhance his play, if he’ll abide it. The season is young, so we’ll see. But Gronkowski strikes me as the sort of caged bird that won’t sing.
Before the front-office wrist slap, Gronkowski could be the kind of star he is because his personality doesn’t appear to cost him anything. Men like Tim Tebow or Sanchez or Michael Vick don’t have the luxury of being as naturally “wow” as Gronkowski is. Their attempts at being carefree would smack of being careless. Gronkowski isn’t carrying a franchise or a region on his shoulders. He isn’t bearing the burdensome self-consciousness of blackness. If nothing else, his behavior is an exclamatory rejection of heaviness and expectation, of those stupid, oppressive, and undying social institutions that he had nothing to do with creating or fostering and doesn’t want to uphold. He signifies certain privileges of whiteness — casual public nudity, being nationally celebrated for acting like a fool — without embracing them. Really, his race is just fun.D.C. United’s Steve Birnbaum suffered his second concussion of the season Saturday. (File photo by Courtney Pedroza/Star Tribune via AP)
With D.C. United‘s match almost over and the ball at the other end of the field, captain Steve Birnbaum rested on one knee and signaled to the bench. For the second time in the late stages of Saturday’s game in the Denver suburbs, the fundamental task of heading a soccer ball had left him dizzy.
Medical staff came to his aid and escorted him off the field with what was later diagnosed as his second concussion of the season.
Birnbaum became the third United starter in the past four weeks to suffer a head injury and the latest in a long list of D.C. players over more than a dozen years to miss time — or contemplate retirement — with a head injury.
The central defender will sit out Wednesday’s match against Atlanta United at RFK Stadium and won’t return to active duty until he passes league-mandated concussion protocol. Forward Deshorn Brown this week was cleared to resume normal activities after missing one game, but midfielder Patrick Nyarko is sidelined indefinitely with issues resulting from his seventh concussion since 2008.
For the time being, Birnbaum is limited to light conditioning and running.
“The symptoms went away afterward,” he said Tuesday. “I felt fine the day after and I feel fine today. I’ve been normal since maybe an hour after the game ended.”
That said, he is following the team’s recovery regimen and isn’t sure when he will return to active duty — perhaps this weekend against New England but more likely after United’s two-week break.
Given its history and the heightened awareness of head injuries, the club isn’t taking any chances.
“When we talk about the head, we are extra precautious whenever the ‘concussion’ word is mentioned with any injury,” Coach Ben Olsen said. “When we’re dealing with this stuff, we’re being as smart as possible.”
Neither MLS nor the players’ union compiles data on specific injuries, such as concussions, but it’s hard to imagine any team with a darker history. Concussions contributed to the premature retirements of former United players Alecko Eskandarian, Josh Gros, Bryan Namoff, Devon McTavish and, in each of the past two offseasons, Davy Arnaud and Chris Rolfe respectively.
“Unfortunately, we have too much experience, but I’m very confident in our staff and doctors that we’re doing the right things and making sure we’re putting best interests first,” Olsen said. “That means, at times, they are out a little longer than they could be.”
United’s head injuries have occurred in a wide variety of ways: in practices and games, while heading the ball, |
.
Men's basketball [ edit ]
UConn men's basketball was once a regional power, winning 18 Yankee Conference championships between 1947 and 1975, including 12 by Hugh Greer. In 1979, UConn was one of the seven founding schools of the American Athletic Conference (then known as the Big East Conference), which was originally created to focus on basketball, and the last remaining school that signed the charter to remain following the 2013 split. In the early days of the Big East, UConn struggled behind national powers Georgetown and Syracuse. Prior to the 1986–87 season UConn hired Jim Calhoun to be the program's new head coach, but the Huskies difficulties continued and they finished the season with a record of 9–19, their fifth straight losing season. But in 1988, the team showed significant improvement and gained a berth in the NIT. UConn went on a run in the tournament and defeated Ohio State, 72–67, at Madison Square Garden to win the NIT, the school's first national basketball title.
The 1990 "Dream Season" would bring UConn basketball to the national stage. Led by Chris Smith, Nadav Henefeld and Tate George, UConn went from unranked in the preseason to winning the Big East regular season and tournament championships, both for the first time. 1990 also marked the opening of Gampel Pavilion, the program's new on-campus home. In the NCAA Tournament the Huskies garnered a No. 1 seed in the East Region, but trailed Clemson, 70–69, with 1 second remaining in the Sweet 16. Scott Burrell's full-court pass found Tate George on the far baseline. George spun, fired, and hit a buzzer-beater that is known in Connecticut simply as "The Shot". They would be eliminated on a buzzer-beater 2 days later by Duke, losing in overtime, 79–78.
UConn rose as a national program throughout the 1990s, winning five more Big East Regular Season and three more Big East Tournament Championships, but the Final Four still eluded Calhoun and the program until the 1999 NCAA Tournament. The Huskies were the top seed in the West region and a win over Gonzaga in the regional finals sent UConn to Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay for the Final Four. They defeated Ohio State, 64–58, in the semi-final to face off against Duke in the final. Despite having been ranked No. 1 for half of the year, the Huskies entered the national championship game as 9-point underdogs. The game was tight throughout, and when the final buzzer sounded, UConn had defeated Duke, 77–74.
The 1999 national championship would not be the last. In 2004, the Huskies returned to the Final Four in San Antonio, Texas. Once again, they faced Duke, this time in the National Semifinal, and used a late run to beat the Blue Devils, 79–78. Two nights later, led by Ben Gordon and Emeka Okafor, UConn beat Georgia Tech, 82–73, to win the championship.
In the 2009 NCAA Tournament, UConn was awarded the No. 1 seed in the West. Led by AJ Price, Hasheem Thabeet and Jeff Adrien, the Huskies reached the Final Four by defeating No. 16 seed Chattanooga in the 1st round, No. 9 seed Texas A&M in the 2nd round, No. 5 seed Purdue in the Sweet 16 and No. 3 seed Missouri in the Elite Eight. This marked the third time in the program's history to reach the Final Four. In the two other occurrences, UConn also came out of the West region and won the national championship on both occasions.
Connecticut returned to the NCAA tournament in 2011 after an off year. Under the leadership of Kemba Walker Uconn won five consecutive games in five nights to earn the Big East Tournament championship in New York City. They headed to the NCAA as a No. 3 seed, and completed one of the most improbable runs to the Championship game defeating Butler to earn their third National championship in a 53–41 defensive affair in Houston, Texas.
In 2014 led by American Athletic Conference Player of the Year Shabazz Napier, UConn become the first #7 seed to win the NCAA Championship, getting past No. 1 seed Florida, No. 2 seed Villanova, No. 3 seed Iowa State, and No. 4 seed Michigan State, before defeating the Kentucky Wildcats, 60–54, in the championship game in Arlington, Texas.
Women's basketball [ edit ]
2010 NCAA National Champions Connecticut Huskies at the White House
Strong alumni, student, and fan support for UConn's men's basketball teams helped the Huskies' women's basketball program attract Geno Auriemma as head coach. Under the tutelage of Auriemma, UConn has become one of the few schools that consistently competes for the national title in women's basketball.
The Huskies were also part of one of the fiercest rivalries in all of women's college sports. In the rivalry between UConn and the University of Tennessee, there was no love lost between Auriemma and deceased Tennessee coach Pat Summitt. The two schools have faced each other seven times in the NCAA Tournament, and four times in the NCAA Championship Game. UConn leads 5–2 in those games including a 4–0 record in the finals. UConn leads the all-time series 13–8. Summitt ended the regular season series in the summer of 2007. It is unknown why the series was ended, but media outlets reported that Tennessee reported to the NCAA that UConn committed minor recruiting infractions with the recruitment of Maya Moore which included a tour of ESPN while Moore was a junior in high school.
Rebecca Lobo, Jennifer Rizzotti, Svetlana Abrosimova, Shea Ralph, Nykesha Sales, Kelly Schumacher, Swin Cash, Kara Wolters, Tamika Williams, Diana Taurasi, Asjha Jones, Sue Bird, Ann Strother, Barbara Turner, Jessica Moore, Ashley Battle, Ketia Swanier, Charde Houston, Tina Charles, Kalana Greene, Renee Montgomery, Maya Moore, Bria Hartley, and Stefanie Dolson are among the women's professional basketball players or WNBA draftees who attended UConn.
In 2002, UConn became the only school ever to have four women drafted among the top 10 of the first round of the 2002 WNBA Draft, with National Player of the Year Sue Bird drafted 1st, Swin Cash drafted 2nd, Asjha Jones drafted 4th, and Tamika Williams Raymond drafted 6th. The 5th starter on the UConn 2002 NCAA championship team was future No. 1 WNBA draft choice and future two-time National Player of the Year Diana Taurasi. A total of 11 UConn alumnae play in the WNBA in the 2010 season.
In 2004, UConn became the second school ever, and the first in Division I, to win the men's NCAA National Championship and the women's basketball title in the same season and did it again in 2014. It was also the first school to ever have both teams ranked number 1 in the nation at the same time (during the 1994–95 season), and has also spent the most weeks by far with both teams holding the number one spot, with Duke being the only other team ever to achieve the feat, for a short period during the 2003–04 season.
In 2006, UConn became the third school ever to have four players drafted in Round One of the NBA Draft, and the first school ever to have five players selected in the two-round draft. In the first round, Rudy Gay, Hilton Armstrong, Marcus Williams and Josh Boone were selected. In the second round, Denham Brown was selected. It should also be noted that Rashad Anderson also entered the NBA draft and has played for several European, Middle Eastern and NBA-D League teams since then.
In 2008, freshman Maya Moore made history by being named Big East Player of the Year, the first time a freshman was so honored in either men's or women's basketball. She was named Big East Player of the Year again in 2009.[citation needed]
UConn women entered the 2008–09 season ranked No. 1 in all national polls. They finished the season ranked as No. 1 as well, winning the national championship, finishing the season with a perfect 39–0 record, while winning every game by 10 points or more. At the end of the year, Maya Moore swept the National Player of the Year honors, receiving the Wooden, Wade and Naismith Awards, and she, Renee Montgomery and Tina Charles were named to various All-America teams. Coach Geno Auriemma received his record sixth recognition as the National Coach of the Year.
UConn women entered the 2009–10 season ranked No. 1 in all the national polls, and remained ranked No. 1 every week for the entire season. They finished the season as the first back-to-back undefeated National Champions, beating No. 2 Stanford at the San Antonio Alamodome. UConn also set the national consecutive victory record at 78 when it won its seventh National Championship at the Alamodome.[12]
UConn women entered the 2010–11 season ranked No. 1 in all the national polls. On December 19, 2010, the UConn Huskies beat No. 10 ranked Ohio State at Madison Square Garden's annual Maggie Dixon Classic to tie the NCAA consecutive win streak to 88 games, and on December 21, 2010 they beat No. 20 ranked Florida State at the XL Center in Hartford to set a new NCAA consecutive win record at 89 games, the streak ended at 90 on December 30, 2010 with a 71–59 loss at Stanford.
UConn is not only a pipeline to both the NBA and the WNBA, but to coaching ranks throughout the sport of basketball. UConn alumnae in the coaching ranks include head coaches Jennifer Rizzotti at the University of Hartford, Jamelle Elliott at the University of Cincinnati, Tonya Cardoza at Temple University, and Carla Berube at Tufts University and assistant coaches Shea Ralph at UConn, Stacy Hansmeyer at the University of Oklahoma, Morgan Valley at the University of Washington and Willnett Crockett at Temple University. Mel Thomas is the Director of Basketball Operations at Florida Gulf Coast University. Tamika Williams is head coach of India's national women's team,[13] and a former assistant coach at The Ohio State University and the University of Kansas.
Six American female basketball players have attained the Triple Crown "plus one" — an NCAA national title, a WNBA title, a World Championship, and an Olympic gold medal. Of those six, four are UConn alumnae: Sue Bird, Swin Cash, Kara Wolters and Diana Taurasi.[citation needed]
UConn football started in 1896. The program's progression lead to an undefeated season in 1924. Four players who attended UConn that year went on to play in the NFL, with one winning a world title with the Providence Steam Roller in 1928. Two played for the Hartford Blues alongside the Four Horsemen, former members of 1924 national champions, the University of Notre Dame.
UConn football finally reached Division 1-A status in 2000, was included in official Division 1-A statistics for the first time in 2002, and became a full Big East member in 2004. UConn has been recognized as having the fastest progression out of I-AA in NCAA history, as it was invited into a BCS conference only two years after becoming a full I-A member, was bowl-eligible in its first season in I-A, and was invited to a bowl game in its first season as a conference member. The Huskies defeated the University of Toledo in the 2004 Motor City Bowl by a score of 39–10, with quarterback Dan Orlovsky being named Most Valuable Player. In 2003, the team was also honored for being one of only 7 schools in the U.S. to graduate 80% or better of its members; it was the only public school on the list. In 2007, the Huskies had their best year as they went 9–3, finished 7–0 at home and earned a berth in the 2007 Meineke Car Care Bowl, where they were defeated by Wake Forest, 24–10. In 2008, the Huskies finished 7–5 and defeated Buffalo in the 2009 International Bowl in Toronto.
During the 2009–2010 football season, cornerback Jasper Howard was stabbed to death on campus after celebrating the win early that day against the Louisville Cardinals. UConn honored Jasper for the remainder of 2009 and 2010, which would have been his Senior year. The Huskies would defeat SEC opponent South Carolina in the 2010 PapaJohns.com Bowl. The next year, Connecticut made its first major bowl by winning the Big East Conference and going to the 2011 Fiesta Bowl.
Men's cross country/track and field [ edit ]
Head Coach: Greg Roy American Athletic Conference Indoor Track and Field Championships: (1) 2014 American Athletic Conference Outdoor Track and Field Championships: (1) 2015 Penn Relays Championship of America Titles: (1) 2000 Big East Indoor Track and Field Championships: (9) 1987, 1997, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013 Big East Outdoor Track and Field Championships: (4) 1982, 2002, 2011, 2013 Big East Relay Championships: 2 All-Americans: 32
Women's cross country/track and field [ edit ]
Head Coach: JJ Clark Olympians: 1 (in women's bobsled) Big East Indoor Track and Field Championships: (2) 2008, 2009 Big East Outdoor Track and Field Championships: (1) 1995 NCAA All-Americans: 9
Field hockey [ edit ]
Playing facility: George J. Sherman Sports Complex Head Coach: Nancy Stevens Most victories: 23 in 1999, 23 in 2017. NCAA Tournament appearances: 26 NCAA National Championships: (5) 1981, 1985, 2013, 2014, 2017 NCAA Runner-Up: (2) 1982, 1983 Final Fours: (15) 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1998, 1999, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 Big East Regular Season Championships: (15) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Big East Tournament Championships: (15) 1992, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 All-Americans: 46 Olympians: 2
Men's golf [ edit ]
Head Coach: Dave Pezzino NCAA appearances: (1) 1980 Big East Championships: (1) 1994
Men's ice hockey [ edit ]
On June 21, 2012 Connecticut announced the program would join Hockey East as the conference's 12th member beginning in the 2014-15 season. As part of the move from Atlantic Hockey to Hockey East, the university added 18 scholarships for the men's ice hockey team and additional scholarships to existing women's sports programs to meet Title IX gender equity requirements. The university was also investigating options to build a new, larger ice arena on-campus as its then-current venue, the Freitas Ice Forum, has a seating capacity of only 2,000 and was too small for the jump up to Hockey East. Since then, UConn has used the XL Center, a former NHL venue in downtown Hartford, as its primary men's home. While the arena has a hockey capacity of 15,635, UConn has capped ticket sales at 8,089. Select home games have also been played at the Webster Bank Arena in Bridgeport. The Freitas Ice Forum now hosts games only for the women's hockey team.
Women's ice hockey [ edit ]
Playing facility: Mark Edward Freitas Ice Forum Head Coach: Christopher MacKenzie Most wins: 22 in 2007–08
Women's lacrosse [ edit ]
Playing facility: Sherman Sports Complex Head Coach: Katie Woods Most wins: 13 in 2013 NCAA Tournament appearances: (1) 2013 ECAC Championships: (1) 2006 All-Americans: 2
Women's rowing [ edit ]
Home surface: Coventry Lake Head Coach: Jennifer Sanford
Men's soccer [ edit ]
In addition to its basketball success, UConn is known for its championship soccer teams. The men's team has won two NCAA national championships, in 1981 and 2000, and the National Soccer Coaches Association of America named the undefeated 1948 team the national champion. The 2000 team was known for its stellar depth on the bench including the likes of Garrett Grinsfelder, Michael Rueda, and Ryan Brown, who exuded the team's "never say die" attitude. The men's team won back to back Big East championships in (2004 and 2005). As of 2011 UConn led the nation in total attendance in eight of the preceding 12 seasons. No program can match it for having drawn better on-campus support for more than 30 years.[14] In the early 1980s, before the NCAA kept soccer attendance records and before Morrone Stadium was downsized, the Huskies drew huge crowds. Total attendance in 1983 was 64,535—a record that held until 2010. Major League Soccer players Maurizio Rocha, Chris Gbandi, Damani Ralph, Bobby Rhine, Julius James, Shavar Thomas, O'Brian White, Kwame Watson-Siriboe, Toni Ståhl, Cyle Larin, and Chukwudi Chijindu each attended UConn.
Women's soccer [ edit ]
Playing facility: Morrone Stadium Head Coach: Len Tsantiris Most victories: 23 in 1997 NCAA Tournament appearances: 28 Last NCAA appearance: 2010 NCAA Championship Game appearances: (4) 1984, 1990, 1997, 2003 College Cups: (7) 1982, 1983, 1984, 1990, 1994, 1997, 2003 All-Americans: 26 Players Awarded 44 Times Big East Regular Season Championships: (8) 1995,1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 Big East Tournament Championships: (2) 2002, 2004 All-Big East Selections: 81
Softball [ edit ]
Playing facility: Connecticut Softball Stadium Head Coach: Jennifer McIntyre Most victories: 45 in 1993 Women's College World Series appearances: (1) 1993 Big East Regular Season Championships: (6) 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 Big East Tournament Championships: (7) 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2001 All-Americans: 47
Men's and women's swimming & diving [ edit ]
Playing facility: Wolf-Zackin Natatorium Head Coaches: Swimming – Chris Maiello[15] | Diving – John Bransfield Big East Champions: 5 Olympians: 1
Men's tennis [ edit ]
Playing facility: UConn Tennis Courts Head Coach: Glenn Marshall Most victories: 20 in 2000
Women's tennis [ edit ]
Playing facility: UConn Tennis Courts Head Coach: Glenn Marshall Most victories: 14 in 2002
Women's volleyball [ edit ]
Playing facility: Gampel Pavilion Head Coach: Kristopher Grunwald Most victories: 35 in 1979 Big East Regular Season Championships: 2 1994 & 1998
Championships [ edit ]
NCAA team championships [ edit ]
Connecticut has won 22 NCAA team national championships.[16]
Other national team championships [ edit ]
Below is one national team title that was not bestowed by the NCAA:
Men's Soccer (1948)
Facilities [ edit ]
Gampel Pavilion: A prospective student tour group is shown the women's basketball championship banners.
The most notable athletic facilities are:
Harry A. Gampel Pavilion on the Storrs campus, the regular home for both men's and women's basketball
XL Center in Hartford, the second home for both basketball teams and the primary venue of the men's hockey team
Rentschler Field in East Hartford, home to the football team
Joseph J. Morrone Stadium on the Storrs campus, the regular home for both men's and women's soccer and lacrosse.
Burton Family Football Complex on the Storrs campus, serves as the on-campus home of UConn football and complements Rentschler Field in East Hartford; opened in 2006 [17]
Mark R. Shenkman Training Center on the Storrs campus, adjacent to the Burton Family Football Complex, "an 85,000-square-foot (7,900 m2) training complex, featuring a 120-yard long state-of-the-art FieldTurf playing surface, an 18,000-square-foot (1,700 m2) strength and conditioning area, and state-of-the-art video capabilities, the indoor training center provides UConn's football team with the most technologically advanced training equipment";[17] also serves as a home to UConn club and intramural sports
Pageantry [ edit ]Loide Jason Windhoek-The Elephant Tusk Bwabwata Joint Operation members arrested three suspects – two Angolans and one Namibian – after they were found selling 13 elephant tusks at Bwabwata in Kavango East Region. The incident happened on Tuesday at about 23h45 at Tjova village, Mukwe district, about 55 kilometres from Divundu heading west. Deputy Commissioner William Peter, who is second in command of the Elephant Tusk Bwabwata Joint Operation, said the suspects crossed from Angola but it was unclear if the origin of the seized elephant tusks is Angola or Namibia. The Elephant Tusk Bwabwata Joint Operation was established between 2012 and 2013, mainly targeting elephant poachers. Bwabwata is a national park. Currently the task force is headed by the Zambezi Regional Police Commander, Commissioner Boniface Mukendwa. The three suspects are being detained at Divundu Police Station and have been charged with contravention of the Nature Conservation Act 9/2008 and Ordinance 4 of 1975, as well as contravention of the Immigration Control Act as they entered Namibia without valid documents. The police managed to arrest three suspects, while two others bolted from the scene. “The two managed to run away during the time of the arrests and the police are kindly requesting information from the community that may lead to their arrest,” said the deputy commissioner, adding that it is not yet known what nationality they are. Deputy Commissioner Peter said the gang were caught after they tried to sell the tusks. “The community tipped off members of the operation, which is why we managed to succeed in arresting those criminals. “We are now requesting the public to come forward with information that would lead to the arrests of the two criminals that are on the run,” said the deputy commissioner. The names of the three men could not be released pending their appearance in the Rundu Magistrate’s Court today or tomorrow. “We are further calling on our fellow community members to provide more information about illegal hunting,” said Peter. “Further, we also call on anyone with information about people who are still in unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, who do not want to voluntarily surrender them to the police, to report them.” It is suspected that illegal firearms are being used for illegal hunting. Contacted for comment the public relations officer in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Romeo Muyunda, confirmed the incident, saying 13 elephant tusks have been seized in Kavango East. He also revealed that last year alone 101 elephants were poached illegally countrywide and this year there was already a single incident of elephant poaching, bringing the figure to 102 from 2016 to date. Last year 63 rhinos were poached countrywide and this year at least one was butchered at a game farm near Otjiwarongo.2017-01-26 13:12:38 2 years agoHuma Abedin spoke about meeting Hillary Clinton for the first time in a new interview, where she also revealed her fears over the State Department's release of the Democratic front-runner's emails from her time as Secretary of State.
'You know these things that happen in your life that just stick? She walked by and she shook my hand and our eyes connected and I just remember having this moment where I thought; "Wow, this is amazing,"' said Abedin.
'And it just inspired me. You know, I still remember the look on her face. And it’s funny, and she would probably be so annoyed that I say this, but I remember thinking; "Oh my God, she’s so beautiful and she’s so little!"'
Clinton's top aide said on the Call Your Girlfriend podcast that she had met Clinton once before this, but just as she took a group photo with the new White House interns.
Scroll down for video
Top aide: Huma Abedin (above in October) spoke about her boss Hillary Clinton and the moment the two first met in a recent interview
Private communications: The top Clinton aide (above in 2010) also revealed that she is terrified about her boss' emails which are being released by the State Department
Abedin also said she was terrified about the release of her boss' emails, especially since she is on many of the exchanges that have now been made public.
'It’s something I can’t really think about, but I can’t even imagine what’s in those emails,' said Abedin.
It’s something I can’t really think about, but I can’t even imagine what’s in those emails. I would probably be mortified. I have no idea. I haven’t read any of them. -Abedin on the Clinton emails released by the State Department
'I would probably be mortified. I have no idea. I haven’t read any of them.'
She then added; 'I have a policy. I never read anything about myself. I could count on one hand how many actual interviews I've done. I'll never read them. I just don't want to know.
'If it's about me personally, I honestly just ignore it.'
One of those exchanges between the two was about Clinton's inability to get a fax machine to work, and Abedin's repeated attempts to get her to hang up a phone so they could reestablish a connection to send her a document.
When asked about those emails, Abedin said; 'I think what you read in the email is a little bit of frustration that it wasn’t working and my frustration that she couldn’t figure it out, or whatever it was, but the backstory here is that we very often... it wasn’t unusual that when secure faxes were coming through that we had some challenges with them coming through.'
The FBI continues to investigate the emails Clinton received on a private email server and address, while tens of thousands of her exchanges have been released so far by the State Department.
Abedin then took some time to gush about Clinton and how she will be remembered in the future.
'I think that if my boss quit tomorrow, she will go down as one of the greatest American women in the history of the world,' said Abedin.
I think that if my boss quit tomorrow, she will go down as one of the greatest American women in the history of the world. -Abedin speaking about Clinton's legacy
“We’re in the midst of campaigning in New York right now, and we’ve been looking through her record and the things that she did in the Senate and everyone she helped from 9/11 and beyond.
'I know she’s committed to making people’s lives better. I wish the world could see the Hillary Clinton that I see every day because it’s... because she has done great things for this country and I’m really confident that she can do great things for - on behalf of this country when she’s our president and I’m really looking forward to it.'
She was then asked about Clinton's very vocal support of reproductive rights during this primary.
'Well I think that, you know, it’s something that she’s spoken out about a lot in this campaign and I think particularly since the other side, you know, our friends on the Republican side have suggested some pretty scary policies and especially when we have to deal with the issues of Planned Parenthoods potentially being closed down and what the Republicans did in Congress,' said Abedin.
'I mean this notion that all women should feel like they’re able to make their own decisions, not have politicians tell them what to do or how to do it but be able to give all women access to affordable, good-quality healthcare. And that’s including your reproductive health which is why I think the threat of the Planned Parenthood shutdowns were so – you know, were so scary.'
Abedin then got very personal, revealing; 'And so, you know, I even remember recently I had a little bit of a scare myself and I thought all right, I want to check myself out.
'And I’m fine. And any woman in this country should be able to go in whether it’s a cancer screening or whatever it is and say – feel like they can go and find that out and not have to worry about the cost or can I get access or how that is.
'And so that’s one of the things that I know she will continue to fight for and continue to speak out about.
Fangirl: Abedin (above in 2008) also said of Clinton; 'I think that if my boss quit tomorrow, she will go down as one of the greatest American women in the history of the world'
Abedin was asked at one point what Bill Clinton's role would be in the White House if his wife was elected president.
'I feel... just that question makes me nervous,' said Abedin, acknowledging that Clinton is still battling Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.
I think what Senator McCain did shows what’s great about our country which is you have people who stand up and say what they believe even if it’s not the most politically sort of popular thing to do. -Abedin speaking about Senator McCain defending her on the Senate floor in 2012 over claims she had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood
'But I think it’s fair to say that as one of the most successful Democratic presidents in the history of this country that there is nothing President Clinton can’t do. He’s one of my great inspirations for getting into public service.'
She later added; 'And so I don’t think there’s anything in the world that he can’t do.'
Abedin then joked; 'I have a feeling, though, that he will not be picking the china out and he will not be picking out the flowers for any of the events.'
It was not just her boss that Abedin praised either, also taking some time to acknowledge how grateful she was when Senator John McCain defended her on the Senate floor when Republicans in Congress began to claim she had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood during Clinton's time as Secretary of State.
'You know, I couldn’t even wrap my head around the charges. And I think what Senator McCain did, and for which I will forever be grateful, and I have to say that I felt exactly the same way about our president, President Obama, who then there was an aid reception at the White House, and he also stood up for the Muslim-Americans, including myself, who had been sort of labeled in a way that was so upsetting,' said Abedin.
'And I think what Senator McCain did shows what’s great about our country which is you have people who stand up and say what they believe even if it’s not the most politically sort of popular thing to do.'
She said she was particularly grateful at that time because people began to attack her family, who had not chosen a life in the public eye.
'But I’m hoping that that’s part of the past, you know?' said Abedin.
'And me and other Muslim- Americans don’t have to move forward in this country having to worry about things like that which again is something that really motivates me to work for this particular Democrat because I think the dialogue on the other side has become increasingly scary.'
Controversy: Abedin's husband Anthony Weiner (pair above in July 2013) was involved in two sexting scandals in the span of two years
Abedin first began working for Clinton while she was still in college at George Washington University, being assigned to the then first lady after getting a White House internship.
She then began to work with Clinton's personal aide and took over the position when Clinton began her successful 2000 run for the US Senate in the state of New York.
I don’t think I could do this if I didn’t have the support of a spouse who is willing to basically be a stay-at- home dad. -Abedin speaking about her relationship with husband Anthony Weiner
Abedin was just 24 years old at the time, and has been in that same position ever since, now also serving as Clinton's vice chairwoman in her current campaign for president.
She married New York Congressman Anthony Weiner in July 2010 in a ceremony that was officiated by Bill Clinton and covered in the pages of Vogue, getting pregnant with the couple's first child just a few months later.
The couple was not even a year into their marriage when news broke that Weiner had been sexting women online after he tweeted out a photo of his erect penis that he had meant to privately send a woman on the social media site.
He resigned from Congress soon after, and in December Abedin gave birth to a son, Jordan Zain Weiner.
In 2013, Weiner decided to run for mayor of New York City and also agreed to be filmed for a documentary about his return to politics.
He announced he would run in late May, but just two months later came allegations that he had continued to sext in the years after he resigned from Congress using the name Carlos Danger.
A 22-year-old named Sydney Leathers said she had been sharing messages and explicit photos with Weiner as recently as April of that year, giving interviews to multiple news outlets and even showing up at the event he hosted after losing in the mayoral primary that September.
Weiner, 51, has held various jobs since, and in 2015 appeared in the television movie Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!.
Family: Abedin and Weiner have a son Jordan, 4, who Weiner cares for while Abedin is on the road with Clinton (family above in April 2015)
Abedin spoke about their relationship during the interview, saying; 'You know, I think that a marriage really only works in any situation, whether you’re in politics or not, if one partner is fully supportive of the other.
'I think it’s a little – it’s often a little more challenging when you’re in politics because your private life, and I think everybody craves their own privacy, and so I think your private life is displayed to the world in a way that you otherwise wouldn’t have to deal with if one spouse is a private person and the other person’s in politics as was the case certainly in my marriage.
'But I think it works if you fully support each other.'
She then noted that her husband has taken over much of the parenting of their son as she is away from home.
'I’m on the road a lot on the campaign. As I mentioned earlier I have a four-year- old son and I don’t think I could do this if I didn’t have the support of a spouse who is willing to basically be a stay-at- home dad as much as he possibly can so I’m able to be on the road,' said Abedin.
'I miss my son but I don’t worry about him because I know between this little village we’ve created between Anthony and my in-laws and my mom and our families and this wonderful woman who we have helping us I can go out and be the best professional woman that I can be because I have that support.'
She is not however planning on a run for office, saying; 'I feel like I’ve worked for a politician for a very long time. I’ve been married to a politician. I see what they go through. I’m not quite sure that I could... I’m not quite sure that I could do that. But I have a lot of respect, a lot of respect for people who run for elected office.'
At the end of the interview Abedin also said that one of her favorite shows on television is the HBO comedy Veep, noting that it is an incredibly accurate depiction of politics in America.
'I identify with the whole show because I think to me it’s the closest thing to what Washington is and it’s just sort of all the things that people don’t want to say they say on that show and it’s done in such a funny way,' said Abedin.
In that same segment of the interview she was also asked what a podcast hosted by herself and Clinton would focus on.
Abedin said it would likely be about their love of food, or possibly shoes.After Congress failed to reach a spending agreement Monday night, the United States government is now partially shut down -- meaning about 800,000 federal workers will go without pay and non-essential federal programs like national parks and museums will be shuttered.
The American public has taken to social media to vent their outrage, tagging tweets #DearCongress to give politicians an earful:
#DearCongress i am embarrassed to be an American today. Putting people's lively hoods ahead of your egos is disgusting. Don't u get it yet. — megkeosut (@megkeosut) October 1, 2013
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something called exotic matter. scanner technology used to locate exotic matter somehow fell into the public's hands so they said it was a game, he posited. Greanias described exotic matter as 'ordered data' which cannot be seen and surrounds the world's oldest monuments and capital cities. 'Shapers' on the other side of some transdimensional portal may have been sending these signals here, he explained. "The data is ordered, it has come from somewhere else, it is influencing us, and probably has for millennia, and we really better get to know what this is all about," he warned.
The final hour featured a replay of Open Lines from 8/17/12.
News segment guests: Larry Arnold / Mish Shedlock / Catherine Austin FittsCongolese defender Christopher Samba faces a possible ban for his response to racist abuse in the Russian league.
The former Queens Park Rangers and Blackburn player was subjected to racist abuse by fans of Torpedo Moscow while playing for Dynamo Moscow on Sunday.
Samba was substituted at halftime in apparent distress at the abuse, but faces a Russian Football Union charge he displayed an "unpleasant gesture" to Torpedo fans. The RFU did not elaborate.
Ivorian defender Dacosta Goore was banned for two games in Russia for a similar offence last year after showing his middle finger to fans following racist abuse.
RFU disciplinary committee chairman Artur Grigoryants told the R-Sport agency that the case will be heard on Saturday.
Torpedo was punished for the racist abuse on Thursday when the RFU ordered the closure of one stand for its next game at Saturn Stadium near Moscow.
Samba was racially abused in 2012 while playing for Anzhi Makhachkala, when a banana was thrown at him at Lokomotiv Moscow's stadium. On that occasion, Samba threw the banana back into the stand and did not face any punishment.
On Tuesday, CSKA Moscow must host Bayern Munich in an empty stadium in the Champions League as UEFA punishment for another case of racist behavior.
The Russian champion also faces UEFA charges over racist behavior and crowd disorder at a Champions League game against Roma this month. Those charges will be heard on Oct. 3.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Virginia’s radically anti-gun Governor and Attorney General were probably quite pleased with themselves when they spitefully severed concealed carry agreements with 25 states, including all but one of its neighbors.
They probably didn’t anticipate the backlash they’ve received, which includes calls to recall or impeach Attorney General Mark Herring, and pushes for legislation that will both strip elected officials of the ability to make such unilateral decisions, and get a little payback.
Herring’s announcement came three weeks before the start of the General Assembly session, which is controlled by Republicans. In November, a bill was filed that would require Virginia to recognize permits from other states. If approved, it would reverse Herring’s ruling. Carrico said he’ll address the issue come January. “A lot of the governor’s power is deferred to the General Assembly at that point and I’ll be getting with my collegues to circumvent everything this governor has done on this point,” he said. “I have a budget amendment that I’m looking at to take away his executive protection unit. If he’s so afraid of guns, then I’m not going to surround him with armed state policemen.”
It’s not lost on anyone that the biggest supporters of gun control are those who have other people with guns employed to protect them. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the man personally bankrolling an otherwise dying gun control movement in the United States, is constantly surrounded by armed bodyguards (mostly poached from the NYPD, as I understand it), and I know for a fact that Moms Demand propagandist Shannon Watts has armed bodyguards, as I’ve seen them up close. Most other gun control supporters have public or private security, and a surprising number of them have concealed carry permits of their own.Find An Event Create Your Event Help Ottawa Roller Derby: Crash Course 101 Centre Multisport
Hull, QC Share this event:
Crash Course 101 is a 7-week course that teaches women and men (aged 18+) the basics of skating for roller derby.
Hosted by Ottawa Roller Derby, participants will learn basic skating techniques such as stopping, falling safely, crossovers, derby position, and footwork, as well as an introduction to the rules of roller derby.
Date: Sunday, February 24th - Sunday, April 14th
Time: 8:00am Sunday mornings
Location: 211 rue Montcalm, Hull, Quebec
Please note that all participants must BRING THE FOLLOWING gear:
- quad skates
- helmet (bicycle, skateboard, multisport, hockey, etc.)
- knee pads
- elbow pads
- wrist guards
- mouth guard recommended but not mandatory
***A limited number of rental skates are available (first-come, first-served) for an additional fee. Please contact Kelly aka Honey Bee at honeyskates@gmail.com.*** Registration Options There are no active dates for this event. Sales have ended for this event. To be placed on our waiting list, please email: ordcrashcourse101@gmail.com Not Available Location Centre Multisport (View)
211 Montcalm
Hull, QC J8Y 3B7
Canada 211 MontcalmHull, QC J8Y 3B7Canada
Categories Social > Adult Education Sports
Minimum Age: 18 Kid Friendly: No Dog Friendly: No Non-Smoking: Yes! Wheelchair Accessible: No Contact Email:
support@brownpapertickets.comIt's a rare find: an iPhone app that's both useful and hilarious. RunPee, an existing website that launched its iPhone app today, checks both those boxes.
Here's the idea: you're watching a movie in the theater and need to take a restroom break, but you don't want to miss the best part. The RunPee iPhone app has a timer letting you know when it's safe to take a break, and gives you a summary of what you missed upon your return.
It also lets you know whether you should stay till the end of the credits, since movies like Iron Man include bonus footage afterwards. You start the timer when the movie begins, and safe break-times are scheduled throughout. The app costs $0.99 [iTunes link].
In an amusing press release for the iPhone app, creator Dan Florio explains:Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Is Japan losing the taste for whale meat?
Hunting whales is irrelevant to feeding Japan's population, draws global condemnation and is certainly not economic. So why does Japan still do it?
The answer from the Japanese government is that whaling is an ancient part of Japanese culture, that fishermen have caught whales for centuries, and that Japan will never allow foreigners to tell its people what they can and cannot eat.
One Japanese official once said to me: "Japanese people never eat rabbits, but we don't tell British people that they shouldn't". I pointed out that rabbits are not exactly an endangered species.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Wada is one of five ports allowed to whale under Japan's coastal whaling program
Image copyright AFP Image caption There is a long history to anti-whaling protests
Still, there is some merit to the government's argument.
A number of coastal communities in Japan have indeed hunted whales for centuries, and continue to do so. Taiji in Wakayama prefecture is well known, many would say infamous, for its annual dolphin hunts. There are other places, in Chiba Prefecture and in Ishinomaki in northern Japan, that also do coastal whaling.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Food festivals have been organised to get the public to eat more whale - even in curry
So, yes, coastal whaling is part of Japanese culture, like Norway and Iceland and the Inuit of northern Canada. But only Japan continues to sail a fleet of ships half way across the globe to hunt whales in the Antarctic and maintains a large factory ship that can process hundreds of whales at sea.
Nothing about these Antarctic whaling expeditions is historic. Japan's first whaling voyage to the Antarctic took place in the mid-1930s but the really huge hunts didn't get going until after World War Two.
Japan lay in ruins, its population starving. With the encouragement of General Douglas MacArthur, Japan converted two huge US Navy tankers into factory ships and set sail for the Southern Ocean.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Japan still runs an approved coastal whaling programme
From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s whale meat was the single biggest source of meat in Japan. At its peak in 1964 Japan killed more than 24,000 whales in one year, most of them enormous fin whales and sperm whales.
Today Japan can afford to import meat from Australia and America. There is no deep-sea commercial whaling in Japan. The fleet that is now hunting in Antarctic waters is paid for by Japanese taxpayers to carry out what the Japanese government describes as "scientific research".
Japan's other justification is that it needs to kill hundreds of whales each year to study them. But the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has systematically dismantled that argument. In 2014 it ruled that there was no scientific case for Japan's programme of "lethal research" in the Southern Ocean, and ordered Tokyo to stop.
For a year Japan stopped. But last year it sent its fleet to sea again insisting, to widespread disbelief, that its new, smaller, Antarctic whaling programme satisfies the ICJ's requirements.
Image copyright AP Image caption Coastal whaling involves much smaller ships, and catches
Junko Sakuma used to work for Greenpeace in Japan. For the last 10 years she has been researching Japan's whaling industry.
"There is no benefit to Japan from whaling...but nobody knows how to quit," she tells me at Tokyo's famously chaotic Tsukiji fish market, the biggest in the world renowned for its pre-dawn tuna auctions.
Of the thousands of fish wholesalers in Tsukiji only two still deal in whale meat.
At one stand we find a few large hunks of minke whale meat, deep red and oozing blood. At the next there are two long slabs of lighter-coloured fin whale meat, an endangered species, its trading banned by CITES.
Business is bad, complains the stall owner. Last year Japan caught no whales in the Antarctic, so there is less minke whale meat available, he says.
If there is a whale meat shortage, the price should be soaring. But according to Junko it is not.
"The fact is, most Japanese people do not eat whale meat," she says. "Consumption has been falling for years," and adds that "even as the amount of whale meat decreases, the price doesn't go up".
According to Junko's research, the average consumption of whale meat by Japanese people in 2015 was just 30g (one ounce) per person.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Once a staple, now a novelty
Image copyright Greenpeace Image caption Iceland also whales, but sends some of the meat to Japan
If eating whale is such an integral part of Japanese culture, why are so few eating it?
I turn to my old friend Etsuo Kato. Over the 20 years we have known each other he has, on occasion, tried to persuade me to eat whale meat with him. Kato-San grew up in Kita-Kyushu in western Japan, close to the big whaling port at Shimonoseki.
We are sitting in a cosy restaurant in Tokyo's notorious red light district, Kabukicho. Above us hangs a very large, and rather ancient, mummified whale penis. On the wall are picture of whales.
The first plate to arrive is whale sashimi - it is raw. The owner points to the different delicacies; steak, heart, tongue and even raw whale skin.
My stomach turns, but I steel myself. Gingerly, I put a bit of raw whale steak into my mouth. It has a strong gamey flavour, chewy and fibrous. Next, I try the tongue. It is salty and fishy. Kato-San points to the heart. I politely decline.
"When I was a child I ate this every day," he says. "Meat meant whale meat. I didn't know what beef was, or pork. Steak was whale steak, bacon meant whale bacon."
But if Japan stopped whale hunting you would be sad?
He looks at me smiling and gently shaking his head.
"I don't need whale hunting" he says. "Once you have eaten beef there is no need to eat whale meat."
The other customers in the restaurant are all middle-aged salary men. Eating a bit of whale meat is nostalgic, remembering school meals 50 years ago.
Image copyright Gereenpeace Image caption Japan's only whaling factory ship is ageing and some analysts suggest the country may be reluctant to fund a replacement
Image copyright AFP Image caption Confrontations on the high seas are used by both sides to drum up support
So I come back again to my original question: why does Japan still do it?
Recently I was at a private briefing with a high-ranking member of the Japanese government. Japan had just announced it was going to resuming whaling. I outlined to him why I thought it made no sense, and asked him to respond. His answer was astonishingly frank.
"I agree with you," he said. "Antarctic whaling is not part of Japanese culture. It is terrible for our international image and there is no commercial demand for the meat. I think in another 10 years there will be no deep sea whaling in Japan."
"So why not stop now?" asked another journalist.
"There are some important political reasons why it is difficult to stop now." he said. He would say no more.
But Junko Sakuma thinks the answer lies in the fact that Japan's whaling is government-run, a large bureaucracy with research budgets, annual plans, promotions and pensions.
"If the number of staff in a bureaucrat's office decreases while they are in charge, they feel tremendous shame," she says.
"Which means most of the bureaucrats will fight to keep the whaling section in their ministry at all costs. And that is true with the politicians as well. If the issue is closely related to their constituency, they will promise to bring back commercial whaling. It is a way of keeping their seats."
It may seem incredibly banal. But Japan's determination to continue whaling may come down to a handful of MPs from whaling constituencies and a few hundred bureaucrats who don't want to see their budgets cut.JERSEY CITY -- The city is moving ahead with the first major redesign of its website since 2007 and officials want your input.
The redesign is in its initial stages, with CivicLive, the company hired in March to oversee the work, working with each city department and seeking feedback from the public via an online survey.
Ward E Councilwoman Candice Osborne is one of a number of city officials involved In the process, which includes workers from the mayor's office, communications and innovation teams and more.
Osborne, who has worked in the private sector for tech firms, said she is a big believer in design thinking that puts users first.
"At the core of design thinking is being right where the users are and we want to do that with Jersey City's website," she said in an email. "Understanding resident needs, frustrations and being able to delight them must be (and is) at the center of the redesign process."
CivicLive is being paid $150,00 for the first year of its five-year contract and $26,000 annually for each of the four remaining years, for a total cost of $254,000.
The company has designed websites for La Plata, Colorado; the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department; and Casper, Wyoming.
"Residents expect a website that is robust, informative, and user-friendly and where they can access a variety of city information and perform city business, like filing for permits or registering for sports," Mayor Steve Fulop said in a statement. "We agree and couldn't be more excited to move one step closer to the finish line and look forward not only to the public's feedback now, as we start the website redesign, but throughout the process."
Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.Jersey City is home to the tallest building in the state — the Goldman Sachs office at 30 Hudson Street. Soon it will welcome New Jersey’s second tallest building, and the tallest apartment complex in the state.
Ground was broken yesterday afternoon for the URL (Urban Living Ready) Harborside apartment building at Greene and Hudson streets and near the Exchange Place PATH station. It will stand 69 stories tall and contain 763 energy-efficient rental units. It is a joint project of Mack-Cali Realty Corp. and Ironstate Development.
The building will be part of Mack-Cali’s Harborside Plaza and is the first of three planned high-rise apartments that are expected to change the Jersey City waterfront skyline with their Jenga block-like appearances.
The Urban Living Ready concept was created by Ironstate President David Barry and features compact, partly furnished apartments.
About 25 percent of the apartments will be 470-square-foot or smaller studios. The one-bedroom apartments will be about 630 square feet. Roughly 120 apartments will feature two bedrooms and be approximately 870 square feet.
"Everyone is drawn to live here," Barry said in a statement, "but the costs of housing can be prohibitive. To meet modern housing challenges, we need creative and thoughtful solutions."
Rental prices were not yet available.
The atypical design is by the Dutch firm Concrete.
The developers received $33 million in tax credits from the state Economic Development Authority in October for the first tower. The project is expected to cost $291 million and employ about 700 construction workers. Construction is scheduled to be completed in about two years.
No date has been set for the other two towers, which are expected to be about the same height. When completed, they will include about 2,358 apartments with commercial space and parking.
The tallest building in New Jersey is the Goldman Sachs office tower in Jersey City at 781 feet. The Harborside building will be 713 feet, about 13 feet taller than the Revel casino and hotel in Atlantic City.
Jersey City has been experiencing a residential building boom. About 5,000 residential units are under construction and another 12,000 have approvals for this year and next.This series shows developers exactly what they need to extend Magento according to best practices. If you want your extensions to be flexible, modular and extensible. If you want to ensure your instance of Magento and all of the code contained inside is fully upgradable, then this is the place for you.
This series is not a beginner’s guide to Magento development. This article assumes you know how to develop Magento modules.
This covers the basics and best practices of module development. This guide takes you through the best practices of deciding how to extend Magento.
What coding standards should I use with Magento? Zend Standards? Other standards?
Best practices for observers and how to leverage them properly.
Need to rewrite a class? This guide shows you how to approach class rewrites in a way that creates minimal conflict with other modules.
Principles of theming are covered at a high level here.
Block classes are the “View Models” of the three-component view layer in Magento. I will show you how to approach creating your own blocks.
Layout xml can be a bit daunting in the beginning. With these tips, you will be a master in no time.
Template files represent the presentation layer of your application. Use them properly and you will have a smooth and sleek frontend.
Where should I put my files? Where is the best place to place 3rd party libraries? This guide will show you the best places.
Controllers let you create your own areas in the Magento application. Follow these steps to ensure your code is smooth and maintainable.
Using the ORM can be daunting. There is a lot of abstraction and many things have to fall into place.
Collections allow you to load multiple sets of data. Be careful, if you don’t follow best practices, you can get unexpected results and poor performance.
This guide shows you exactly what installation script are (and are not) used for.
This guide shows you how to make sense of the Magento application and how to debug common problems in the best way possible.
Make sure that after all of your hard work you don’t end up grinding your site to a screeching halt. Follow this guide for best practices of performance.Donald Trump spoke at a massive rally in Melbourne, Florida's Orlando Melbourne International Airport today, where more than 10,000 people are expected to attend. Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg said fire officials told her the count was closer to 5,200, but later reports showed the crowd was at capacity, which meant at least 7,500 were there. However, people who were at the rally said there were many, many more attendees than that. When Donald Trump tweeted after the rally was over, he said that 15,000 people were there and an additional 12,000 could not get in. Meanwhile, about 1,400 people attended a rally that Clinton held in North Carolina earlier on the same day. Trump's rally was absolutely packed, and only a small group of protesters were gathered at the corner of NASA and Airport Blvd. Trump shared his vision of America's future with passionate supporters who are ready to vote for him in November. The rally was delayed a bit because of weather while Trump was flying in, but that didn't diffuse his supporters' enthusiasm at all. Click through the gallery to see photos and stories from Trump's rally. (Getty)Facebook today released its biannual report on government data requests, indicating that total law enforcement requests are at their highest level ever at 41,214 for the first half of 2015. That's an 18 percent jump over the back half of last year, according to the social network's publicly available database that began tracking requests two years ago. The company also said it saw a 112 percent rise in content it hides due to violations of local laws. Roughly 75 percent of that restricted content is coming from users in India, where the company's Computer Emergency Response Team is said to censor social media posts critical of religion or the state.
The US is still far and away the global leader in data requests, with 17,577 total requests affecting 26,579 users. In 80 percent of those cases, Facebook handed over some type of data. That rate fluctuates by roughly 10 percentage points depending on the type of data request. Search warrants remain the leading request type with 9,737 related requests made by US law enforcement, followed by subpoenas at 5,375 requests.
US search warrants make up the majority of data requests
Facebook does not break out request types for other countries, but India, France, and Germany trail the US in total number of data requests at 5,115; 2,520; and 2,344; respectively. Facebook can decline to provide certain types of data if it's not legally mandated to do so, and less than half of all requests made by India, France, and Germany resulted in Facebook handing over any type of data to law enforcement.
Facebook also reiterated in the report that it doesn't let law enforcement peer onto its network directly, a hot-button topic ever since the PRISM scandal first broke in 2013 thanks to leaker Edward Snowden. "As we have emphasized before, Facebook does not provide any government with 'back doors' or direct access to people’s data," wrote Chris Sonderby, Facebook's deputy general counsel, in a blog post. "We scrutinize each request we receive for legal sufficiency, whether from an authority in the US, Europe, or elsewhere. If a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back hard and will fight in court, if necessary."
Facebook isn't the only company that discloses this type of information. Twitter, Google, and Amazon, as well as large telecoms and ISPs like Verizon and Comcast, all disclose government data requests. We've seen Twitter's 2015 report, but Google has yet to disclose information regarding the first half of the year.Consider this your latest reminder that lacrosse is the worst. What follows is an email exchange, forwarded to us by a tipster, that took place between an angry lacrosse coach, one of his players, and that player's parents. It begins with the player telling his coach that he won't be able to attend a practice or game. It goes downhill from there, thanks to Coach Crazypants. As you read along, keep in mind that the player is in eighth grade.
From: Ryan
To: Coach Maddux I can't make Thursday finals are starting
Sent from my iPhone
Bad move, Ryan!
From: Coach Maddux
To: Ryan I need you there. Seriously. It is about being a student-athlete. You can't miss. You need to manage time better and attend practice. Everyone of your teammates is in exams also and so i am not making an exception for only one player. It is how it will be in hs and college and you have to figure it out. I know you went to landon practice yesterday and so you found time for that. This practice is in season and frankly very important. You need to show up to play as we are not practicing friday. See you thursday!
-Coach Maddux
After not hearing back from the kid for two days, the coach reaches out to Ryan's parents:
From: Coach Maddux
To: Ryan's Parents Call me please this morning. [Phone number redacted] We need to talk.
No response, which begs a follow-up email:
From: Coach Maddux
To: Ryan's Parents Still waiting on a return phone call....been 2 weeks now.
And here he comes again, on the very same day:
From: Coach Maddux
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2013 14:05:16 -0400
Subject: Ryan - Madlax
To: Ryan and his parents
I know I have left you a bunch of messages, texts and emails but the best time to call me is in the morning. I have tryouts every night last week and this week and next week.
I just want to speak with you guys. I know you have always said, "Ryan is Madlax for life", and I still love him but it seems like you have been blowing me off. Just call me in the morning. I have done a ton for Ryan over the years and have given him amazing opportunities (Landon, scholarships, 3d/NBC invites, National Team, etc..) and I want to continue to help him as he enters HS and starts looking at colleges. He will need my recommendation with college coaches who I will speak to on his behalf soon believe it or not. I plan to start calling coaches on him and a few others this summer. Going to be fun.
Looking forward to hearing from Ryan or Trish or Myland...someone please.
Thanks, Cabell / Coach Maddux
PS: Ryan played a beautiful game on Sunday! Congrats.
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Finally, a response from Ryan's dad:
From: Ryan's dad
To: Coach Maddux We understand that this is a very crazy time for you. And my work AND Trish's work are a bit overwhelming as well. And as you know, I can't call during the day from my mobile and I have been non-stop at work for the past few months.
I am sure you have heard, and you would have noticed because we have not signed up for the summer program, but we are going to make a change this summer. Ryan has had a great time in Madlax, but this year has really been different. Ryan has been unhappy and very demotivated to play. We as a family think it is time we make a change. We have appreciated everything you have done for Ryan, but he has also had a hand in getting where he is. He works very hard and plays very hard. We are very proud of him. We are also grateful for the opportunities he has had to play for Madlax. But again, Ryan just wants to make a change..and we support him in that. This is not a decision we have made lightly...but one we have discussed the pros and cons about over the past several months.
We think you have a tremendous program and wish you the best of luck. I know your teams will do well as you have a TON of talented players with great parents and coaches as well...this weekend proved that. But we have to do what we feel is best for Ryan, so we are going to go in a different direction. And I know you care about Ryan, so I am sure you will be complementary if college coaches happen to ask about him. Ryan is a really good player, but we are realistic about playing at the next level, so we ensure he focuses on his grades as well!
And Cabell, we don't want to make this a big deal...or create a lot of drama that adversely impacts Ryan or anyone else in your program. This decision is hard enough on him. I know you want the same. We wanted to wait until Spring season was done to avoid any distractions to the team. I think you agree that Ryan gave his all until the very last play of the last game.
I think it is best that we agree to part ways and enjoy the great memories in Madlax and the season that we just had. All positive things. This was a tough decision, but one that we have made and will not reverse, so no need to talk further.
Please feel free to remove us from any Madlax distro list. We will continue to pay the CASE fees through July.
Cheers
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And here's where the shit hits the fan:
From: Coach Maddux
To: Ryan's Parents What? Is this a joke? This will be a decision that Ryan regrets for a long time. I doubt it is his decision though. I know it is you trying but failing to control the situation. I will speak to coach Bordley and colleges coaches immediately and make sure they know they are getting a quitter who is ungrateful and soft who can't take criticism. You have taken advantage of me and madlax and now you are doing a huge diservice to your son. I am hurt and angry. You have no clue how this lacrosse world works. Wow. You have really screwed him. And by the way it is a big deal and I will let every one of his teammates know. His teammates will hate him for years for quitting and playing for a rival club. Trust me on that.
The fact that you have been considering it for months is just unbelievable cowardice. If I had any clue which I didn't until right now I would have kicked his butt off the team for not being committed. I dont need Ryan or your craziness. I would much rather work with a kid who is tough and grateful.
Your word is obviously meaningless. Ha. Madlax for life. Yeah right. You are a joker and this will hurt Ryan for a long time. No college coach wants to recruit a kid with a crazy and disloyal dad who will transfer his son as soon as he gets yelled at. And by the way you have been on scholarship so I will be back billing you for unpaid events that you said you would pay for. I would never have asked you for that money but now since you are quitting I have legal right to bill you for it.
You have obviously not thought this through. You have not spoken to anyone at Landon because I know what they would tell you to do. You are a team parent cancer and every team has one. All the Landon parents already hate you because they tell me and I have been sticking up for you because you were'madlax for life'. Screw you for taking advantave of me. I am sorry I got Ryan invited to 3d/ nike blue chip and introduced you to landon because he is obvuously unappreciative. If he was appreciative he would stick with madlax but I know his crazy and controlling dad would not let him.
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But coach isn't done yet! Two weeks later, he decides that he hasn't spent enough time acting like a giant man-baby and sends the following email to Ryan and his parents:
From: Coach Maddux
To: Ryan and his parents Hey ungrateful quitter....
Your former teammates and coaches, who hate you now, can't wait to get a piece of you Saturday when we play vlc.
Who quits for getting yelled at and uses people who have helped them for years? Oh yeah...only babies who are coddled (and done a long-term disservice) by their crazy father.
See you there!!!
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Don't let your kids play lacrosse.You weren't invited to this picnic! Hungry black bear gatecrashes family lunch... and tucks into their sandwiches
When a family headed down to the woods for a spot of lunch they had no idea it would turn in to a real-life teddy bear’s picnic.
And much like the song suggests they were definitely in for a big surprise - when it was gatecrashed by this hungry black bear.
These incredible pictures were captured by terrified walkers after their lunch was brought to an abrupt end by the ravenous visitor.
Bear faced cheek: This hungry black bear had no hesitation in interrupting a family picnic, where he tucked into sandwiches and cakes left behind by a terrified family Lunchtime: The bear rummages through the food left by a fleeing family in the Shenandoah National Park, Virgina
It sat happily munching on cakes and sandwiches, ignoring the hysterical crowds, after the families enjoying the sunshine in the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, had fled when the enormous black bear came to join them for lunch.
It was only when a ranger turned up and pelted him with rocks that he finally decided he had had his fill, and went back into the woods.
The snaps were captured by keen amateur wildlife photographer Rodney Cammauf, 67, from Florida.
He said: 'The bear wandered into the picnic area looking for food as it had received food there before from people who had left it out.
Teddy bear picnic: Shocked walkers captured this hungry bear trawling through food on a picnic table after it interrupted a family lunch
Caught red handed: The bear tries to claw out anything left in packets left behind by terrified diners
'The bear saw the picnic table full of food and went over to it causing the people occupying the picnic table to run away.
'After the rangers were called one came up and chased the bear away.
'It was eventually trapped and relocated to another part of the park away from people.
'My impression was that the bear was getting into big trouble by raiding the picnic table but not being aggressive to the people around it.'
Time to roll: Just as the bear looks to tuck into a bread roll he is startled by park rangers who were called when the enormous animal rudely interrupted a family picnicEuropeans were not familiar with the concept of ‘toilet’ during the middle ages. They were taking care of their ‘needs’ on open fields, or inside their houses. High-heel shoes and umbrellas were in great demand since people used to throw their cr’ap out in the streets of the smelly cities.
The Church also did not welcome the washing and cleaning of the entire body because “it would stimulate lust”. European women were wearing large skirts to conceal the potties they carried underneath. The invention of perfume in France is also often related to Europe’s historical lack of hygene.
While walking down on a street during the time of Louis XIV of France in Paris, nobody was sure that something dirty would not fall on their heads. At any moment, someone could pour a potty out to the street from a window. It was not a pleasant sight at all, and the horrific smell throughout the streets of the city was unbearable. Any corner, even the walls of the churches were covered with feces. ( Max Kemmerich )
In medieval Europe, people were often getting married in June because they used to take their yearly baths in May. But the brides were still carrying a bouquet of flowers to suppress their booming body scent. The nuns were strictly forbidden to wash their bodies except faces and hands. Isabella, the Queen of Castile, only took a bath two times during her 50-years-long life.
The tradition of pouring potties out in the streets continued until the 17th century in Europe. For instance, Louis XIV of France used to spend a considerable amount of time on his potty everyday, including managing the state affairs from there.
The extreme dirt of the old European royal palaces was well-known. That is why, juniper tree was burned to give them a nice scent. ( Frantz Funck Brentano / la Societe Sous l’Ancien Regime )
( The “potty throne” of Louis XIV. )
The bedtime of Louis XIV was like a ceremony. He used to wear his gown first, and then take care of his ‘needs’ by sitting on the potty. Meanwhile, he was also discussing the political and economic matters with the high-ranking officials of the palace. “The right to sit on the potty” was a privilege that the aristocrats could have. Only the ones “with a licence” were allowed to use it. (Primi Visconti)
Europe partially met with a “toilet culture” in the beginning of the 18th century. Crates were placed inside the palaces for the kings and aristocrats to “meet their needs”. There were places in Europe that still did not have any toilets even in the beginning of the 20th century.Jim Palmer pitched most of his career in front of defenses replete with Gold Glovers.
Brooks Robinson, Paul Blair, Mark Belanger, Bobby Grich. Palmer benefited from them all. Yet the Hall of Famer turned television analyst barely hesitated recently when asked to put this year's Orioles defense in historical perspective.
"This is the best defense they've ever had," Palmer said. "It's pretty simple."
The 2013 Orioles are on pace to obliterate the all-time record for fewest team errors in a season. They're also on pace to set the mark for best fielding percentage. Manager Buck Showalter said five or six regulars should be strong candidates for Gold Glove Awards. Third baseman Manny Machado has quickly become one of baseball's signature defensive stars.
In an up-and-down season vexed by hitting slumps and bullpen struggles, defense has been the greatest constant for a club that's competing for a second-straight playoff berth after 14 consecutive losing seasons.
"Numbers can lie sometimes, and numbers don't lie sometimes," said second baseman Brian Roberts. "I don't think numbers lie with this one."
Bud Norris experienced the other extreme, pitching for the error-riddled Houston Astros until the non-waiver trade deadline. He grinned when asked how it feels |
characters from the animated television series Rocko's Modern Life and the comic book of the same name.
Joe Murray, creator of the series, said that he matched personalities of his characters to various animals, forming a "social caricature."[1]
Main characters [ edit ]
Main characters in the television show and comic [ edit ]
Rocko Rama [ edit ]
Voiced by Carlos Alazraqui
Rocko Rama (née Wallaby) is a wallaby who emigrated from Australia to the United States, he is the protagonist of the show. He is 18 years old. He is a sensible, moral, and somewhat timid character who enjoys the simple pleasures in life, such as doing his laundry or feeding his dog, Spunky. He is neat, compassionate, and self-conscious. He wears a blue shirt with purple triangles, sneakers and no pants. Rocko usually works at "Kind of a Lot o' Comics" (but once worked at Conglom-O where Ed Bighead attempted to make him quit) and his hobbies include recreational jackhammering and pining for the love of his life, Melba Toast. Due to Rocko's benevolence and non-confrontational personality, his kindness is often taken for weakness. He is often taken advantage of by the other characters. Rocko would prefer to live a quiet life, but his reckless friends often throw him into turbulent situations. His most common catchphrase is "______-Day is a very dangerous day", even once saying "Open mic night is a very dangerous night." He is often mistaken for a weasel, a platypus, and occasionally a beaver or even a dog. Rocko has no family name because the writers could not think of a family name that they liked.[2]
Spunky [ edit ]
Voiced by Alazraqui
Spunky is Rocko's pet Miniature Bull Terrier. He has a very high-pitched bark and wags his tail a lot. He's not too bright and will eat anything on sight, including Mr. Bighead's salmon bushes and a moldy slime found in Rocko's refrigerator. He often repeatedly drools into his water bowl and drinks it, only to drool into it again. He is Rocko's only regular pet and Rocko loves him dearly. Rocko will go to great lengths to protect Spunky if he is in danger or about to do something stupid. Spunky is best remembered for falling in love with a mop in the episode "Clean Lovin'", much to Rocko's dismay; Spunky was noted to have used his front paws as hands as he tries to protect the mop. Spunky is also the home of two parasites, Bloaty and Squirmy. Spunky also can do a cool trick, but it was not shown.
Heffer Wolfe [ edit ]
Voiced by Tom Kenny
Heffer Wolfe is Rocko's best friend, a happy-go-lucky and not-too-bright steer (a castrated hereford bull) whom he met in high school. His appearance is basically just a big (bigger than Rocko), round, yellow bull who wears red dungarees. He has two horns and a green tuft of hair on the top of his head. Heffer is an absolute glutton who loves to eat and party. His favorite food is "Pasture Puffies". Though he is normally portrayed as being jobless, he has worked as a waiter at a coffee shop, a salesman at a tree farm, a greenskeeper at a golf course, a mail carrier, a manager at a Chokey Chicken restaurant (later Chewy Chicken), a paperboy, and a security guard at Conglom-O-Corp (the last one causing him to go insane in a reference to The Shining). As his family name suggests, he was raised by a family of wolves who decided not to eat him as a child and adopted him as one of their own; his "birthmark" is actually their plotting lines of how to best divide him up into choice dishes. He is often called a "Big fat cow," a term he (and his father) objects to by saying "steer." His catchphrase, which can be heard in the series' opening theme, is "That was a hoot!"
Filburt Turtle [ edit ]
Voiced by Mr. Lawrence (Kenny, singing)
Filburt Turtle[3] is Rocko's other best friend, a neurotic, hypochondriac turtle wearing Woody Allen-style glasses. He started out as a different character, usually seen having many jobs, such as a supermarket cashier and a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles, before being written in the storyline as Rocko and Heffer's friend in the second season. He lives in a trailer and earns his money by collecting cans "here and there", and has a penchant for "sauce". Filburt has an extremely weak stomach and even the slightest wrong movements can give him nausea. He tried to be a dentist but failed in his last exam when he turned one of Rocko's teeth into a Giant Mutant Tooth. He turned 21 in the second-season episode "Born to Spawn" where he is called to his home island of Kerplopitgoes in order to become an adult. At one point, he also had a Frank Sinatra style singing voice that he nearly became a star with. He eventually started a family with Dr. Hutchison, a bubbly cat with a hook for a hand. One of their children turned out to bear a strong resemblance to Heffer, thanks to his having sat on their egg during the incubation period. Among Filburt's catchphrases are "Oh fish sticks!", "I'm nauseous... I'm nauseous.", and "Turn the page, wash your hands. Turn the page, wash your hands. And then you turn the page, and then you wash your hands..." and, "oh boy".
Ed Bighead [ edit ]
Voiced by Charlie Adler
Edward "Ed" Bighead is a cane toad, and the husband of Bev Bighead, he is the main antagonist of the show. He lives next door to Rocko, whom he vehemently despises and sees him and his friends as the bane of his existence. In the television show, Mr. Bighead is aggressive and crass towards most people. Ed works at the large corporation Conglom-O. His position with the company is usually in middle management, but it can be any position from assembly-line worker to an executive role, depending on the needs of the episode: according to his nameplate at Conglom-O, his job title is "Toad". As seen in the episode "Sailing the 7 Zzzs", he is a sleepwalker and has the habit of turning into a pirate while sleepwalking and views ordinary people and things as their pirate equivalents; he believed Rocko was an enemy pirate and proceeded to launch various household objects, such as toasters and bowling balls (cannonballs), at Rocko's house (an enemy pirate ship) from a dryer (a cannon). In the comic book, Mr. Bighead works for a similar company headed by Donald Frump, an elephant that serves as a parody of Donald Trump. Ed seems to have very bad luck wherever he goes and thus is very cynical. His catchphrase is "I hate my life."
Bev Bighead [ edit ]
Voiced by Adler
Beverly "Bev" Bighead is a cane toad and Ed's wife. Bev assumes authority in the Bighead household. Unlike her husband, she enjoys the company of Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt. She is a party animal who enjoys cooking and sunbathing nude. There is evidence that she sees Rocko as more than a neighbor and wants to have an affair with him—she has tried to seduce Rocko on more than one occasion, resulting in Rocko seeing her naked numerous times. She also is a possible masochist— she sleeps on sharp objects and has been impaled in the back with a lawn dart by Rocko, but was unaffected by it. At one point, she took over Ed's job at Conglom-O for a week when Ed took a leave of absence due to a nervous breakdown and ran the company very well. Her favorite bedroom pastime with Ed is to make him crack plates in mid-air with his tongue like clay pigeons.
Bev is also an incredibly compassionate toad, having taken Earl the vicious dog in when she forces him into a submissive posture for digging out their yard, she falls in love with him and likewise, which is strange for Earl. Earl and Ed then vie against one another for Bev's attention and approval, which Ed ultimately loses due to his underhandedness. Fortunately Earl is gone in subsequent episodes and his adoption is for the most part retconned through the rest of the series.
Minor characters [ edit ]
Minor characters in the television show and comic [ edit ]
Bloaty the Tick and Squirmy the Ringworm [ edit ]
Bloaty is voiced by Kenny Squirmy is voiced by Alazraqui
Bloaty the Tick and Squirmy the Ringworm are two parasites who live on and in Spunky. Certain episodes and both stories in Issue 6 of the comic book, "Special Disgusting Parasite Issue!", revolve around their Odd Couple-like relationship. They are introduced in the first-season episode "Dirty Dog", in which their boss, Mr Ick, comes over for dinner while Rocko tries to give Spunky a bath. This episode suggests that more than one parasite is living on Spunky, proven in future episodes by huge crowds of insects and even an old-west style town on Spunky's body. One of Bloaty and Squirmy's more well known sayings is "Up, work, home, TV, bed!". In the first story of Issue 6 of the comic, "Bug Out!", the two hop between various pets, trying to find the perfect host. In the second story, "Lice on the Loose", the two again find Spunky, prompting Rocko to take Spunky to a pet store; Bloaty and Squirmy interact with local parasites at the store.
Writer Martin Olson created Bloaty and Squirmy. Olson loved Murray's character designs of Bloaty and Squirmy, and said that he and the crew "had tons of fun recording and singing my nutty "Bloaty & Squirmy Theme Song".[4]
Chuck and Leon Chameleon [ edit ]
Chuck is voiced by Kenny Leon is voiced by Alazraqui
Chuck and Leon Chameleon a.k.a. The Chameleon Brothers are identical twins, have faux Scandinavian accents and snooty attitudes. They became a running gag, having several odd jobs such as being gym owners, running a client agency for clients who need help to break bad habits (in Rocko's case, nail biting), running a hair salon (Haute Coiffeur), and owning a café. Most, if not all, of these establishments are, by their own admissions, very exclusive (such as for people with "an exclusive amount of cash", as was the case in the episode "Tooth and Nail"). They say that they once worked for a tsar (who resembled Heffer) in the fictional country Balzak before immigrating to America.
Both brothers appear in the second story of Issue #1 once. They never speak and are never identified by their names.
Conglomo Lizards [ edit ]
Voiced by Kenny, Alazraqui, Lawrence, and Adler
These are lizards that work where Ed Bighead works, Conglom-O. They appear quite often.
Mr. Dupette [ edit ]
Voiced by Adler
Mr. Dupette is the CEO of Conglom-O, the megacorporation whose motto is "We Own You". Prior to this he is the manager at Super Lot-O Comics in the episode Canned, where he fires Rocko. It is unknown precisely when or how he became the CEO of Conglom-O. Some episodes showing flashbacks to Conglom-O's early years, such as when Ralph Bighead turned down his father's offer of a job at the company, remain consistent with Dupette's original appearance in "Canned", while others depict him as being with Conglom-O during events set well before the events of "Canned."
Dupette is almost always shown picking his nose, although sometimes he has a personal assistant pick his nose for him (most of the time, his right-hand man, Mr. Noway). Despite his official job title of "Slimy Boss" and propensity for firing executives on a whim for the most insane reasons, Dupette is a staunch environmentalist thanks to Rocko's efforts (in the episode "Zanzibar!") and he also secretly enjoys performing as a clown at children's birthday parties (in the episode "Closet Clown"). He is also a golf pro and, as his original job suggests, a big comic book fan.
In the comic book, Dupette appears in the second story of Volume #1 and is never identified by name.[5] In the comic, an elephant named Donald Frump (a parody of Donald Trump) serves as Mr. Bighead's boss.[6]
Earl [ edit ]
Voiced by Alazraqui
Earl is a large, mean-looking, purple bulldog. He has yellow eyes, red hair and large lower teeth that protrude from his mouth and wears a spiked dog collar. He was initially homeless, and is occasionally locked up at Dr. HP Marten's Institute for Questionable Experiments, due to his viciousness. Earl enjoys mauling Rocko, Ed Bighead, the fly man, and basically anything else that is alive. He was adopted by Bev in the second season after his "fairy dogmother" frees him from Martens' lab. Ed hates him and Earl hates Ed but is loving towards Bev.
After the first season, Earl occasionally appeared.[7]
Gladys the Hippo Lady [ edit ]
Voiced by Adler
Gladys the Hippo Lady is a sunglasses-wearing, stretch pants sporting hippopotamus with whom Rocko would often collide in Season 1 episodes and get in her way. She would utter her catchphrase, "How dare you!" at this juncture, which is always in a deep, manly voice, in total contrast to her unnerving high-pitched voice. In the Season 4 episode, "Dumbbells", she drags Rocko on a "ding-dong ditch" frenzy after catching Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt trying to pull the prank on her and finds it hilarious. In her first episode on the beach, she was briefly very apologetic to Rocko when she asked him to help her apply sunscreen.
Gladys appears in the comic book in "This Is A Test!", the second story of Issue #1, and "Remote Controlled", the first story of Issue #4. Gladys appears in the background in "This Is A Test!" In "Remote Controlled", an unidentified passerby bumps into her, causing Gladys to yell her trademark phrase at the man.
Melba Toast [ edit ]
Melba Toast is a mysterious female character who happens to be Rocko's next door neighbor in the television show and comic. Rocko falls head over heels for her but never sees her. Melba's face is never seen in the television show, nor in the comic. In the comic Melba is portrayed as a famous and high-class hand model for beauty products for the hands and feet.
Garbage Strike Rats [ edit ]
Voiced by Alazraqui and Kenny
They are garbage rats who claimed they were on strike in the episode "Popcorn Pandemonium". They have made various cameo appearances throughout the series. They even appear in the pilot episode, "Trash-O-Madness", as garbage men.
One of them, Tyrone, takes on the role of "the Big Fairy of Bigland" in Rocko's dream in "Short Story".
Really Really Big Man [ edit ]
Voiced by Kenny
Big Man or RRBM for short, is an extremely large and strong possibly humanoid superhero. In most episodes that revolve around him, he shows incredible but uncontrollable strength. His superpowers include flight, magic chest hairs, nipples that allow people to see their future (by attaching them to the eyeballs), and super strength. His alter-ego is a cross-gender office worker named "Lois Lame" (a parody of Lois Lane from Superman). His catchphrase is "Gaze into my nipples of the future!".
Slippy the Slug [ edit ]
Voiced first by Dom Irrera, later by Alazraqui
In the television show, Slippy the Slug manages the city dump. Before that, he ran a dangerous carnival sponsored by the sewage treatment center called the "Carnival O' Knowledge." After the episode "Carnival Knowledge" Slippy rarely appeared. Murray said that Slippy did not become "fleshed out to my liking."[8] In the television show he made occasional appearances after Season 1.[7]
Slippy appears in the second story of Issue #1 and the first story of Issue #7; in Issue #7 he operates a "Slippy the Slug's Sales for Suckers" booth at the Humongo Comicon.
Minor characters only in the television show [ edit ]
Alicia [ edit ]
Alicia, a kangaroo, is the mail carrier in the episode "S.W.A.K." Rocko has a crush on her in the episode. She is voiced by Linda Wallem.
Ambulance Beavers [ edit ]
The Ambulance Beavers are a running gag. They are two beavers who appear when a character is seriously injured. However, instead of taking the character who is hurt off on a stretcher, they take the inanimate object the character was injured on. An example is when Rocko crashes his bumper car at the carnival, the Ambulance Beavers take away the car instead of Rocko. When Rocko's appendix was hurting him, he fell off his jackhammer and they took the jackhammer instead of Rocko. In the same episode, they took Heffer, after they were told to (and they actually got it right), for emergency hippo-suction (liposuction) after he rushed to the hospital with Rocko in tow. Their catchphrase is saying "Hup!" repeatedly, while carrying a stretcher, loading the object on, and driving off to the hospital. They are voiced by Tom Kenny.
Balding Eagle [ edit ]
A North American eagle that has an extremely large collection of wigs to conceal the fact that he is balding. This is wonderful for "bird-wig snatching" Filburt, who wanted to steal the most valuable wig in his collection. Filbert used Rocko for bait, as the Balding Eagle likes to eat wallabies, according to Filbert's bird book. Though Rocko convinced him to embrace his baldness, and he ended up throwing out all his wigs. He lives in a big birdhouse above a lake that looks a lot like a regular house. He was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui.
Jaime [ edit ]
A purple laughing hyena that laughs really loudly. Voiced by Charlie Adler.
William "Buddy" Gecko [ edit ]
Filbert's musical gecko idol. He sings "Come Crawl with Me" with Filbert in "Lounge Singer". He makes various cameos throughout the series. He is very kind to Filburt, he provided him with a pair of record phones to help him feel less stage fright. "Come Crawl with Me" is a parody of the Frank Sinatra song "Come Fly with Me." His speaking voice was done by Tom Kenny, while his singing voice was done by Les Brown, Jr..
Karen Chicken [ edit ]
Karen appears in "To Heck and Back", interviewing at Chokey Chicken, only to be served there. However, the entire episode turned out to be a dream for Heffer so she comes back in the end, ironically she was on her way to a job interview at Chokey Chicken. She is voiced by Linda Wallem.
Captain Compost Heap [ edit ]
Also known as C.C.H., is a great big rotting pile of vegetable matter, that showed the meaning of recycle, conserve and pollute to the citizens of o'Town. He is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Claudette [ edit ]
Claudette is a wallaby who looks surprisingly like Rocko. She only appeared in the episode, "I See London, I See France". A resident of Paris, Rocko fell in love with her at first sight when he saw her as he and Heffer were on a vacation trip to Paris. Rocko had very strong feelings for her, even calling her the, "girl of his dreams." Throughout the episode Rocko chased Claudette through Paris until finally catching up to her and Heffer at the Chokey Chicken restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. At the end of the episode, Heffer stated that Claudette probably really likes Rocko, but Rocko denied his feelings for her, stating that he likes Melba Toast. She is voiced by Linda Wallem.
Crazy Aunt Gretchen [ edit ]
She is Filburt's crazy grumpy aunt. She never came out of her tank, so as an adult, she has her arms and legs sticking out of it and water sloshing on everyone she passes. She appears in "Sugar Frosted Frights", where it's revealed that she babysat young Filburt and told him all kinds of horror stories about Halloween, contributing to his fear of Halloween. Crazy Aunt Gretchen hates Halloween. She then later attended Filburt and Dr. Hutchison's wedding in "The Big Answer." Crazy Aunt Gretchen is voiced by Linda Wallem.
Dave [ edit ]
Melba Toast's boyfriend, shown in "Love Spanked". Only his feet are seen.
Dingo [ edit ]
Dingo, appearing in "Wimp on the Barbie", is Rocko's former bully. In the episode, Rocko explains that he fled to the United States to escape from Dingo. When Rocko's mother calls to tell him that he is coming to visit, Rocko panics, afraid Dingo will come to the United States and continue to bully him there. When Dingo arrives at Rocko's house, he reveals himself as a member of a Hare Krishna-esque cult that opposes all types of violence and that he is now at peace with everyone, and is now known as "Foofy No-No". His ears are also gone when he visits Rocko. He presents Rocko with various gifts (a 3-speed blender, Bacon-in-a-box, and $5) and asks Rocko to punch him in the nose for all the pain and suffering he put on Rocko for years. Rocko is apprehensive at first but does it anyway after Dingo said "please". Dingo thanked Rocko for doing so, and as he leaves, Heffer and Filburt ambush and attack him, unaware of his changed personality. He was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui.
Doctor Bendova [ edit ]
A psychotic mental patient rat who appeared in "Flu-In-U-Enza" as a physician. His last name is a pun of "bend over". He terrifies and infuriates Rocko with his continuous "turn your head and cough" tests and bizarre behavior before signing him a prescription and giving him a prostate exam. It's only after that the hippo nurse comes in and says "I thought I strapped you to the bed!" revealing him to be a mental patient. At the end of the same episode he was the challenger at the WWWWF (Wide World of Wacky Wrestling Federation) match that Rocko couldn't make it to. He made several brief cameos following this episode. He is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Madam Doreeno [ edit ]
Madam Doreeno is a rhino fortune teller who conjures up Mortimer Khan in "Feisty Geist". She is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Elkie [ edit ]
Elkie is a beautiful elk who is mostly seen at the elk's club in O-Town. In the episode " An Elk For Heffer", Elkie is befriended by Heffer. Of course, they fall in love. Later in the episode, Elkie is almost eaten by Heffer's family, but Heffer would not let it happen. Elkie is voiced by Linda Wallem.
Christmas Elves [ edit ]
They are Rocko's neighbors and Santa's elves. They were invited to Rocko's Christmas party on "Rocko's Modern Christmas".
Filburt and Paula's children [ edit ]
Gilbert, Shelbert, Norbert, and Missy are the four children of Filburt and Dr. Hutchison, who all came from the same egg in the fourth and final season of the show. Gilbert and Shelbert look exactly like Filburt while Missy is a miniature version of Dr. Hutchinson. Norbert, on the other hand oddly resembles Heffer since he sat on the egg for Filburt. He also believes that Rocko is his father and constantly follows him around. For most of the series, the four are featured as babies; they appear once as teenagers in the episode "Future Schlock." Gilbert and Shellbert were voiced by Mr. Lawrence, Norbert was voiced by Tom Kenny, and Missy was voiced by Linda Wallem.
Flecko [ edit ]
Voiced by Tom Kenny
Flecko is a fly, who appears in the episodes "Day of the Flecko", in which he is a prolonged nuisance to Rocko as the latter tries to get to sleep, "Fly Burgers", in which he sues Rocko after feigning serious injury and "Rocko's Happy Vermin" where he saves the rest of his bug friends. He has a glass eye that always falls out. He is the creation of Timothy Björklund and writer Martin Olson.
Gib Hootsen [ edit ]
Gibson "Gib" Hootsen is Rocko's cowboy uncle and owner of the Lazy R Ranch in The Middle of Nowhere. He appears in "The Good, The Bad, and The Wallaby". He is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Granny Rocko [ edit ]
Rocko's obnoxious grandmother, who never stops complaining. She always wears sunglasses and uses a walker. She even wears a long dress that matches Rocko's shirt and the same shoes he does. She appears in "Pranksters," but it was revealed that this Granny Rocko was really Filburt in a Granny Rocko suit. She was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui.
Buff and Dick [ edit ]
Buff the bull and Dick the gorilla are two irritating, insulting employees at the O'Town Hospital. They first appeared together in "Tickled Pinky". They also appear occasionally in the series. Dick was one of the monster truck drivers, in "Driving Mrs. Wolfe", Buff can be seen in the crowd of customers, "Dear, John".
Dr. Paula Hutchison Turtle [ edit ]
Voiced by Linda Wallem
Dr. Paula Hutchison Turtle, or Hutch for short, is a feline character on Rocko's Modern Life. Originally a dentist, Hutch has also been a cashier, surgeon, veterinarian, obstetrician, and pharmacist. She jokingly admits she left her job as a dentist because she was "Getting tired of looking down in the mouth!" and as a surgeon when she admits she "Just couldn't cut it!" She has a large smile and very upbeat outlook on life. She has a hook for her right hand which does not hinder her normal activity in any way. Her hook was also used to defeat the Giant Mutant Tooth. Hutch took a liking to Filburt and has encouraged him to do various things he's afraid of and eventually married him. Hutch's mother, the widow Hutchison, disallows the wedding between the two because of her belief that "cats and turtles don't mix" citing their status as natural enemies. While both Filburt and Hutch's families fight each other, it turns out that Hutch's father Colonel Frank Hutchison, who was thought to be dead, is actually a turtle, meaning that Widow Hutchison did not want her daughter to marry Filburt because she was trying to protect her.
Hutch's catchphrase is "'kay?", said while tilting her head. In "Sailing the Seven Zzz's", Rocko did this in the same fashion. She was the prom queen of O-Town High School. Hutch also seems to have a number of odd quirks, including the fact that she claimed to keep a baboon heart under her pillow. The team created Dr. Hutchison after Murray attended a press conference for networks to market new seasons of television shows to the press. A reporter asked Murray why the show did not have any "positive female role models." Murray responded by stating that he had no positive role models, that people do not use cartoon characters as role models, and that television shows should not teach lessons. After the conference some Nickelodeon executives told the reporter that they had plans to place female role models in the television show and asked Murray to place an unused character, Magdalane, as a female role model. Murray refused to use Magdalane.[2] A female executive from Nickelodeon later requested "a professional woman, someone with a good hook." The executive intended for the "good hook" to be a personality trait that attracts viewers; Murray instead gave the doctor a literal hook. Murray and the directors "grew to love her."[9][10] Martin Olson, a writer, described the decision when Nickelodeon gave the "okay" for the marriage of Filburt and Paula Hutchison as one of the most memorable moments of the production. Olson said that the executives at first did not like the marriage idea which he came up with in his outline of The Big Question; linear character development did not exist in Nicktoons. Murray convinced the executives to allow for the marriage to occur.[4]
Frank & Widow Hutchison [ edit ]
Frank and Widow Hutchison are Dr. Hutchison's parents and Filburt's in-laws. The Col. Sanders-esque owner of an ice cream company, he sits in a wheelchair with a nurse, named Magnolia, accompanying him. He appears in "The Big Answer" and encounters his wife, Widow Hutchison (who has two hooks), at Filburt and Dr. Hutchinson's wedding. The Widow Hutchison exhibits anger towards him throughout the episode and in the previous "The Big Question" episode because Frank left her. At the end of "The Big Answer" the Widow Hutchison tells Frank, "Frankie, wait! I still love you!" Widow Hutchinson is voiced by Kevin Meaney, and Frank Hutchinson is voiced by Carlos Alazraqui.[11] Ironically, he is a turtle despite the Widow Hutchison's prejudice against them. Widow Hutchinson didn't want her daughter to date or marry Filburt because she was afraid that Dr. Hutchinson would get hurt.
The Hopping Hessian [ edit ]
A parody of the Headless Horseman, The Hopping Hessian is a one-legged ghost from the Revolutionary War who lurks beyond the old Foto-Hut. Gordon, the talking leg, is the Hessian's missing leg who sounds like Johnny Carson, and has a face on his foot. He was created by Doug Lawrence in a story by Martin Olson. The Hopping Hessian is also voiced by Lawrence, while Gordon is voiced by Carlos Alazraqui. The Hopping Hessian rarely speaks; he only says "Yes!" or "No!", agreeing with Gordon on something (initially, he only said this off-screen, until he was first revealed in "Sugar Frosted Frights.")
Meatball [ edit ]
Meatball appeared in "Magic Meatball" who came to life on Ed Bighead's desk. Meatball claims the cafeteria food is too greasy and prefers Chinese instead. Ed kept asking him about expanding employee parking, but couldn't come up with an answer. Ed tries many different things to help Meatball come up with an answer, but nothing works. He then bursts out in tears and finally comes up with an idea that could help him. He marries Ed and still does not come up with an answer at 4:59 PM. Ed becomes furious with Meatball and forces him to come up with an answer, but he wants to call it off. It's revealed that Meatball actually came to life in Ed's imagination, costing Ed his job at Conglom-O. Meatball is voiced by Carlos Alazraqui.
Mortimer Khan [ edit ]
A horse parody of Genghis Khan, he is conjured up by fortune teller Madam Doreeno in "Feisty Geist". In telling Heffer's fortune, he finds that in life Heffer's Mongolian ancestor fell prey to a bribe for food and ruined his plans of conquest, literally leaving them to rake muck as "muckrakers". In swearing revenge, he possesses Spunky and nearly all the things in Rocko's house, finally being trapped in a snowglobe with Filburt's Spirit-Away paste. Mortimer Khan is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Nosey [ edit ]
A talk show hostess skunk from the episode "Speaking Terms" who is a parody of Rosie O'Donnell. Nosey uses anger issues for ratings increases in her show. In this episode Rocko and Heffer were in a huge fight due to Heffer forgetting Rocko's birthday and Nosey tries to mediate them (while on the commercial break telling them to act angrier toward each other). By the end of the episode, Rocko and Heffer make up which causes the audience to get up and leave, but they quickly start telling a story about aliens in Rocko's basement which lures the audience back and saves Nosey's show. She is voiced by Jill Talley.
Peaches [ edit ]
Voiced by Tom Kenny; A parody of Satan who is pink-skinned and clad in black robes, Peaches is in charge of "Heck", a parody of Hell (which he claims appears infernal "for the tourists") which Heffer almost pointed out before being interrupted. By taking off his hood, he reveals his head disturbingly resembling cow udders. Despite his menacing appearance and given his authority, Peaches has an "average Joe" tone and likes playing with a paddle ball. He has attempted to lure Heffer into "Heck" several times but has repeatedly failed to do so. Due to his failures, he was punished by being forced to star in his own cartoon show: Peaches' Modern Life.
When writer Martin Olson created the story for "To Heck and Back", he had "Satan" originally in charge of Heck.[4] Director Jeff "Swampy" Marsh says Doug Lawrence named Peaches and "never explained the udders (or many other things he thought up) to anyone. It was just funny, and that was explanation enough."[12]
Dr. Phil [ edit ]
He is the pink, pig, plumber that Rocko hired in the episode "Pipe Dreams". He is very dramatic and he says he never fails to do his job. He made a cameo appearance as the plumber Rocko was assisting. Dr. Phil is very handy with plungers, he used them for a grappling hook, horn, and suction cups. He speaks with a Southern accent (in reference to Dr. Phil McGraw), and is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Pinky [ edit ]
Rocko's cute appendix, who was removed in "Tickled Pinky". He was in Ms. Pancreas' class, in Rocko's body. He wears a blue hat and sneakers much like a real child, Despite his color, his personality and choice of bucket list things, Pinky acts like a normal, male, child. He is voiced by Linda Wallem.
Ralph Bighead Studios Tour Guide [ edit ]
He is a rhino, and the tour guide to Ralph Bighead Studios. He carries around a smiley face prop. He once used it as a weapon to smack Filbert and Rocko, to make them join his tour. The only way to get into Ralph Bighead Studios is to join his tour. He lives in Holl-o-wood, and is voiced by Tom Kenny.
Ralph Bighead [ edit ]
Voiced by Joe Murray
Ralph Bighead is Ed and Bev's son. He was disowned by Ed for not wanting to work for Conglom-O, so he went to Holl-o-Wood to become a cartoonist. He created a cartoon called The Fatheads (who are both voiced by Charlie Adler), a married couple with obese heads that constantly fight and hit each other with parking meters. The Fatheads were based loosely on Ralph's parents as a sort of retaliation for his awful childhood. Rocko and his friends are big fans of the show. Eventually, he became tired of being a cartoonist and wanted to quit to work on his true dream of building the world's largest still-life fruit sculpture, but was contractually obligated to keep producing cartoons for his company. In an attempt to get around this, Ralph allowed Rocko and his friends to create the show Wacky Delly assuming that it would immediately be cancelled and he could quit his job. Instead, the show became a runaway hit, much to Ralph's dismay. He then attempted to sabotage the show, but his attempts only made the show more popular. Eventually, Rocko convinced him that he should take pride in his work, which he did. Ironically, his attempts to actually make the show good ended up getting it cancelled. Years later, Ralph finally created his art; however, it only ended up reminding people about Wacky Delly, much to his horror.
He finally made up with his parents (mainly his father) with the help of Rocko and Filburt and is welcomed back into his family. Though as a retaliation for Rocko getting into his family's business he created a new (one time) character named "Rolo" who is portrayed as the Fatheads' dumb, snotty Australian beaver next door neighbor.
Creator Joe Murray provides the voice of Ralph. Writer Martin Olson created Ralph and based the character's personality on Joe Murray's personality; Olson also used the character to satirize Murray's experiences with Nickelodeon.[4] When Murray created the first episode with Ralph, the directors and artists, enamored with the story, became involved in the production. Olson asked Murray to voice Ralph. On his website Murray wrote, "I don't consider myself a voice actor, but this one I did."[10]
According to Olson, Doug Lawrence persuaded Murray into yelling "NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER!" as the voice of Ralph. Olson found this humorous as, according to him, Murray "NEVER EVER screamed." Olson describes Murray's voice as "a quiet, thoughtful murmur" and therefore found "Joe as his alter-ego screaming like a nut" to be humorous.[4]
Rocko's Car [ edit ]
It is Rocko's old transportation device ever since he went to O'Town. Rocko loves his car. When his car breaks, it flies away as an angel, almost running into the Grim tow-truck. But when it gets fixed it is resurrected. In some episodes it acts and moves like a living animated object, instead of just a car. |
the best of the best.
Forty medals bearing the name Norm Smith have been handed out since the award was introduced, but only the three times has a player been good enough to win it twice. It’s an outstanding achievement to win it once; to be named the best player on the best team (with one or two notable exceptions). Winning it twice leaves no room for doubt as to just how good you were when the heat was on.
Wayne Harmes was the inaugural winner in 1979 for Carlton, and names such as Hird, Buckley, Rioli x 2 and Judd have all earned the medal. However, prior to ’79 there were a host of players whose efforts have never been officially recognised. These are players whose skill, courage and ability to perform on the biggest day of the football year was proven, but they’re also players who have not had their accomplishments lauded, as Hodge, McLeod or Ayres have.. Their exploits, however great, have not been celebrated even remotely similarly to those in the modern era.
Perhaps foremost amongst these players is Brent Crosswell.
‘Tiger’ as he was known, could hold the unique distinction of being judged best on field in two grand finals, for two different teams. The first effort came for Carlton in 1970. Crosswell was named the Blues’ best in their win over the Magpies in a game famous for the Jesalenko “you beauty” mark. Crosswell collected 17 kicks and 6 handballs, and was one of few Carlton players to stem the tide as the Magpies established a seemingly insurmountable 44-point lead..
He transferred to North Melbourne in 1975, just in time to help usher in their first premiership. Crosswell was named best for the Kangaroos with 24 disposals (22 kicks) and a goal. He was what former journo Ken Piesse described as an “incredible big game player”. His ability was only matched by his volatile temper. Crosswell’s on-field exploits would be fondly remembered by both older Carlton and North Melbourne fans, but his reputation within the football world would be enhanced with two Norm Smith medals to his name.
Kevin Bartlett proudly accepted his Norm Smith medal in 1980 as the Tigers ran over Collingwood. ‘Hungry’ finished with seven goals, equalling a then-record, and was clearly the best player afield. The vision of him streaming past Michael Roach to receive the handball and run into the open goal was burned into the memory of ever Tiger supporter who saw it, as was the memory of him leaving Stan Magro in his wake on the boundary as he turned towards goal and slotted his seventh goal. But seven years earlier, Bartlett had another stellar outing.
Richmond knocked over Carlton by five goals in the 1973 Grand Final as Bartlett racked up 26 disposals – all kicks unsurprisingly, and kicked a goal. A retrospective medal for his ’73 outing would only enhance the legend of KB, and it would be even more fitting that it happened in a game where he did not see the need to handball even once.
The accolades Ron Barrassi received during his career are many, but due to the era he played, a Norm Smith is something he could never obtain. That Norm Smith was actually coaching him at the time kind of prevented that.
Barrassi was named best on ground in both the 1957 and 1959 Grand Finals, kicking five in ’57 and adding another four in ’59. Naming him as a dual Norm Smith medallist is probably something Barrassi doesn’t want or need at this stage in his life. His career is etched in stone as one of the greatest of all time, but if you ask a modern fan of Barrassi’s achievements, they may struggle to tell you. He was a master coach, and many remember him as such, but Barrassi, the player, was equally as good. Two Norm Smiths would be all that you need to know about him as a player.
Despite the greatness of those mentioned above, one man could even top all of them when it came to big game performances. You’ll be forgiven if his name doesn’t automatically ring a bell.
Percy Beames of the Melbourne Football Club was in contention for three consecutive best on ground awards in Grand Finals from 1939-41. His six goal haul in ’41, playing as a rover left no doubt as to his prowess. MCC members would be well aware of the Percy Beames Bar at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and those who follow amazing individual sporting achievements may be aware that Beames is the only sportsman to ever play 200 VFL games and 200 cricket matches for Melbourne and Victoria. He went on to become the chief football and cricket writer with The Age. He sits in the forward pocket in Melbourne’s Team of the Century, which is an amazing set of accolades. Adding “triple Norm Smith medallist” to the CV is something no one else could lay claim to.
There are many others whose careers would be greatly enhanced with a retrospective medal. Robert Diperdomenico was arguably best on ground in 1978 although many swear it was Leigh Matthews. Arnold Briedis’ five goals and 28 touches were good enough to earn best on ground for the Kangaroos in the 77 Grand Final Replay. Don Scott (71), Robert Walls (72) and the great Kevin Sheedy (74) could all stake a claim to be recognised as retrospective Norm Smith medallists as well.
The Norm Smith medal enhances a player’s reputation. It is a source of pride; recognition that when it was all on the line, the player awarded the medal was the one to stand up and make a difference. The AFL has footage of grand finals dating back many years before the inaugural award. There are newspaper reports detailing the games dating back before that, too; a compilation of reports detailing the best player on the ground is not too far removed from the voting system currently employed.
The players who came before the award was instituted deserve the honour just as much as the modern day heroes. It’s time for some retrospective Norm Smith medals. Sadly, for some of those great players, their time with us has ended. That’s all the more reason to ensure their legacy is preserved.
Follow us on Twitter @themongrelpuntTalk about your white guilt run amok. As you know the democratic candidates for president are stepping over each other to see who can kiss the most black ass, but Bernie Sanders has really outdone himself. Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have apologized for saying, “all live matter” while Sanders has taken it a step further by agreeing that black lives are more significant than all other lives.
Sanders did an interview with Ebony.com and put forth his shameless race pandering:
EBONY.COM: Is it clear as to why Black Lives Matter is more significant than All Lives Matter? SEN. SANDERS: Yes…
I’ll get to the rest of Sanders’ answer in a moment, but for now I want to focus on the fact that a presidential candidate just agreed that lives of one race of people are more important than the lives of all other races. How is this not the most racist thing anyone who has ever run for president ever said?
Now for the rest of Sanders’ answer:
…particularly when I think about the case of Sandra Bland from a few months ago. Clearly if Sandra Bland, who was a middle class Black woman, had been a middle class White woman, it is unlikely that the police would have treated her in the same way. It’s unimaginable [what happened to her] but it’s a reality that has absolutely got change.
Sandra Bland was pulled over for a traffic violation. The cop was ready to give her a warning, but she freaked out and assaulted him. She was arrested and while in jail killed herself. How does this make black lives matter more than other lives? Sandra Bland didn’t even think black lives mattered because she took a black life: her own.
And let’s not ignore Sanders’ speculation that a white woman wouldn’t have received the same treatment. Bullshit. If a white woman had attacked the cop, she would have been arrested the same as Sandra Bland.
Why is it so “unimaginable” that Bland was arrested for assaulting a police officer? We, as a society, have come up with a set of rules everyone is expected to live by. Bland broke those rules and she went to jail. In addition to thinking black lives matter more, Sanders also seems to think that black people shouldn’t have to follow the law. That’s just how special he thinks they are.
So special, that he wants the law changed to reflect his opinion. He says the reality of what happened to Sandra Bland has to change. That can only mean that he wants cops to stop pulling over black people for breaking the law, and to just walk away when black people assault them.
Taking Sanders answer in full, he believes that black lives matter more because a black woman attacked a cop and then killed herself in jail. Are these the thoughts of a person that should be in charge of the most powerful country in the world? Would you trust this guy to deal with hostile nations or to have his finger on the nuclear button?
I wouldn’t trust Bernie Sanders with my dry cleaning. He’d probably give my shirts to some people who don’t feel like working in some socialist redistribution of wardrobe scheme.
Follow Brian Anderson on TwitterAccording to a poll I conducted, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory as a designer; and what really surprised me is about 24% don’t even know what SEO is! If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article. This is an SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. I’ll explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers. Then I’ll provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.
[poll=7]
Why Should You Learn About SEO?
SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility.
If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in "www.yourwebsite.com" and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on average, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 – 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Imagine, without search engine referrals, I would be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That means, I’m risking losing potential clients too.
SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.
The Basics: How Search Engines Work?
First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.
When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.
What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.
Your Job As a Search Engine Optimizer
Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.
On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your site, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.
Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.
This is a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly though, if you do your job right… and design a beautiful site… and/or produce useful content… you’ll get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.
Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers
1. Splash Page
I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage. The worst case — the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.
This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.
Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.
2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus
Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.
3. Image and Flash Content
Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.
4. Overuse of Ajax
A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.
Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.
5. Versioning of Theme Design
For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.
6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text
You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”
Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.
7. Common Title Tag Mistakes
Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.
One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t
that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text "Site Name > Blog Archive >" at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it
should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.
Exceeding the 65 character limit:
Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including
spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.
Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:
"Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures"
“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.
8. Empty Image Alt Attribute
You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.
Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms "abstract" and "dj".
9. Unfriendly URLs
Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.
Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title
Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356
General SEO Do’s and Don’ts
Let me tell you WHAT TO DO by telling you WHAT NOT TO DO:
Don’t Ignore Your Audience
Write about topics your audience cares about. Like what? Find out, by conducting a poll (like I did), scan some relevant bulletin boards or forums, look for common topics in customer emails, or do some keyword research. There are great free keyword tools like the Google Keyword Tool or SEO Book’s Keyword Tool and loads more. The plan is not to spend your life doing keyword research but just to get a general idea of what your visitors are interested in.
Don’t Be Dense About Keyword Density
Once you have a topic for readers; help search engines find it. Keyword Density is the number of times a keyword appears in a page compared to the total number of words. You want to make sure your keywords are included in the crucial areas:
the Title Tag
the Page URL (friendly URL)
the Main Heading (H1 or H2)
the first paragraph of content.
at least 3 times in the body content (more or less depending on amount of content and if and only if it makes sense).
Most people aim for a keyword density of 2% (i.e. use the keyword 2 times for every 100 words). But what if your keyword phrase is “SEO for Web Designers and Web Developers” how many times can you repeat that before it sounds just plain unnatural? Write for your readers not for search engines. If you follow the tips
in this article you’ll be writing naturally for your readers; which works for the search engines too.
Warning: Do not over fill your page with the same keywords or you might be penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing.
Don’t Ignore Relatives
In this article, it makes sense to mention topics like “keyword research”, “search engine crawlers” and “title tag use”, but what if I mentioned a highly trafficked term like “cell phone plans”… kind of out of context right? So use other keywords and topics that make sense to your audience, the search engine measures keyword relations to determine relevancy too.
Cars and Tires (yes)
Web Design and Flying Monkeys (no…well sometimes)
Don’t Be Afraid of Internal Linking
Do you want the search engine to see every page on your website? Help the search engine spider do its job. There should be a page (like a sitemap or
blog archives) that links to all the pages on your site.
Tip: You can promote the more important pages by inserting text links within body content. Make sure you use relevant linking text and avoid using "click here" (as mentioned earlier).
Don’t Ignore Broken Links
You should always search for and fix the broken links on your site. If you’ve removed a page or section, you can use the robot.txt to prevent the spiders crawling and indexing the broken links. If you have moved a page or your entire website, you can use the 301.htaccess to redirect to a new URL.
Tips: You can use the Google Webmaster Tool to find broken links and your 404 Not Found errors.
Don’t Be Inconsistent With Your Domain URL
To search engines, a www and a non-www URL are considered two different URLs. You should always keep your domain and URL structure consistent. If you start promoting your site without the "www", stick with it.
Don’t Be Scared of Semantic Coding
Semantic and standard coding not only can make your site cleaner, but it also allows the search engines to read your page better.
Search Result Position
Coding and setting up your site to be SEO friendly can improve how well a search engine can access your website, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up at the top of the search engine result page (SERP). There are many factors in determining the search result position, but here are the basics:
PageRank
Some professional SEO’s pay attention to Google’s PageRank and some don’t. In my experience it doesn’t hurt to have a high Google PageRank. It’s a nice little benchmark to let you know how important Google sees your web page as. You can improve your PageRank by following the tips above and building-up quality backlinks. If you want to learn how PageRank works, Smashing Magazine has a very good article.
Domain Age Before Beauty
You might be surprised to learn that domain age is also a factor in the search engine algorithm. Older domains have a history, and their content is looked at as more credible than the website that got started last week. Older domains sometimes get the edge in search results.
Be Patient
You may have done every single thing right., but your site is still not showing up in the search engines for your target keywords. Why? Because everything takes time. It takes time for the search engines to index and rank your site (especially for new domains). So, be patient.
Another reason — it could be the keywords that you’re trying to target are very competitive. Try altering the keywords on the page and you may have different results. Remember, you are competing with millions of web pages on the internet.
Resources to Help You Go Farther
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools allow you check the crawl statistics of your site. If you haven’t been using this great tool yet, login to the Google Webmaster Tools, then add and verify your site.
After you’ve verified your site, you can find out:
When was the last time Googlebot crawled your site
HTTP errors
404 Not Found errors
External link counts
What keywords people are using to link to your site
What are the top search queries to your site
And more.
Free SEO Tools
Here are some online SEO tools that you can use to check your PageRank, Link Popularity, Search Engine Position, Keyword Density, etc.
SEO Resources
Here are some external links where you can learn more about SEO:
Final Remarks
Please note that I’m not a SEO expert (although I manage to get very high rankings on all my sites: N.Design Studio, Best Web Gallery, and Web Designer Wall). The tips I share in this SEO guide are based on self-taught knowledge and years of web design experience.
Good Luck.A forum for the nation's physicians
■ The AMA House of Delegates is convening June 15 through June 19 in Chicago to discuss such issues as health system reform, delivery of care, practice sustainability and public health. Return to this page for top news from the meeting.
Medical Service (Committee A) Call for tougher rules to stop misleading medical device ads Updated June 17 Advertisers who promote durable medical equipment should follow tougher regulations to ensure that suppliers stop confusing patients about how to obtain their products, according to a Board of Trustees report approved by the AMA House of Delegates. The report calls on the AMA to pursue legislation or regulations that require direct-to-consumer advertising for DME to include a disclaimer saying that eligibility for and coverage of DME is subject to specific criteria and that only a physician can determine if a patient meets the standards. Such ads also should list the actual criteria from an appropriate source. Federal rules mandate that to be covered by Medicare, DME must be medically necessary and prescribed by a physician, among other criteria. Covered products include oxygen, wheelchairs, hospital beds, walkers and prosthetics. During reference committee testimony, delegates said advertisers frequently promote their products without explaining the qualification process. This leads to some patients believing they can obtain DME when they do not qualify for the supplies. Mobile, Ala., urologist Jeff Terry, MD, said not enough is being done by legislators and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to stop the inaccurate ads. “Some of the advertisements on TV are just plain wrong as far as medical facts,” Dr. Terry, a delegate for the Medical Assn. of the State of Alabama, said during reference committee testimony. “Do you call this misleading, ignorance, lying or fraud? My efforts [to discuss the problem] with CMS and my congressman just meet dead ends.” Macon, Ga., family physician Michael Greene, MD, said he refuses to work with two DME companies because of their misleading treatment of his patients regarding equipment. “I've reported them to CMS,” said Dr. Greene, an alternate delegate for the Medical Assn. of Georgia. “We've got to really focus on the fraud aspect of this.” The board report said advertisers should refrain from statements that only a physician order or signature is required to obtain the desired items. The equipment first must meet federal standards before a doctor can approve use of the device. DME companies also should stop coercive acts that inappropriately influence physicians to sign such prescriptions for their patients. In other action Delegates approved a Council on Medical Service report aimed at making sure that insurers charge appropriate co-payment rates for outpatient treatments depending on where a service is performed. Although many surgical procedures can be performed safely in physician offices, ambulatory surgical centers and hospital outpatient departments, third-party payers and Medicare often impose substantially different co-pays for the same service, depending on where it is performed, the report said. The council report says the AMA will work with states to advocate that such payers be required to assess equal or lower facility co-pays for lower-cost sites of service. The plan's participating physicians also should be allowed to perform outpatient procedures at an appropriate site as chosen by the physician and the patient.
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Legislation (Committee B) Pharmacists cautioned not to intrude on medical practice Updated June 19 Delegates voted to adopt policy that says pharmacists who make inappropriate queries to verify a physician's rationale behind a prescription, diagnosis or treatment plan are interfering with the practice of medicine. If the problem isn't resolved, the AMA will advocate for regulatory and legislative solutions to prohibit pharmacies from denying therapeutic treatments to patients that are legitimate or medically necessary, the policy states. Physicians need to send a clear message to pharmacists “that they can't intrude on our practice of medicine,” said Robert Wailes, MD, an alternate delegate for the American Academy of Pain Medicine and pain medicine specialist from Carlsbad, Calif. As a collaborative step, the policy directs the AMA to work with the National Assn. of Chain Drug Stores, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal regulators and stakeholders to develop policies on reducing inappropriate dispensing and drug diversion incidents. In other action Delegates approved a Board of Trustees report that provides guidelines on invasive pain management procedures for treating chronic pain, including procedures that use fluoroscopy. One issue that commanded delegates' attention during committee testimony was the degree of supervision required for nonphysicians. Such procedures require physician-level training, the report stated, but there are instances where appropriately trained and credentialed nonphysicians could perform certain technical aspects under the direct and/or personal supervision of an experienced physician. Nonphysicians such as physician assistants “are extremely valuable, and we believe strongly that we want to work in cooperation and partnership with them,” said AMA Trustee Joseph P. Annis, MD, who chaired the task force that wrote the board report. In cases where radiologic imaging is involved, the report specified that invasive pain management procedures should be performed only by doctors with appropriate credentials and training. Policies to support a proactive role for doctors in gun control issues were adopted, including a provision that encourages doctors to educate and have open discussions with patients about firearm safety and the use of gun locks in homes. To promote public health and injury prevention, the language urged physicians to take part in local firearm safety classes. Other measures support research on firearm-related deaths and injuries and increased funding for firearms injury databases such as the National Violent Death Reporting System. The policy calls on the AMA to work with specialty and state medical societies and other stakeholders “to identify and develop standardized approaches to mental health assessment for potential violent behavior.” The House addressed several payment issues, fine-tuning policy to phase out Medicare's sustainable growth rate formula and adopt newer payment models. Such an approach would reflect diversity in physician-led practice models such as patient-centered medical homes and regional health collaboratives, while continuing to support fee-for-service and private practice medicine as options for providing high-quality, patient-centered care. Doctors should have the flexibility to determine the basic payment method for their services, as well as the right “to establish their compensation arrangements, including private contracting, at a level which they believe fairly reflects the value of their professional judgment and services,” the policy states. Delegates voted to support federal legislation that would require all payers to implement ICD-10 or ICD-11 over two years. The move gives “our members time to get used to the sticker shock” of ICD-10, said Reid B. Blackwelder, MD, president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Payers during that period “will not be allowed to deny payment based on specificity of ICD-10-11 diagnosis,” but would be required to give doctors feedback for incorrect diagnoses, the policy says. “We should not allow payers to find loopholes to not pay us for services we provide under contract,” said M. Eugene Sherman, MD, an alternate delegate for the American College of Cardiology and a cardiovascular disease specialist from Englewood, Colo.
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Medical Education (Committee C) Impact of board certification process on doctors to be examined Updated June 18 The house directed the AMA to take several steps to look at the maintenance of certification process and ensure it is not burdensome to physicians. The AMA will commission an independent study to evaluate the impact that MOC and maintenance of licensure requirements have on physicians' practices, the doctor work force and patients. A progress report on the study will be presented at the Annual Meeting in 2014. The Association will work with the American Board of Medical Specialties and its specialty boards to determine if the mandatory exams are still needed and to explore alternatives to the exams. The house directed the AMA to encourage the ABMS to ensure that its member boards are transparent on the costs of preparing and administering certification exams. During reference committee testimony, some delegates said that MOC is expensive and time-consuming. They said doctors need to fulfill continuing medical education requirements, and being board-certified doesn't necessarily mean you're a better physician. “If I see 15 patients every day, I'm taking 15 tests and I need to get an 'A' on every one of them,” said Leah McCormack, MD, a dermatologist and past president of the Medical Society of the State of New York. Dr. McCormack called the requirements onerous and an insult to physicians. Brigitta Robinson, MD, general surgeon, speaking on behalf of the Colorado Medical Society, expressed concern about the cost and travel time involved in taking the exams, which often are administered in another state. In other action The house directed the AMA to work with other health profession organizations to advocate for a reduction of the fixed interest rate of the Stafford student loan program. Delegates also adopted policy calling on the AMA to collaborate with other organizations to explore evidence-based approaches to quality and accountability in residency programs and support of enhanced funding for graduate medical education. Delegates said it is crucial to expand the number of GME positions to allow the growing number of medical school graduates to obtain a residency program slot.
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Public Health (Committee D) Delegates classify obesity as a disease state Updated June 18 Designating obesity as a disease could lead to greater investments by government and the private sector to develop treatments and ensure that doctors are paid for those services. The house approved a Council on Science and Public Health report that assessed the arguments for and against creating the classification on obesity. The report said better clinical and public health strategies are needed to help obese patients improve their lifestyle behaviors and reduce adverse outcomes associated with unhealthy weight. The report also recommended that a better measure of obesity than body mass index is needed. But the report stopped short of calling for the AMA to consider obesity a disease. However, delegates adopted new policy that recognized obesity as a disease state, requiring “a range of interventions” to advance treatment and prevention of the disease. Obesity “affects patients psychologically, functionally, physically and medically,” said Ethan Lazarus, MD, speaking for the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. For those reasons, obesity should be classified as a disease, said Dr. Lazarus, a delegate for the society from Denver. The council had opposed the designation because of the difficulty of screening for obesity, the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a disease and potential problems associated with medicalizing obesity, said Robert A. Gilchick, MD, MPH, a member of the council. “It's a very serious condition … a pandemic, a significant risk factor for many other diseases,” said Dr. Gilchick, a public health and preventive medicine physician from Los Angeles. “But that does not alone mean it is a distinct medical disease state.” He is among the physicians concerned about the implication of labeling the estimated one in three U.S. adults who is obese as having a disease, even if an individual isn't sick. Other concerns with medicalizing obesity that were discussed at the meeting include an increased emphasis on treating the condition with medication and surgery rather than improving diet and boosting physical activity. Laguna Beach, Calif., ob-gyn Diana Ramos, MD, MPH, supported classifying obesity as a disease. Her position is based, in part, on the fact that obesity has a significant impact on minority populations. For instance, black women are 40% more likely to be obese than similarly aged white women, said Dr. Ramos, a delegate for the Minority Affairs Section, speaking for the section in reference committee testimony. “We should not be afraid to call [obesity] what it is,” Dr. Ramos said. The new policy comes as the nation's obesity epidemic has skyrocketed to epic proportions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers project a dramatic increase in adult obesity and related health care costs by 2030 if the trend continues. Obesity increases the risk of a variety of potentially fatal health conditions, including breast cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke. It also leads to rising health care costs. About $147 billion was spent on medical costs related to obesity for U.S. adults in 2008, according to the latest available CDC data. In other action Delegates directed the AMA to encourage screening for social and economic risk factors to improve patient care. Such screens “will make the physician aware of what's happening with [the patient] socially,” said Dr. Ramos, speaking for the Minority Affairs Section during reference committee testimony. “Maybe you will understand why they can't afford fruits and vegetables and then you will” suggest other ways to improve their diet.
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Science and Technology (Committee E) FDA, birth control pill makers asked to examine OTC option Updated June 18 The AMA House of Delegates is calling for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to encourage manufacturers of oral contraceptives to submit applications and supporting evidence to the agency to consider approving a switch of birth control pills from prescription to over-the-counter status. The policy also calls on the AMA to encourage the continued study of issues relevant to OTC access for oral contraceptives. The vote came after delegates debated an earlier resolution that called on the AMA to adopt a philosophical statement of support for OTC status for birth control pills. Some argued in reference committee testimony that allowing contraceptive drugs to be sold over the counter could result in patients not receiving crucial drug education and possibly skipping important preventive procedures such as Pap smears and pelvic exams. Kenneth Crabb, MD, a delegate for the Minnesota Medical Assn. and an ob-gyn in St. Paul, testified on his own behalf against the resolution in virtual reference committee testimony. But during live testimony, he said he had since changed his mind after learning that the benefits outweigh the risks. He said the potential health risks of pregnancy were higher than possible side effects from birth control pills. Kira Geraci-Ciardullo, MD, a delegate for the Medical Society of the State of New York, spoke on her own behalf against the original resolution during reference committee testimony. She questioned the possible precedent that might be set by allowing the resolution to move forward. “I am shocked, frankly, at the abrogation of the physician in this discussion,” said Dr. Geraci-Ciardullo, an allergist and immunologist in Mamaroneck. “How many medications are we going to allow over the counter so that the pharmacist and the nurses are the ones doing the education and advice for medication use? If we send these prescriptions over the counter to patients, who is going to advise them? Where is the value of the relationship between the physician, particularly on ob-gyn, and her patient?” In other action The House approved a report that called for an amendment to AMA policy supporting tighter restrictions on compounding pharmacies. Compounding refers to the act of combining, mixing or altering pharmaceutical ingredients to prepare a customized medication for a patient. According to the Food and Drug Administration, compounding, “if done properly, can serve an important public health need if a patient cannot be treated with an FDA-approved medication.” The report calls on the Association to support efforts to subject compounding facilities to state board of pharmacy oversight and comply with current United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary compounding regulations regarding uniformity, quality and safety of compounding medications. Several ophthalmologists testified in opposition to the policy during reference committee testimony, saying tighter restrictions |
of free markets, equal treatment under law, and individual rights is taking a real beating.
One needn’t paper over past political disagreements to recognize that there is something qualitatively different about what seems to be happening today. We are not arguing about whether federal spending should rise or fall by some small percentage of GDP, whether taxes should go up or down, or how to regulate this or that. Sure, those issues come up, but at a more fundamental level, this election is about the relationship between the individual and the state, and neither of the major candidates is taking the side of the individual.
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Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton see government as the preeminent force in our lives. The words “liberty” or “limited government” or “Constitution” almost never pass their lips. Their entire campaigns are based on what government should do for us or give to us.
Both candidates believe that it is the government’s job to create or preserve jobs. Consider trade. Both Trump and Clinton would restrict our right to buy and sell where we please, even though doing so would increase costs to consumers and spark retaliation that could cost jobs elsewhere. Trump’s call to lower taxes is belied by his desire to impose new taxes on consumers, a.k.a. tariffs. (Hillary, of course, doesn’t even pretend that she wants lower taxes.) But beyond the economic malpractice, what is truly troubling is the belief that the government should choose which jobs should be shielded from the “creative destruction” of the free market.
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As long ago as 1845, Frédéric Bastiat pointed out the foolishness of such policies. His satiric Candle-makers’ Petition posited the candle-makers guild asking for protection from their unfair competitor — the sun. In fact, since at least Adam Smith, free-market economists have understood that, while there are always winners and losers, trade enriches society overall, increasing both growth and innovation. But Trump and Clinton choose government, and its ability to pick winners and losers, over the market.
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When not “protecting” jobs, both Trump and Clinton want government to create jobs directly, hence their proposals for massive infrastructure programs. Again, they ignore the longstanding consensus of classical liberal economics that government ultimately can’t create jobs. Any money that the government spends on infrastructure — or anything else — must ultimately be extracted from the economy through debt or taxes. That means there is less money available for the private sector to create jobs. Neither Trump nor Clinton would create new jobs. They would simply have the government choose which jobs get created.
Both also see government as a means for propping up wages. Whether it’s Clinton’s (and sometimes Trump’s) plan to hike the minimum wage, or Trump’s call to restrict the labor supply through immigration controls, both want government to pay workers more than what a free market would provide.
Both Clinton and Trump see it as government’s job to provide Americans with whatever we need.
Trump and Clinton don’t stop at jobs and wages either. From health care to child care to retirement, both see it as government’s job to provide Americans with whatever we need. If there is a problem faced by someone somewhere in America, they believe that government can and should intervene. This obviously flies in the face of government failures in everything from the War on Poverty to the War on Drugs, but it is a recipe for essentially unlimited government. Government becomes not just a village, but our mommy, daddy, and brother’s keeper. Civil society withers and dies, replaced by the beneficent state.
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Nor does Trump and Clinton’s love affair with government power stop with economics. In almost any given situation, from freedom of speech to freedom of religion to police power, their default is in favor of government control. The idea of individual autonomy seems completely foreign to them. Clinton clearly thinks in terms of the collective, rather than the individual. And Trump compounds his anti-liberalism with appeals to nationalism and racial resentment.
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The United States is hardly alone in witnessing the rise of a new illiberal politics. Europe is rife with it, from Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and the Law and Justice party in Poland to Jobbik in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia. We just never thought it could or would happen here.
But as we contemplate the election of an illiberal American president, we should understand that, more than ever, there is a need to make the case for free markets, individual dignity, and an open society.A short and sweet bulletin to kick off your long holiday weekend. As the president flops around in the mud of salacious gossip, petty insults, and alleged blackmail -- and as the Republican Party consumes itself over an unpopular healthcare bill that they can't agree on, and have barely attempted to market to voters, despite seven years of big promises -- a new national survey confirms what one might expect: Donald Trump is an unpopular president:
Voters are souring on President Donald Trump and the GOP, and nearly 75 percent indicate they are either uneasy or alarmed about the way things are going in Washington, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today national poll of registered voters. Trump’s unfavorable rating has risen 8 points, to 55 percent, since a March poll by Suffolk University/USA Today. Forty percent of voters now look on him favorably, compared to 45 percent in March. And 53 percent of voters polled this week disapprove of the job he is doing, compared to 44 percent in March.
His above-the fray Vice President fares a bit better, but isn't exactly crushing it: Pence's favorability rating is just about dead even, at (41/43). And the beleaguered, divided, frustrated Republican Party is in bad shape at (32/55). Historically, Democrats and their "Resistance" base should be primed for a big comeback, their string of special election losses notwithstanding. A blue wave may eventually build, but Democrats are facing one minor problem. Voters dislike them even more than the president they're resisting:
USA Today/Suffolk poll
Favorable/Unfavorable:
Trump 40/55
Pence 41/43
Dems 35/51
Media 36/50
GOP 32/55 — Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 30, 2017
Among the overall electorate, 46 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Pelosi, compared with 30 percent who view her favorably, according to a new Morning Consult/POLITICO poll. Pelosi doesn’t fare conspicuously worse than other congressional leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan is viewed unfavorably by 42 percent of Americans and viewed favorably by 37 percent.
As you can see, the national press -- which has never hidden its disdain for conservatives and outright contempt for Trump -- is treading water alongside the object of their barely-concealed opposition. The president's favorable rating is higher than the media's, although his unfavorable numbers are worse. At (36/50), the public's dim view of the press is almost identical to their negative feelings on Democrats, perhaps appropriately. In another new survey out this week, the national political figure with the worst brand in America is...Nancy Pelosi, whom rank-and-file Democrats continue to support
The Morning Consult write-up asserts that Pelosi's numbers aren't "conspicuously worse" than Paul Ryan's, but their data doesn't back that up. He's five points underwater; she's 16 points underwater. She's also energizing to Republicans and toxic with independents:
More insurers seeking high premium increases for ACA plans https://t.co/kGruXOYrOL — R Loret de Mola, MD (@loretdemola) June 30, 2017
"Rate requests underscore struggles under ACA to enroll enough healthy people..." #ItsWorking https://t.co/nUUoCRWYNE — Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 30, 2017
The Free Beacon reports on GOP data suggesting that Pelosi is especially radioactive in swing districts being targeted by Democrats in 2018. No wonder Republicans are preparing to elevate and nationalize her profile yet again.Despite the unpopularity of the still-incomplete Senate healthcare bill, only 11 percent of respondents in the USA Today poll want to see Obamacare remain in place. Everyone else is split between repeal and major fixes. It's failing:Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 4, 2013, 7:24 PM GMT By Alan Boyle, Science Editor
Six years ago, the inconvenient truth surrounding human-caused climate change was edgy enough to earn a Nobel Prize for Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — but the IPCC's upcoming re-assessment of our climatic future is far less likely to shake up the planet. Instead, the next chapter of the climate saga is shaping up as a long exposition, driven by economics rather than politics or science.
"The core scientific understanding has been in place for decades," says Roger Pielke Jr., a climate policy analyst and professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The IPCC draft report due for release later this month reflects that core understanding: Earth's climate is changing, industrial activity is a factor in that change, and the effects of those changes will be increasingly felt in the decades ahead. Based on last month's leaks, the report may play up the potential effect on sea levels and play down the effect on surface temperatures — but Pielke says those projections amount to mere fine tuning.
Roger Pielke Jr. is associated with the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and other policy research centers. Courtesy of R. Pielke Jr.
There's a lot of fine tuning going on in climate science nowadays: For example, an increasing number of studies are setting out detailed forecasts for future weather patterns, or trying to explain why past predictions on rising seas or rising temperatures haven't come to pass. Pielke told NBC News that such studies are basically "watching the wiggles" in long-term trends.
"That's a little bit like watching the stock market from noon until 1 and trying to figure out what's going to happen to your retirement portfolio," the 44-year-old said.
What is to be done?
So if the core science is basically settled, how is that translating into government policies on climate change? "Not much has changed on the policy level, other than our awareness of how poorly the policies have been performing, " Pielke said. He doesn't expect the next IPCC report to remake the policy landscape, either.
That's not to say there haven't been dramatic shifts. The economics of energy production have had a far greater effect on the climate outlook than the Kyoto Protocol. "It's hard to overstate how dramatically the energy landscape has changed over the past five years," Pielke said.
The rise of natural gas — thanks in part to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" — is the biggest factor behind that change. Pielke acknowledges that fracking has become an environmental flashpoint, due to concerns about pollution and the potential seismic effect at drilling sites. But as an energy source, natural gas outshines coal in terms of its climate impact, and in terms of its contribution to U.S. energy independence.
"It has made the U.S. more competitive in some respects, because of the cheaper cost of energy," Pielke said. "It has led to a significant decrease in emissions.... The mathematics of natural gas are that it's about two-thirds or half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy, compared to coal. Which is a good thing, if you're worried about carbon dioxide. But it's still two-thirds to a half."
The next inconvenient truth
When it comes to policy, the inconvenient truth — or, in Pielke's words, "the uncomfortable reality" — is that the range of possibilities for government action will have a marginal effect at best on global climate. If anything, the current trend is to fall back on fossil fuels to close any perceived energy gap.
Germany, for example, was once considered a leader in making the transition from fossil fuels to nuclear power and renewables. But in the wake of Japan's Fukushima nuclear crisis, the country is unplugging the nuclear reactors and shifting to gas- and coal-fired power generation in a big way.
Japan, too, is in a state of energy flux. Since Fukushima, the Asian country has increased its reliance on coal, oil and gas. That trend was starting to turn around over the past couple of months, but renewed concern about Fukushima has cast a pall over nuclear power once again.
Despite all the efforts to promote wind, solar and other renewable sources of power, the statistics are pretty much the same as they were 20 years ago: Eighty-seven percent of total power production continues to come from fossil fuels, due to the ever-increasing global demand for energy. "If people were under the impression that renewables were gaining share, they're not," Pielke said.
A painless carbon tax?
To make a dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, Pielke said the world's economies would have to drive that 87 percent down to 10 percent, while at the same time doubling or tripling global energy production. Unless some sort of climate crisis radically changes public sentiment, the only way to do that is through fostering technological innovations on a scale comparable to the shale-gas revolution of the past 30 years, he said.
"We need to start thinking about energy like we think about national defense, or health R&D," Pielke said. He noted that federal support for energy research and development (including fossil fuels) amounts to $5 billion per year, compared with $150 billion for military R&D and $40 billion for health R&D, he noted.
To fund more research, Pielke suggests a tax on carbon dioxide production — say, $5 per ton of carbon. The tax should be small enough to avoid setting off political alarm bells, but large enough to lay the groundwork for America's carbon-free energy future. And the world's, for that matter.
What will that energy future look like? Pielke resists bringing out the crystal ball.
"We have a horrible track record of picking technological winners, because we don't know where breakthroughs are going to occur," he said. "Breakthroughs could come in solar, they could come in energy storage or transmission. It could be modular nuclear reactors.... There are far-out ideas about capturing carbon dioxide. There's tidal power, there's fusion. The list goes on and on, but we need an energy R&D portfolio big enough so that some of these things may become possible."
Climate policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr., author of "The Climate Fix," joins NBC News Digital's Alan Boyle at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show that airs on Blog Talk Radio as well as in the Second Life virtual world. Tune in, join the virtual audience in the Exploratorium's Second Life auditorium, or listen on demand via Blog Talk Radio or iTunes. To ask questions via Twitter, use the hashtag #AskVS. Here's a rundown of previous "Virtually Speaking Science" episodes:
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding +Alan Boyle to your Google+ circles. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.I love me some Julian, and Wren will ALWAYS be my “A”, but is anyone else nervous about his return to PLL?
I feel like after everything that happened Tuesday night & all of the days since, I am extremely worried that Marlene is going to use his return to Rosewood as an opportunity to try and present him as someone who has never been a suspect in the first place.
She keeps digging herself into a hole with the vague & frustratingly incorrect “answers” that she continues to give about the massive amount of plot holes in the story line. I’m worried because I can totally see her taking Wren Kingston down with her, just so that she can prove herself right.
She has already claimed in a recent interview that she has no idea why we thought Wren was A. And do you know what she had the nerve to say when she was asked that exact question?:
“I don’t know why, because he’s someone we haven’t really cast suspicion on yet.”
.…………………………………….?
…………………………….?
……………….?
…but are we watching the same show?Posted by Luke Taylor on February 6, 2014
There are around 456,000 people who have epilepsy in the UK and around 50 million worldwide. Given the number of people with epilepsy, there is still an unacceptable amount of misunderstanding, misinformation and stigma surrounding the condition.
Whether you have friends, family members or work colleagues with epilepsy and you want to know more about epilepsy then you can use our simple guide. If you don’t have epilepsy then it can be difficult to know what to say and do. Our guide is designed to help spread awareness around epilepsy and etiquette including things you should know as well as dos and don’ts around epilepsy.
If you have epilepsy then please share this guide with your friends, family, colleagues and help raise awareness.
Epilepsy Etiquette Infographic
For anyone using a screenreader or similar device here is all of the information contained in our Epilepsy Infographic
Epilepsy Dos and Don’ts
Don’t refer to me as an epileptic or label me.
I am an individual with many interesting things about me. I also have epilepsy.
Don’t assume that epilepsy is a mental condition.
Epilepsy is a physical disorder that has nothing to do with mental health or illness.
Don’t offer me advice on my epilepsy.
I know my condition best. Unsolicited advice and tips are not helpful.
Don’t presume that everyone with epilepsy has the same condition.
There are many different forms of epilepsy. Seizures can differ between people.
Don’t assume that living with epilepsy is easy.
It’s extremely hard physically and emotionally living with epilepsy.
Don’t patronise me because I have epilepsy.
Treat me with respect and don’t talk down to me. I want to be understood without judgement or preconceived assumptions.
Epileptic Seizures Dos and Don’ts
Do talk to me about my needs and how you can help.
Feel free to discuss my epilepsy with me and find out how you can help. Listen to any instructions I have.
Don’t use words like fits, spells, epis or attacks.
Just call them seizures. Ignorance and discrimination only make it harder so stick to the facts.
Do give me time alone after a seizure.
I may be confused, disorientated and embarrassed so just leave me alone to gather myself.
In the event of a seizure…
Dos
Guide me from danger – remove harmful objects from nearby & cushion my head.
Stay with me until I am recovered.
Call an ambulance if the seizure lasts more than 5 minutes.
Aid my breathing by gently placing me in the recovery position once the seizure has finished.
Be calmly reassuring.
Don’ts
Restrain my movements.
Put anything in my mouth.
Move me unless I am in danger.
Attempt to bring me round.
Give me anything to eat or drink until I am recovered.
Thanks to Tiffany Kairos from The Epilepsy Network and Linda Metson of Epilepsy Hackney for their input.
Please help raise awareness by sharing our etiquette and epilepsy guide. For more information on epilepsy visit www.epilepsysociety.org.uk. If you want to talk to our small dedicated team about epilepsy life insurance then give us a call on 01275 404268 or get a quote.Quoted By:
> CTR took out a "Larry Silverstein" insurance policy a year ago. (CTR are expendable pawns/loose ends that have links to "kiddie stuff")
> Various MSM outlets are going bankrupt due to supporting Hillary.
> Watch for more "gas leaks" and other cover stories to occur between now and the election.
> SJW/Feminists have Frontal Lobe damage. (Social Engineering)
> If Syria falls, the next County that would fall would be Turkey.
> Hillary has a List of countries she wants to attack: http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/92901346/#92901346
> Mexico & other south american countries have ISIS and radical cells that have been setting up shop overtime & using the Cartels trafficking networks.
> If the Bernie supporters in the DNC tried to protest, the DNC was going to stage a terror attack to blame it on them.
As always, I try to get information out:Post by karrikuh » Mon Aug 08, 2011 6:23 am
2 oscillators with triangle, sawtooth, pulse and noise waveforms
oscillator pulse-width modulation (PWM) and slew rate modulation (morphing between triangle and sawtooth)
oscillator hard synchronization and ring modulation
2 ADSR envelope generators
LFO with host tempo synchronization
3 filter types modeled after classic analog hardware: 4-pole (24 db/oct) and 2-pole (12 db/oct) lowpass, bandpass
filter code based on nonlinear zero-delay feedback technique for accurate emulation of analog counterparts
3 voice modes: Monophonic with retriggering, Monophonic Legato and 8-voice Polyphonic
low CPU usage
100% coded in C++
native 64-bit support
BUGFIX: DCO mode with Osc2 square/pulse wave was broken
noise source now separate from Osc 1
Osc 2: narrow pulse wave
LFO: extended rate range
GUI update
BUGFIX: potential crasher
some more presets
Charlatan is a polyphonic, subtractive virtual analog (VA) synthesizer plugin with design focus on sound quality and easy usability. The design philosophy was to provide a feature set just flexible enough to cover a wide range of sounds while deliberately abstaining from countless parameters and modulation options cluttering the user interface and distracting from the creative process. That being said, Charlatan's architecture is flexible enough to create all kinds of sounds, from conventional classic leads, basses and pads to weird blips and noises.While making no compromises about sound quality, the algorithms have been optimized for efficient CPU usage making Charlatan well suited as a ''bread and butter'' synth even in projects with a large number of plugin instances.Best of all, it's FREEWARE! I'm happy to hear your opinions and suggestions! Enjoy!- I don't like the GUI color. Can I replace the GUI skin?Yes, you may use a Resource Editor to replace the image in the DLL. I even allow you to share your hacked DLL as long as you distribute it along with the original readme/license files and a clear note that this is not the original version and point people to the place where they can find the original.- Will you add official skinning support?Not in the near future as it involves quite some work with IMO only limited value in return.- Will you add a proper preset management system? Arpeggiator? Integrated effects?See answer to previous question. I'm more into the UNIX philosophy of designing software tools which is to do one thing and do it well. There are already great free standalone arps/FX available.- I really feel I need another osc/LFO/envelope/...As you are aware, Charlatan's all about simplicity. I really feel that I have reached a feature set which gives you the best versatility/complexity ratio. If I wanted an even more flexible architecture, it'd probably better be in a new plugin.- Will there be a Mac version?I'd love to have one, but there's lot of work to done, as I'm using my custom development framework, which currently supports Windows only. Also, I need a Mac...1.4.1 (2013-06-04)1.4 (2013-06-02)More info and download: http://www.blaukraut.infoI often think of a sour beer as a collaboration between the brewer and the microorganisms involved, with one party or the other having a greater deal of control at different times. A sour beer begins its life like any other beer, at the control of the brewer during the brew day. Like a baton in a relay race, this control is then handed off to the microorganisms during fermentation, only to be taken back by the brewer during the blending process. If a beer is to be bottle conditioned, the microbes will get to have the final word on that beer’s flavor, as changes often still occur after the blending and bottling process. I believe that remembering this big picture approach to sour beer creation is important for brewers, because it reminds us that we are not alone in determining the ultimate fate of our beers. This picture also highlights the two times when we as brewers have the most control over our creations, during the brew day and during the blending process. If you’ve been following along with my series of articles on aged and blended sour beers, you may have already read the articles covering fermentation management and blending. This article marks the third in the series and will cover the sour beer brew day. The goal of this article will be to discuss aspects of sour beer recipe creation and brew day processes that can be controlled to yield differing results. As a roadmap, these topics will include ingredient choices, recipe formulation, as well as mashing, sparging, boiling, and cooling processes. Many of these topics are not exclusive to sour brewing and will contain information applicable to a wide variety of beer styles. We will also cover in detail a few topics unique to the sour beer world such as the creation of traditional lambic wort for spontaneous fermentation and raw “no-boil” beers. Let’s get started with a discussion of ingredients and recipe formulation.
Creating Sour Beer Recipes As a general rule, sour beers derive the essential backbone of their flavor balance from an interplay between “sweet” malt characteristics and the “sour” flavors provided from a variety of organic acids. The reason these beers taste fundamentally different from classic beer styles is a result of the swapping of classic hop bitterness for acid sourness. When first tasting and learning about sour beers, it’s easy to get hung up on their acidity, thinking erroneously that these acids are responsible for the complexity present in many sour beers… For the most part, this is not true. The two most common acids in sour beers are lactic and acetic acid, created respectively by lactic acid bacteria and Brettanomyces. For most tasters, and at average concentrations, these acids taste different, lactic acid tends to provide a soft, tangy, fruity acidity reminiscent of greek yogurt or sauerkraut. Meanwhile, acetic acid tends to come across a bit more biting and vinegary when tasted at similar concentrations to lactic acid. Most aged and blended sour beers will portray a combination of these two acids in a balance that provides a rounded sourness that triggers both salivary and trigeminal nerve sensations (they get you in the jowls). Depending upon the use of specialty ingredients such as fruits and spices, sour beers may also contain malic, citric, or tartaric acids as well. While each of these have a slightly different flavor, they all tend to fall in line with lactic acid in providing some degree of generalized backbone acidity. The reason I bring all of this up is to emphasize the concept that, while different sour beers may have varying acid profiles, these acids only give rise to a small portion of the overall complexity in these beers. As a brewer, it’s important not to get hung up on the overall acidity of a sour beer as being the most important goal to shoot for. Virtually any well crafted sour beer will taste great at a relatively wide range of acidity levels. Degree of acidity and beer quality are not related, and there are a tremendous number of sour beers being produced both at home and professionally that would likely benefit from a little less, rather than a little more, acidity. Don’t get me wrong… I love a plethora of bracingly sour beers. My point here is to emphasize that sour beers are much more than just their acidity, and that big acidity in the absence of other interesting flavors makes for a pretty one-dimensional experience. So with that said, let’s take a look at the portions of a sour beer recipe that do provide complexity:
Malt, Grain, & Fermentable Choices When creating a sour beer recipe, the other half of the “sweet and sour” backbone is provided by a brewer’s choice of fermentables. While at best there may be half a dozen major acids in a sour beer, the number of flavor compounds that can be contributed by malted or unmalted grains numbers easily into the hundreds. If a recipe contains fruit, either as a hot side kettle addition or as a cold side fermentation / blending addition, the flavor possibilities contributed by fermentables become expanded to an even greater degree. My goal in writing this article is not to discuss an endless number of permutations of malt choices, but rather to highlight a few ways of thinking about these choices in regard to a sour beer’s overall flavor presentation. Let’s start this discussion with what I imagine to be a recipe for the world’s least complex sour beer: Dr. Slambic’s Lawnmower Sour 40% Corn or Rice (Cereal Mashed)
60% American 2-Row Brewer’s Malt
No Hops
Kettle Soured with a single strain of Lactobacillus plantarum
Re-boiled
Fermented to completion with California Ale yeast While I included the adjunct corn or rice to draw obvious attention to the recipe’s similarities to American Light Lager, if you swapped those out with white wheat malt, this recipe would mirror those being used for a large number of both Berliner Weisse and American Golden Sour base beers. Such a recipe has either the benefit or the detriment of ending up with virtually no distinct malt character. This can be a good thing if you plan to highlight other unique ingredients like fruit, age the beer in a subtle oak such as used white wine barrels, or if you plan to allow the beer to develop unique fermentation flavors through long aging with a mixed culture. However, even in situations like these, I feel that golden sour beers and “Berliner Weisse”-ish beers tend to benefit from a little more malt complexity. Don’t be afraid to swap in character-rich options such as floor malted Pilsner or an English Maris Otter varietal for all of your base malt. Likewise, swapping out all or a portion of the white wheat malt with options like spelt, oats, or rye can add another layer of complexity to these beers. Malts such as Vienna, Munich, Aromatic, Biscuit, or Honey can also make fine additions to a golden sour recipe. The goal of such substitutions would be to introduce a wider variety of malt flavors to these beers. Flavors like crackers, flour, biscuits, honey, bread, spice, nuts and grain are easy to layer into the background of a sour beer. Unlike roasted or caramelized malts, which we will discuss next, characterful base malts can generally be used without the risk of becoming cloying or detracting from other elements of the flavor profile such as its esters, phenols, fruit, or oak contributions. If we apply these ingredient concepts and a more complex fermentation plan to our original recipe, we may come up with something like this: Dr. Lambic’s Fireside Sour 50% Floor Malted Pilsner
10% Vienna
30% White Wheat Malt
10% Rye Malt
Kettle Soured with a single strain of Lactobacillus plantarum
Re-boiled with 10 to 15 IBUs late addition Hallertauer
Fermented to attenuation with German Ale Yeast
Aged for 3 months on a Brettanomyces blend As a result of our ingredient choices, we would expect a wider spectrum of malty flavors to persist through fermentation and into the final product. Specifically, I would be looking for graininess, crackers, and flour from the Pilsner addition, bread crust from the Vienna, and a malty spice from the rye. To mirror souring from the first recipe, I kept the single strain kettle souring practice, but this time added some late noble variety kettle hops to the second boil, adding another layer of flavor complexity. The choice of a German Ale Yeast will help to retain a nice mouthfeel through the production of glycerol while also promoting the malty flavors of our ingredient choices. Finally, a relatively short aging cycle on a healthy pitch of Brettanomyces will promote a more complex bouquet of esters and phenols in the finished beer.
Crystal malts are a common addition to Flanders Red recipes, but these malts can also make a synergistic addition to fruited sours. Or, for lighter Lovibond varieties (typically 10 to 30 L), crystal malts can be used to increase the mouthfeel and complexity of low-ABV golden sours in the same way that these malts are used to boost the backbone of session IPAs. Every SRM / Lovibond range for crystal malts will bring a different set of caramel, candy, raisin, stone-fruit, fruitcake, or lightly roasted flavors to the table. When writing recipes, these malts should be used sparingly. In many cases, the perception of sweetness imparted by these malts will continue to remain after fermentation and extended aging. Even in an aggressively sour beer, it is possible to create cloying sweetness with crystal malts, so proceed with caution when using them for more than a few percentage points of the total grain bill. Here is an example grain bill for a Flanders Red Ale to use as a starting point: Dr. Lambic’s Startup Red: 50% Pilsner Malt (grain, cracker, flour)
20% Munich Malt (sweet, malty, grain)
20% White Wheat Malt (wheat, flour)
5% Caramel Wheat (candy, toffee, sweet caramel)
5% Special “B” Malt (plum, raisin, burnt sugar) Finding their place in a wide range of brown to black sours, roasted malts will impart flavors such as coffee, cacao, chocolate, almond, toast, and dried fruit to these beers. It can be difficult to find the right balance between some of these flavors and the background acidity of a sour beer. But, when a recipe works well with both the acidity level and fermentation characteristics, these can be deeply layered and beautiful beers. Highly kilned malts contain nitrogen-based melanoidins in the pyrazine and pyridine groups that contribute acrid, burnt, and lightly smoky flavors to beer. To my palate, these flavors can accentuate the more negative aspects of phenols produced by Brettanomyces, making these compounds come across as plastic, medicinal, burnt rubber, and Band-Aid, as opposed to the more positive flavors (often contributed by the same phenols) of farmyard, spice, hay, wood, and bitter. Taking all of this into consideration, when designing a sour brown or black sour recipe, it is best to avoid the most highly kilned barley malts. Options that are de-husked or range in the lower roast SRM levels such as chocolate varieties of barley, wheat, or rye will help to avoid the acrid flavors most likely to clash with Brett phenolics. Here is an example grain bill for a deep brown / black sour: Dr. Lambic’s Baseline Brown: 60% Maris Otter (bready, biscuit, nutty)
25% Munich Malt (sweet, malty, grain)
6% Aromatic Malt (deeply malty)
5% Extra Dark Crystal Malt (150 L) (toffee, raisin, fruitcake)
4% Midnight Wheat Malt (smooth roast, coffee) In general, sour brewers love experimentation, and as such may decide to include a wide variety of non-grain fermentable options during the mash or boil such as vegetables, fruits, honey, candy syrups, etc. When incorporating these types of ingredients, it’s important to keep in mind that the sugars they will contribute are generally of the highly fermentable type such as glucose, sucrose, or fructose. In classic brewing these additions can be used to increase ABV without increasing the body of a beer, or to create a wort that will attenuate to a higher degree than one composed entirely of malted ingredients. Both of these properties hold true in sour brewing as well, but additionally this modification of sugar balance towards the more fermentable may aid faster souring by Lactobacillus (these bacteria are adapted to most readily ferment simple sugars), reduce the long-chain sugars available to Brettanomyces during aging, and reduce the mouthfeel of a family of beers that already tend towards being thinner and drier. The body and mouthfeel of a sour beer is something that should be considered during recipe development. In general, the following table highlights components of a sour beer that affect body and mouthfeel: There are two issues in sour beer fermentation that can lead to a beer having an undesirably thin body and mouthfeel. The first of these is lack of glycerol production by Brettanomyces. The second is a nearly total reduction of residual dextrins (very high attenuation) in most mixed culture fermentations due to the ability of many strains of Brettanomyces and bacteria to produce enzymes which convert these long chain sugars into fermentable short chain sugars. One method used to combat thin mouthfeel during recipe formulation is the inclusion of ingredients with higher levels of protein and beta-glucan content. In my experience, oats and rye make fantastic additions to nearly any sour beer recipe for this reason.
Incorporating Hops As I alluded earlier in our discussion of a sour beer’s balance, these beers tend not to have high levels of bitterness, but this does not preclude the usage of hops altogether from sour beer recipes. In fact, hop bitterness and flavor can both add further layers of complexity to a sour beer’s profile and provide a means by which to control the acid producing bacteria in mixed culture fermentations. Additionally, hops can provide a sour beer mixed culture with a variety of aromatic alcohols and glycosides that can be biologically transformed into esters and other aromatic compounds. This creates the possibility for unique and appealing fermentation aromas which would not occur without the use of hops. When choosing which hops to use, there are a great number of options. As a general rule more traditional European varieties such as Kent Goldings, Fuggles, Styrian Goldings, Hallertauer, or any noble hops will easily incorporate into the flavor profiles of most sour beer styles. It can be a little trickier to use American, New Zealand, or Australian options with a wider range of citrus, pine, and tropical fruit flavors. These options tend to work well if you have a mixed |
her first idea was to have a brass band playing over severe electronic beats. In the event, she relied on flute, harp, accordion, and harmonium to echo the old world. Talvin Singh supplied Indian string arrangements; the Brazilian arranger Eumir Deodato emerged from retirement to endow techno dance stompers like “Hyper-ballad” with a Nelson Riddle lushness. The intermeshing of acoustic and electronic sound succeeded not only because the production scrupulously avoided the usual formulas but because the songs were stocked with historical cues. Several of them lean on a stately tango rhythm, which supplies a hint of between-the-wars cabaret. The gently rocking chords of “Isobel” are cousins of Gershwin’s chords for “Summertime.” The smoldering nostalgia of Björk’s musical material is balanced by the urgent optimism of her lyrics, which seem always charged with the sense that the next moment or meeting could transform everything. She always seems to be exclaiming in breathy terms of some visceral but elusive “it”: “I can sense it.... It’s coming up”; “One day, one day, it will all come true”; “When she does it, she means to”; “But it hasn’t happened yet”; “I’ve seen it all”; “It’s not up to you.” On a bewitching new song, “Desired Constellation,” she repeatedly lets out a high, falling cry of “How am I going to make it right?” Her lyrics, which are sometimes composed with the help of the poet Sjón, are a kind of poetry of possibility. She is unafraid of the darker byways of emotion, but she has no time for free-floating, modernist-style alienation. On “Who Is It,” she sings, in a definitive statement of her emotional philosophy, “Carry my joy on the left, carry my pain on the right.” Like the greatest opera singers, Björk combines precision of pitch with intensity of emotion, and any diva will tell you how hard it is to master one without sacrificing the other. If you throw a lot of emotion into your voice, you can easily lose control of the pitch. If you focus on the pitch, you may find it difficult to convey emotion. Something tremendous must be happening in the brain when a singer is able to escape that double bind, and Björk’s new album is like a CAT scan of the process. “Everyone loves Maria Callas,” Björk told me, “because she doesn’t get locked up in a technique box. She keeps her rrrr”—she gestured toward her chest. “The unity of emotion and word and tone. Especially, the purity of expression. Every genre has these mechanical clichés that get implanted in the voices and start to hide the power of words.” She sang a bit of rock and roll around the words “I don’t know nothing” and made a bit of bel canto from the words “I know everything.” Björk manages to sound as if she knows everything and nothing at once.
In February of this year, Björk went to Salvador, the capital of the Bahia province of Brazil, to watch Matthew Barney create a high-tech, avant-garde float for Carnaval. Salvador’s Carnaval is not as flamboyant as Rio de Janeiro’s; the emphasis is more on the energy of Brazilian music and dance, especially the African-accented music of the Bahia region. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, leaders of the Tropicália musical revolution of the sixties and seventies, both come from Bahia, and both were in attendance as Barney’s float made its entrance. Barney’s musical consultant was the downtown New York musician Arto Lindsay, who spent his childhood in Brazil. Björk wasn’t directly involved in the float project, but the Nordic idea was manifest in the person of Valgeir, who was in charge of electronic samples. Björk settled herself apart from the action, renting a house along the beach in the old hippie community of Arembepe, about an hour up the coast. She was having a hard time adjusting to the warm weather and had come down with the flu. The other Icelanders had instituted a minor social revolution at the house. They released a supposedly bad-mannered dog from its kennel, and the animal now happily roamed free with a tennis ball. They invited the house’s domestic staff—a gardener, a cook, and a cleaning lady—to sit down at the dinner table with them. Valgeir had set up a makeshift studio in a ten-by-ten-foot spare bedroom. An old air-conditioner rattled ineffectively in the window. When Björk was feeling better, she played me the results of her sessions with Tagaq, the Inuit throat-singer. The Inuit tribes in northern Canada have a long-cherished game in which two female singers sit face to face and make all manner of strange, rapid, breathy noises, in an attempt to make each other smile. Björk fell in love with this kind of vocal horseplay at the time of “Vespertine”; it recalled the sensuous avant-gardism of Meredith Monk, whom she had long admired. On “Medúlla,” Tagaq’s artful hyperventilations have filled up the middle spaces that, on earlier albums, were occupied by the electronic swirl. Bahia was threatening to muscle its way into the already crowded sound-world of the album. Björk had been listening in on Lindsay’s rehearsals with a group of Afro-Brazilian drummers, who were to play alongside the float. They came from two Bahian groups, Cortejo Afro and Ilê Aiyê. They played complex, ever-shifting beats with a powerful martial tinge. Björk thought of putting them on “Mouths Cradle,” another of the choral-powered songs on the album, in which she sings of “the simplicity of the ghostlike beast, the purity of what he wants.” Later, the drummers were recorded, and they gave the music a rough, grainy texture, a propulsive drive. But they weighed on Björk’s conscience; they violated the strictly vocal concept that she had set up, and they seemed too obvious a move for a tourist from the north. “I don’t want to be colonial, culinary,” she told me. “My brain says no, but my heart says yes.” The climactic night of Carnaval arrived. Barney’s creation was to make its appearance in the parade of floats as it moved along the oceanfront of Salvador. Björk ventured out in a small van with various Icelanders and friends of Barney’s. About a mile from the beach, a Brazilian security detail—nine men in charcoal-gray suits, sunglasses, and earpiece headphones—drove up in a second van to supervise the celebrity visitor. Björk wanted to walk the rest of the way through the crowd, but the security people vetoed the idea. They formed a V-shaped wedge in front, and the crowd parted. Björk sang along to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the radio and talked again about “The Master and Margarita,” which Johann, her Pilates instructor, had just read. “When I was young,” she said, “I was surrounded by friends who were always having these drunken passionate arguments all around me. I sometimes feel as if I read a lot of important books just by listening to their arguments.” Brazilian paparazzi had got wind of the approaching convoy; they swarmed around the van as we disembarked. Indeed, the entire expedition had been arranged with the understanding that if Björk allowed herself to be photographed on this occasion then she would otherwise be left alone. “Robert Altman should make a movie about the paparazzi,” Björk said, registering the tension of the situation. “About this little world of people who lurk in the bushes for five days, hardly sleeping or eating, waiting like hunters for the prey, for Lady Diana or whoever. They hate each other, and they hate the prey. It is all about the moment of the kill. It would be a very interesting movie, yes?” She said all this without bitterness, as if she were observing a phenomenon that had nothing to do with her, which, indeed, it really didn’t. “Actually, most people here don’t know who I am. They just know that I’m famous for some reason.” A little later, we were on a balcony high above the street, facing the old Barra lighthouse. Barney’s float came into view, a huge, dark, fascinating thing. In the lead was a big industrial tractor decorated with tree trunks on which phallic candles had been mounted. It was pulling a long trailer bed with high walls the color of rust, on top of which Arto Lindsay’s musicians and Valgeir were playing. Björk explained that Valgeir was sampling the sounds of wheels crunching over various wood implements, which had some significance in the Afro-Brazilian candomblé religion. She began to sing her own version of a candomblé hymn. Valgeir, dressed in a lab technician’s coat, was hunched over his laptop, wearing much the same bemused expression that he had displayed when pizzas piled up in his kitchen in Reykjavík. Barney was directing the action from the street. Björk waved at them while the paparazzi snapped away and the security men warded off an overzealous journalist who had begun yelling at Björk in frustration. An hour later, Björk managed to shake off all but two of the security people and worked her way into the crowds that were following the floats. For fifteen minutes or so, before the photographers picked up the trail again, she danced along the Avenida Oceânica with a couple of friends. I thought of Bulgakov’s Margarita, flying on her broom above the dead lights of Moscow: “Invisible and free! Invisible and free!” The trip to Brazil felt like another miniature saga, another study in the conflict between the Nordic idea and the infinite possibilities that cluster around it. In a way, though, there was no conflict. Icelanders, in their isolation, have always quilted into their culture whatever useful influences they have found on the outside. They live so far from the rest of the world that they have had to remake it on their own terms. They are icebound cosmopolitans, studying us all.
In 1998, Björk moved from London back to Reykjavík. It was the beginning of a period of retrenchment, a retreat from the gregarious, promiscuous spirit of “Debut” and “Post.” Her albums of the next few years, “Homogenic” and “Vespertine,” turn progressively inward. Harsh, dark tones enter the music. “The album represented some kind of doomsday,” Björk said of “Homogenic” in an extended interview with Ásmundur Jónsson, the manager of Bad Taste, that appeared with her “Live Box” collection. “Some kind of explosion had to take place, some kind of death.” At the same time, “Homogenic” evoked reassuringly familiar Icelandic landscapes, whether the lush, rolling sound-fields of “Jóga”—written in honor of the singer’s old friend—or the volcanic violence of “Pluto,” which seems like Björk’s answer to Leifs’s “Hekla.” Mark Bell gave the production a gleaming minimalist sheen. “Vespertine,” released at the end of the long-ago summer of 2001, was a homecoming of a different kind—a swerve toward a more intimate, chamber-music style of performance, without any of the heavy beats that had made her earlier music amenable to clubgoers. Matmos, an electronic duo from San Francisco, wrapped several songs in a mesmerizing sonic filigree, a gentle overlay of murmurs and rustles and clicks. “Vespertine” was Björk’s most ambitious work to date; it made clear what was already implicit in the previous albums—that she was not simply a singer with great taste in collaborators but a full-fledged composer with a singular command of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture. The tone of “Vespertine” is set by the first sound you hear: a half-diminished seventh, an intensely Romantic chord that broods at a slant from a main key that never quite appears. “There lies my passion hidden,” Björk sings, drawing the chord around her like a blanket. The harmonic adventurousness climaxes on the song “An Echo, A Stain,” in which a chorus sings a huge, soft, shimmering cluster of tones. In front of this dreamlike backdrop, Björk sings more tantalizing lyric fragments: “I’m sorry you saw that. I’m sorry he did it.” Put this monodrama in a concert setting and it would hold its own against any vocal composition of the past decade. While intellectual types have celebrated Björk’s recent work—musicologists are lining up to analyze what one scholar plausibly calls her “anti- and hyper-pop”—some longtime fans have voiced discontent. “Vespertine” was not unlike Radiohead’s electronically saturated album “Kid A,” which in 2000 scandalized the rock world by jettisoning guitars and guitar chords. But Björk managed to avoid the appearance of writing against her audience, of launching a polemic against mainstream popular music. She has an ability to stand apart from the crowd while not holding herself aloof from it. In private, she can wax critical about a lot of the music that’s going on around her, but her catholicity of taste is real and automatic. I didn’t hear anything cynical or calculated, for example, in the way she talked about collaborating with Beyoncé. When I asked what she liked about Beyoncé, she answered, with a slightly disbelieving look, “This is an album about voices, and she’s got the most amazing voice.” Although Björk disavowed the classical world at an early age, she never entirely detached from it. She has a strong working knowledge of the twentieth-century repertory, and is happy to discuss the pros and cons of Morton Feldman, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Steve Reich. (“Minimalism is my abyss!” she says, meaning that she does not like it.) She has experimented from time to time with a direct pop-classical fusion: one version of her song “Cover Me” incorporates the dance of the shepherds from Messiaen’s “La Nativité du Seigneur.” Her most daring venture was to sing excerpts from Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” at the Verbier Festival, in Switzerland, in 1996. She sallied into high atonal Schoenberg at the invitation of the conductor Kent Nagano. “It was an amazing experience for me,” she recalled. “The songs left so much to the imagination of the singer—you know, they were originally written for a cabaret singer or an untrained singer like me. Kent Nagano wanted to make a recording of it, but I really felt that I would be invading the territory of people who sing this for a lifetime.” “Medúlla,” the new album, performs a typical Björkian maneuver, moving forward and looking backward at once. “Who Is It” and “Triumph of a Heart” will reassure those who cherish the big-time sensuality of Björk’s early work. Yet, with contrapuntal layerings of choral parts and tricky harmonies throughout, the record is perhaps Björk’s most “classical” and “composed” to date. The short interludes are not so much songs as studies in vocal texture, in the manner of Meredith Monk. They are crucial to Björk’s conception of the album, forging the links among its huge array of vocal styles, from Inuit throat-singing to hip-hop beatboxing, with the “old-woman melodies” of Iceland still at the center. I had the sense that “Medúlla” was the realization of something that Björk had first imagined when she was still very young. “Sometimes after a long time you end up back where you started,” she told me while riding in the van in Brazil. After a while, the impulse to find a place for Björk in the geography of popular, classical, art, folk, Icelandic, or non-Icelandic music seems fussy. What’s most precious in her work is the glimpse that it affords, in flashing moments, of a future world in which the ideologies, teleologies, style wars, and subdivisions that have so defined music in the past hundred years slip away. Music is restored to its original bliss, free both of the fear of pretension that limits popular music and of the fear of vulgarity that limits classical music. The creative artist once more moves along an unbroken continuum, from folk to art and back again. So far, though, this utopia has only one inhabitant.With the fantasy season now officially over (no one should play week 17), it’s time to turn our attention fully to the off-season. After completing a 2 round 1 QB rookie mock last week, we decided a Superflex mock was in order. If you don’t play in Superflex leagues, you’re truly missing out. Today we reveal our 1st round selections; we’ll share rounds 2 and 3 tomorrow.
1.01 Saquon Barkley, RB, Penn State (@FF_EvilEmpire)
Barkley looks like the consensus #1 pick of the 2018 dynasty community, and for good reason. Saquon has insane measurables, listed 5’11”, 223 lbs with sub 4.4 speed and the strength to lift a truck. He has shown immense talent, proven each week with his vision, tackle breaking, receiving skills, toughness, and statistics. Finally, and maybe most importantly, Barkley exhibits fantastic character, evidenced by his demeanor off the field and by NFL personnel calling him “smart, humble, coachable, teachable.”
1.02 Derrius Guice, RB, LSU (@DFF_Madman)
There’s a chance I would select Guice at 1.01. I like him that much. Having the second pick in the first round saves me draft capital and I still get the guy I value more. So, at 1.02, getting Guice is twice as nice. What have you done for me lately? People have short memories. This kid was a beast last season setting the SEC afire with his rushing totals. I love the way Guice can run around guys and through tight spaces but is just as willing to run DBs over if they get in his way. Running low to the ground with excellent power, Guice has quick feet that never stop moving. He’s a dynamic all-around back with nice lateral quickness. He puts his vision and balance on display in the passing game as well, getting positive yardage on many plays that easily could have resulted in no-gains.
1.03 Courtland Sutton, WR, SMU (@SlizzDigital)
I’ve watched the big name WRs in the 2018 draft class and there is a major drop off after Courtland Sutton. Courtland Sutton is a legitimate #1 WR. Standing at 6’4”, 214 lbs and estimated to run his 40 in the 4.5’s he has the build/makeup of an elite WR. Sutton Topped 1000 yards in back to back season’s while averaging 16.4 yards per reception. Sutton has the physical build to give NFL QBs a large window to put the football in and he is big enough to bully most NFL DBs before and after the catch. I see him landing with Jimmy G in San Fran or Trubisky in Chicago in the draft, both spots are ideal situations for him.
1.04 Nick Chubb, RB, Georgia (@Devywarehouse)
Chubb finished up his college career by being the 2nd All-Time leading rusher in SEC history. Had Chubb not sustained a major knee injury during his Sophomore season he may have surpassed Herschel Walker. Chubb may not be as good as he was prior to his knee injury but he is still the 3rd best back in this class.
1.05 Lamar Jackson, QB, Louisville (@FranchiseKF)
This spot feels like the most likely position that the first QB is taken. Take your pick of Rosen, Mayfield or Jackson here. If you need an immediate contribution from your QB, Rosen or Mayfield are safer choices. Lamar Jackson will immediately be one of the most dynamic runners, at any position, in the entire NFL. The fact that he is still in the infantile stages of development as a QB and has shown the arm talent and ability to appropriately read defenses gives a foretaste of his tremendous ceiling.
1.06 Josh Rosen, QB, UCLA (@DFF_Feuker)
Getting the best pure pocket passer here in a Super flex league is GOLDEN. Prototypical size at 6’4″ 220. Has the arm talent for all the pro level throws. Character concerns are overblown I look at it as no drugs no abuse no arrests no problems. The only on the field problem I have with him isn’t even his fault. Rosen may struggle if his offensive line doesn’t give him average time to throw as he has limited mobility you would want for a porous line.
1.07 Sam Darnold, QB, Southern Cal (@DFF_Brian)
There are questions about whether or not Darnold will declare for the 2018 NFL Draft. Should he forgo his senior season in Los Angeles, I would be very pleased getting him here. While Josh Rosen might be more polished at the moment, and Lamar Jackson is an exciting player that put up tremendous statistics in college, I’d argue Darnold has as much or more upside than both. The fact that he has room to grow says a lot about how high his ceiling is. In my opinion, Darnold has that “it” factor that coaches and GMs look for in a franchise quarterback. He can make all the throws, and by all accounts he’s a tremendous leader. He should make an immediate impact, but should also improve moving forward. He can potentially be my fantasy QB1 for the next decade.
1.08 James Washington, WR, Oklahoma State (@Fulst_rosto)
Arguably ‘18s premier deep threat prospect, the Cowboys senior led the nation in average yards per game with 118.6. Washington burst onto the scene with an impressive 5-184-3 line as a sophomore vs T.C.U in Nov 2015. The 6’ 1” 205lb Cowboys wideout went on to produce 1,000+yds for 3 consecutive years. Returning for his final year at Oklahoma State with a 60-1423-12 stat line helped earn Washington this year’s prestigious Biletnikoff award. James shows exceptional skills tracking the ball at full speed but is not just a burner, winning contested catches is within his repertoire. A slight concern in PPR leagues is his low volume of catches, he averaged only 5.8 per game in ‘17. I will be targeting him in bestball leagues where his big games will be a huge bonus.
1.09 Calvin Ridley, WR, Alabama (@JerrySinDFF)
Going to Alabama as a wide receiver means that you’ll definitely get to play on the biggest stages, but you’ll never be a focal point of the offense. Ridley doesn’t have the stats to warrant a pick here, but he was consistent throughout his entire career, he did everything that was asked of him. As a true freshman, he torched future Top 12 pick, and current starting NFL CB, Trae Waynes, to the tune of 8 catches for 138 yards and 2 TD’s in the CFP semifinal. Also considered Florida State WR Auden Tate with this pick.
1.10 Ronald Jones II, RB, USC (@DFFMemphis)
Jones looks to be another outstanding USC running back. He will enter the Cotton Bowl versus Ohio State as USC’s 5th all-time leading rusher. Jones’ 3,555 career rushing yards at USC put him ahead of guys like OJ Simpson and Reggie Bush. Jones is not a bruiser, as he is only listed at 200 pounds, but he has displayed the ability to handle a heavy workload. Jones had 177 carries as a sophomore and is up to 242 carries as a junior with one game to play. Jones maintained the same 6.1 yards per rush even though his workload increased by 37% this year. Jones is 6’0 and 200, which scares me a little, but makes him very comparable in size to Jamaal Charles.
One of his biggest opportunities post-2016 was showing more toughness, which he addressed by cleaning up his diet and increasing his 2017 workload by 37% and his rushing production by 27%. The biggest remaining concern with Jones is his use as a pass catcher. He only had 11 catches as a sophomore and that number has only moved slightly to 13 this year. Jones will have to show pass-catching skills at the combine and his Pro day or we could see him slide down NFL draft boards. The holds true for dynasty drafts as well. Jones will have to produce in the passing game in order to be an asset in today’s PPR fantasy landscape.
1.11 Bryce Love, RB, Stanford (@DFFMikeJernigan )
Doak Walker award winner. 1,973 yards, 17 TDs, and an 8.3 YPC average. The skill set of Christian McCaffrey, with a smaller build (5’10” and 184lbs). Size could be an issue at the NFL level, but at pick 1.11, I thought it was worth a shot at an elite college RB.
1.12 Damien Harris, RB, Alabama (@DFF_Shane)
Harris has the size of a bell-cow, 5’11” 220 lbs., he’s plenty fast to boot. Watching his film I can count on one hand the number of times I saw him go down on 1st contact. PFF’s 2nd rated most elusive college back Harris is a great blend of strength and speed who can run through or around a defender. Limited pass-catching role in college, but that’s owed to the Alabama offense not a lack of ability.
That’s our wrap-up of Round 1. Tomorrow, we’ll bring you Rounds 2 and 3. Make sure you have a leg-up on your league mates and pre-order the Devy Watch today. As our gift to you when you pre-order today, you’ll immediately receive the 2017 CFB Target and 2017 CFB Dominator Rating data.North Americans need not spend hundreds of dollars to cross the Atlantic Ocean for a European getaway. With its historic architecture, booming gastronomy, and cutting edge cultural scene, Mexico City now offers the same charm as any big city in Europe.
Mexico City is a destination greatly undermined by its public perception. There is no more visible crime here than in other metropolises around the world. Pollution is minimal, and traffic a lot better than what you would find in São Paulo or Mumbai. If you take proper precautions, you will hardly feel the change in elevation. Most people working in the hospitality industry are fluent in English. The weather is temperate year round - it's nice and cool even through the summer. Moreover, there is a lot to do beyond drinking tequila, listening to mariachi bands, and attending business meetings! Recently, the Mexico Tourism Board has done a great job in highlighting the city's museums, artists, chefs, and boutiques - some of which are already on par with those in Paris.
There are enough museums to keep you busy for a month
Mexico City has more museums than any other city in the world (150+ at last count). Not only can you find huge collections of pre-Columbian, colonial and contemporary art, there are artifacts displaying Mexico's rich cultural, social, political and economic heritage. The most famous national museums are the Anthropology and History Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Modern Art Museum, the San Ildefonso Museum, and the Templo Mayor museum.
There are also quirky and interesting themed museums around the city, such as
The Cartoon Museum, Shoe Museum, Pen Museum, Chile and Tequila Museum, Mexican Olympic Museum, and the wonderfully Interactive Economics Museum.
Remember that museums are closed on Mondays.
Its home to Frida and Diego's world famous art
A visit to Mexico City would be incomplete without admiring paintings of this famous artistic couple. The largest private collection of works by Diego Rivera is housed at Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino. Casa Azul (Blue House) is Frido Kahlo's private home, now museum and a shrine, where she was born in 1907 and died 47 years later.
The city seems to attract artists from all over Latin America who want to learn and practice independent art expressions. At Galería At Despacho 29, you can see young artists at work as they display their paintings, sculptures, graphics and more, in this thriving artist colony. Galeria Omr in Colonia Roma is a must see with its international fame. Even walking around the city, you will come across many chic art galleries and stores representing all genres.
Neighborhoods in Mexico City look like Europe
In the Colonia Roma neighborhood, you will see homes and building constructed in French, Italian and Spanish style architecture. Most of these were built in the 1800's, when Mexican aristocrats traveled to Europe and modeled their surroundings based on what they saw there. Strolling through Colonia Roma's Plaza Río de Janeiro Street, you will find bistros, cafes, gelaterias, bookstores, art galleries, as well as cantinas and dance clubs. Note that most art galleries are closed on Sundays.
La Condesa is also a charming area that caters to the young and hip. Besides admiring the unique building styles and colors, you can also explore the nightlife here.
Zocalo (main plaza) bustles with organ players, street vendors, excited tourists, wandering bicyclists and downtown office crowds, with a backdrop of the Cathedral, National Palace, Federal District buildings, Templo Mayor site, and the omnipresent Mexican flag. At 57 thousand square meters, this is one of the largest city squares in the world. Explore side streets to see more architectural gems, such as the post office and the Opera Cantina. On weekends, the streets in Zocalo come alive with balloons, clowns, cotton candy, live music, and dancing.
Mexico City is the cultural capital of Latin America
Watch Mexican folklore ballet and temporary art exhibitions at the colossal white marble opera house with a Tiffany stained-glass curtain, known as Palacio De Bellas Artes. This beautiful building was designed by the famous Italian Adamo Boari, and inaugurated in 1934. Inside, you can see paintings by several celebrated Mexican artists, including Rufino Tamayo, Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros.
View current artistic trends across seven exhibition rooms at the Centro Cultural De Espana, along with a museum, conference center, and jazz bar designed specially for art and culture lovers.
To explore more of the mariachi music scene, spend the evening at Plaza Garibaldi, where you can even rent a personal band by the hour. Dressed in embroidered "charro" outfits and large wide brim sombrero hats, these musicians play guitars, trumpets and violins, sing, dance and entertain crowds.
Mexico City also has gondolas
Take a short drive to the southern outskirts of the city for an authentic Mexican fiesta on the boat experience. Xochimilco, a World Heritage Site is best known for its 110 miles of canals where tourists and locals come to ride on colorful gondola-like boats called "trajineras." You can see families' picnicking, dancing, and singing on the boats, as mariachi bands and food vendors ride along.
Here you can eat well without breaking the bank
From street food and hole-in-the-wall regional establishments, to upscale restaurants, Mexico City offers something for all distinguished taste buds. The best way to get oriented to the local cuisine is through Gastronomic Tour Sabores de México (Mexico Flavors Gastronomic Tour). A guided walking tour will take you through some of the best places to sample tacos, tamales, tequilas, beer and coffee.
Visit the largest family run taco franchise in Mexico, El Fogoncito, where you can trace the evolution of tacos from the Middle East to Mexico City.
Even high-end cuisine can be quite affordable in Mexico City. A dinner at Pujol, rated in the top 50 restaurants in the world, will set you back only $50 per person (excluding drinks). Also noted among the world's best, five-diamond restaurant Astrid and Gaston, was one of the first to put upscale Peruvian cuisine on the map. Now they have locations in Lima, Bogota, Santiago, Madrid, and Mexico City's Polanco Area.
Try the chocolaty mole from Pueblo region, cooked with different chilies (even a pink mole for Valentines Day) at Dulce Patria. Martha Ortiz, known as one of the best chefs in Mexico City emphasizes her menus on contemporary Mexican cuisine, drawing inspiration from the opera and the visual arts; her insatiable reading habit; Mexican women whose lives have influenced Ortiz, among them Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Frida Kahlo, and the many home cooks of the Mexican state of Michoacán who she calls "the queens of cooking."
The city is dotted with parks and plazas for strolling
At Alameda Park in downtown Mexico City, you can envision viceroys and counts dressed in their formal attire, taking a stroll through the French designed fountains, while admiring sculptures based on Greco-Roman mythology. There is even a monument dedicated to Beethoven in commemoration of the centenary of his 9th Symphony. While no street vendors are allowed in the park, you will see couples of all ages sharing romantic moments, kissing and holding hands, not just here, but in most parks across the city.
Joggers, walkers and tourists can be spotted at Bosque de Chapultepec, the city's largest park, which also houses a castle, a lake, an amusement park, the Mexican president's official residence, and five world-renowned museums. This is Mexico City's equivalent of the Central Park of New York.
A must see neighborhood is Coyoacán. This charming and quiet residential area was home to many famous Mexicans including Miguel de la Madrid, president of Mexico from 1982 to 1988; artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco; Gabriel Figueroa, cinematographer for Luis Buñuel and John Huston; film star Dolores del Río; film director El Indio Fernández; and writers Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. It's also the neighborhood where the exiled Leon Trotsky met his violent death.
It's a shopper's paradise
From high-end boutiques selling limited edition Christian Louboutin and traditional Mexican apparel designs, fine art galleries, modern furniture stores, to dozens of weekend markets selling Mexican artesanías (handicrafts) such as colorful hand-painted crockery to innovative blown glass made by regional artisans in poor communities, there are all kinds of products available to shoppers.
While state of the art shopping malls are scattered all through the city, Centro Santa Fe, in the western part of the city, is the largest shopping center in Latin America and boasts nearly 300 shops, with department stores, boutiques, restaurants, play areas for children, and 10 movie theaters.
Mexico City is so close!
Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world, yet largely undiscovered by vacation travelers. Delta Airlines and Aero Mexico serve nonstop connections from most major cities in US to Mexico City. Depending on where you fly from, you could be in Mexico City in 1-4 hours and discover that you can enjoy a European style getaway so close to home.Enterprise chat platform HipChat has entered the 101 Battle of the Billboards, putting up the above memetastic masterpiece on the 101 North after the Whipple exit this past Friday. For the uninitiated, the “Y U NO USE HIPCHAT?” billboard is a take off of the startup friendly Y U NO guy meme, which has already spawned at least one parody Twitter account run by YCombinator hopefuls.
Billboards on the 101 cost a whopping 30K, so companies haven’t always been so willing to use that expensive real estate to appeal to those of us used to trolling 4Chan. But the billboard creative in SF and SV has really upped the intellectual ante ever since younger startups started buying the roadside placards: “We made it because we were sick of billboards like this,” HipChat co-founder Peter Curley explains.
(Why is it always Microsoft?)
And the company’s appeal to the more internet savvy of drivers among us seems to be working, as search traffic for “HipChat” has gone up 300% since the billboard went up, according to Curley. Also, they got another TechCrunch post.
Unrelated: Here’s the HipChat “Arrington” emotion. Yes, this exists.
Image via: LaoFuSi/RedditOldham boosted their League One survival hopes with victory over play-off chasing Peterborough.
Paul Green and Ryan McLaughlin scored their first goals for the Latics, who completed back-to-back home victories under recently returned boss John Sheridan to move to within three points of safety.
Oldham gave free admission to all fans in a bid to arrest their decline in attendances.
And the majority of a 7,224 crowd were almost celebrating the breakthrough in the 19th minute, only for McLaughlin's shot to be deflected inches wide.
Oldham threatened again when Green pulled back a right-wing cross and Peter Clarke fired over from 10 yards.
The hosts also made a bright start to the second half, with Green testing Posh goalkeeper Luke McGee and Clarke seeing his header cleared off the line by Michael Smith.
Oldham struck after 69 minutes when Dominic Ball hauled down McLaughlin and Green slotted in the penalty, sending McGee the wrong way.
The lead was doubled eight minutes from time as McLaughlin tapped in a six-yard volley after fine build-up play by Anthony Gerrard and Aaron Amadi-Holloway.
Peterborough were well below par and did not go close to scoring until injury time when Marcus Maddison clipped the bar from distance.
Report supplied by the Press Association.With all our recent focus on trading cryptocurrencies it’s important to remember that the original use case for blockchain was as a payment network. Now bitcoin payments processor BitPay Inc. is reporting that forex traders and brokers are |
-3030, seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.Asserting that Hindu values will be restored in the country, Vishwa Hindu Parishad today said they have never wanted to convert the world but only to "win over its heart".
Speaking at a book launch, VHP patron Ashok Singhal said it was due to their "struggle" in the last 50 years that Hindus have "regained" the lost "empire" of Delhi after 800 years.
"Our culture and religion were subjugated and we struggled. In 800 years, a day has now come in which we can say we have a government which is committed to protecting Hindutva. Our values will be gradually established in the country.
"We want an invincible Hindu society which works for the world's welfare according to these values... We have never gone out to convert the world but to win over their heart," Singhal said, apparently referring to the recent row over conversion.
Referring to the BJP government, he said Hindus have come back to power in Delhi after Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan lost it in the 12th century.
He claimed that various powers in their attempts to capture the world have brought it close to a world war.
"You can see that in Australia and in Central Asia. The danger of 'Islamic terrorism' we can see in Europe. This war could have been stopped but the way different powers are in a race to establish their reign in the world, it seems this world war is inevitable," he said.
However, he said Hindus will not be a "player" in such a war as they have always sought to win the world by love and believed in spiritual and not material victory.
"They (others) are showcasing their strength on the basis of hate... World will have to think that if we have to live together then we can do so only on the basis of mutual love that India has been propagating," he said.MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin inaugurated a monument to the victims of Stalinist purges on Monday, but Soviet-era dissidents accused him of cynicism at a time when they say authorities are riding roughshod over civil freedoms.
Russian President Vladimir Putin lays flowers during a ceremony unveiling the country's first national memorial to victims of Soviet-era political repressions called "The Wall of Grief" in downtown Moscow. Sputnik/Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin via REUTERS
“The Wall of Grief” occupies a space on the edge of Moscow’s busy 10-lane ring road and depicts a mass of faceless victims, many of whom were sent to prison camps or executed on Josef Stalin’s watch after falsely being accused of being “enemies of the people.”
Nearly 700,000 people were executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38, according to conservative official estimates.
“An unequivocal and clear assessment of the repression will help to prevent it being repeated,” Putin said at the opening ceremony.
“This terrible past must not be erased from our national memory and cannot be justified by anything.”
His words and the ceremony amounted to one of his strongest condemnations of the Soviet Union’s dark side in the 18 years he has dominated Russia’s political landscape.
Putin has in the past called Stalin “a complex figure” and said attempts to demonise him were a ploy to attack Russia. But at Monday’s ceremony, he said there were lessons for Russia.
“It doesn’t mean demanding accounts be settled,” said Putin, who stressed a need for stability. “We must never again push society to the dangerous precipice of division.”
‘TRAGIC PAGES’
Putin’s carefully balanced words reflect Kremlin unease over this year’s centenary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which paved the way for Stalin’s rise. Uncomfortable about promoting discussion of the idea of governments being overthrown by force, the Kremlin is not organising any commemorative events.
Putin, who is expected to run for and win the presidency again in March, told human rights activists earlier on Monday that he hoped the centenary would allow society to draw a line under the tumultuous events of 1917 and to accept Russia’s history - “with great victories and tragic pages”.
Yet some historians fret that what they say is Putin’s ambiguity about Stalin along with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea have emboldened Stalin’s admirers.
Monuments and memorial plaques honouring Stalin have sprung up in different Russian regions. State-approved textbooks have softened his image, and an opinion poll in June crowned him the country’s most outstanding historical figure.
By contrast, those who have helped document Stalin’s crimes, from the Memorial human rights group to individual historians and journalists, have sometimes felt themselves under pressure from the authorities.
Slideshow (5 Images)
A group of Soviet-era dissidents published a letter on Monday, accusing Putin of cynicism.
“We... consider the opening in Moscow of a monument to victims of political repression untimely and cynical,” they said in the letter, published on the Kasparov.ru news portal.
“It’s impossible to take part in memorial events organised by the authorities who say they are sorry about victims of the Soviet regime, but in practice continue political repression and crush civil freedoms.”When Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan came out of the fall film festival circuit seven years ago, the pic was promptly teed up for Oscar season with many bewitched by Natalie Portman’s graceful turn as a tormented ballerina who notches the lead in Swan Lake.
“Black Swan” Fox Searchlight Pictures
Fox Searchlight ensured that the movie was protected theatrically in what was a pretty fierce awards season that included competition like The Social Network and The King’s Speech. As such, the label platformed Black Swan during the December holidays before going wide around the time of the Golden Globes in January. Black Swan crossed over feasibly from specialty houses to multiplexes, appealing to horror fans, the LGBTQ community and sophisticated audiences who shelled out close to $107 million. The film remains one of three Searchlight titles to cross the century mark in the classic label’s history. Black Swan earned five Oscar noms, with Portman walking home with a Best Actress trophy.
This weekend, Paramount is taking a completely different, audacious approach with Aronofsky’s latest genre twist mother! starring Jennifer Lawrence. Having just finished earning great praise out of the Toronto and Venice film festivals with a 76% certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, mother! won’t be receiving a platform rollout. Instead, the studio is brazenly taking the Aronofsky pic wide in 2,368 theaters.
Typically when a distributor goes wide with what appears to be an art house film, it’s because they need to make their cash back fast, making a platform play risky. But that’s not exactly the case for Paramount with mother!, which per insiders cost around $30M before P&A.
Sure, part of the wide-release strategy stems from having a star like Lawrence, who guarantees a female turnout between 50%-60% for her post-Hunger Games fare. Social media monitor RelishMix points out that Lawrence’s Facebook followers alone rep 25% of the film’s 81M social media universe. However, Paramount feels it has something wild in mother! and that the best way to pull the string open is to go big, hopefully triggering a huge conversation on social. Early audiences have expressed a wide array of emotions and reactions — the Google search phrase “what does mother movie mean” has generated 77 million results as of this afternoon. Some moviegoers interpret mother! as a Biblical allegory, or a jab at social media, while others believe it’s about climate change, or as Lawrence explains in her deconstruction of the film above, it’s all allegory, with Shel Silverstein’s children’s book The Giving Tree more of an inspiration than Roman Polanski horror pics.
The film’s storyline has largely been shrouded in secrecy with its initial theatrical trailer attached to Dunkirk two months ago literally comprised of words on the screen and chaotic audio. Throughout the last month we’ve come to learn that Lawrence plays the younger wife to Him (Javier Bardem), a famed writer. They’re restoring their country house, but have unexpected guests showing up portrayed by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Rival distribs have rubbed their chins over Paramount’s brave move to open what looks to be a horror film in the wake of New Line’s behemoth It, which will cross $200M at the domestic box office this frame take No. 1 in its second weekend with $50M-plus. But while mother! looks and smells like a horror film, it’s essentially something crazier, Lynchian, and completely Aronofsky-esque. After Blumhouse’s PG-13 horror pic Happy Death Day moved on to mother!‘s original release date of Friday, October 13, Paramount moved mother! up to September 15 as it saw both titles were competing for under-25 females.
Tracking has mother! at $11M. If Paramount can get the movie to $15M, it would be considered a decent start, with anything higher being fantastic. CBS/Lionsgate’s American Assassin is also in the mix this weekend at 3,154 sites, with a projected debut of $15M-$17M, and while older men are that pic’s bread and butter, spots have been featuring more of Dylan O’Brien to attract, yup, young women.
In the final run-up to the mother!‘s opening, Paramount is hoping that its Europe-North America premiere tour of the film — including the Venice and Toronto film festivals, London, Paris and a Radio City Music Hall New York City premiere this week — has spurred a want-to-see. On the day of the London film premiere, #mothermovie hashtags spiked to 43,000 and have since settled and grown this week from 4K to 8K daily, and generic #mother from 1,500K to 3K hashtags on Twitter, per RelishMix.
Well, what about awards? Wouldn’t it be wiser for mother! to roll out slowly and be something akin to a Crying Game that specialty audiences discover? While there will certainly be an awards campaign for the movie, of utmost importance for Paramount was that a bold movie deserved a bold launch. By going wide, it’s a way to get everyone talking in the Stranger Things sense all at once, whether they enjoyed the movie or not. Not to mention, if an actress of lesser marquee value than Lawrence was toplining, a platform strategy would have been considered.
Last weekend, to goose interest among the It masses, Paramount released a custom in-theater trailer in the vein of a Screen Gems horror film that exclaimed to audiences, “In one week, in this theater, one movie will mess you up for life…You will never forget where you were the first time you saw mother! After the movie, visit the box office to get your tickets.” The question tomorrow is whether any leftover It moviegoers were so inclined. mother! is not the traditional horror pic by any means in the commercial sense of the term. A bulk of the marketing campaign was shrouded in symbolism and secrecy, which is certainly sincere to the movie’s gripping, maddening sensibility. From moment to moment, you’re unsure of the fate of Lawrence’s character as the camera follows her Hitchcock-style (over her shoulder, on her face, or her POV).
Paramount
On Mother’s Day, Paramount dropped James Jean’s Catholic prayer card-like one sheet of Lawrence offering up her bleeding heart. There were clues embedded throughout, and props from the film (i.e. a jewelry box, a lighter. There was also a companion Jean poster dropped in early August of Javier Bardem with hell flames in the background and his hubby character holding a silver globe. On Instagram, the Bardem poster was embedded with audio, which when run through a pro audio tool revealed a spectogram of the Oscar winner’s face. Neither poster was permitted for use in theaters by the MPAA, but the early August one sheet showing a porcelain face of Lawrence was OK’d for in-theater use. During the first weekend of August, a second teaser showing Lawrence walking around the house amid chaotic noises was released in theaters. By the time Annabelle: Creation opened the next weekend, the full trailer was released showing the pic’s unwelcome guest premise as we know it with images of people storming the country house’s lawn at night, capped off Lawrence yelling “Get out of my house!”
Paramount
Darren Aronofsky
By late August, the meat of the campaign kicked in with the Rosemary Baby homage posters and billboards (in orange and the original 1968’s hunter green) appearing in cities and online. This was a hint Lawrence’s character in the movie was indeed pregnant and in peril. There were also theories that the actress’ half-face image was an homage to the 1997 animatef film Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion. The exclusive look during the September 5 premiere of American Horror Story: Cult fully revealed that Lawrence’s Mother was in fact pregnant. Aronofsky and Paramount’s marketing team worked closely in crafting all aspects of the cool and clever in the campaign. Paramount is using such critic quotes as “The boldest studio movie since Kubrick died” and “Tear-down-the-screen inferno” in its TV spots.
Typically a studio will test their campaign materials, but Paramount decided to go with its gut. In addition, mother! wasn’t tested, rather screened to friends and families only. Aronofsky is known to get final cut.
RelishMix reports, “The social convo surrounding mother! is mixed, yet leaning towards positive. This discussion is rather typical for an Aronofsky-directed film, whose titles have been polarizing to this point. Conversation suggests curiosity among fans, and confusion over the plot, but this doesn’t deter their interest in seeing the film. The chatter also reflects loyalty in the director, trusting that he made the trailers unclear for a reason. The Oscar-winning cast, particularly Jennifer Lawrence, also gives the fans hope that this will be an awards contender.”
Paramount’s mother! opens tonight at 7 PM.Amendment No.8 to Form S-1
As filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 7, 2016
Registration No. 333-189752
UNITED STATES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549
Amendment No. 8 to
Form S-1
REGISTRATION STATEMENT
UNDER
THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933
WINKLEVOSS BITCOIN TRUST
Sponsored by Digital Asset Services, LLC
(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)
Delaware 6221 81-6728214 (State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization) (Primary Standard Industrial Classification Code Number) (I.R.S. Employer Identification No.)
301 N. Market Street, Suite 1463, Wilmington, DE 19801
+1 (646) 751-4444
(Address, including zip code, and telephone number, including area code, of Registrants principal executive offices)
The Corporation Trust Company
1209 Orange Street
Wilmington (New Castle County), DE 19801
+1 (302) 658-7581
(Name, address, including zip code, and telephone number, including area code, of agent for service)
Copies to:
Cameron H. Winklevoss Digital Asset Services, LLC 301 N. Market Street Suite 1463, Wilmington, DE 19801 Edward B. Baer, Esq. Margaret S. Moore, Esq. Ropes & Gray LLP Three Embarcadero Center San Francisco, CA 94111-4006
Approximate date of commencement of proposed sale to the public: As soon as practicable after this registration statement becomes effective.
If any of the securities being registered on this Form are to be offered on a delayed or continuous basis pursuant to Rule 415 under the Securities Act of 1933, check the following box. x
If this Form is filed to register additional securities for an offering pursuant to Rule 462(b) under the Securities Act of 1933, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering. ¨
If this Form is a post-effective amendment filed pursuant to Rule 462(c) under the Securities Act of 1933, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering. ¨
If this Form is a post-effective amendment filed pursuant to Rule 462(d) under the Securities Act of 1933, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering. ¨
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or a smaller reporting company. See the definitions of large accelerated filer, accelerated filer and smaller reporting company in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act. (Check one):
Large accelerated filer ¨ Accelerated filer ¨ Non-accelerated filer x (Do not check if a smaller reporting company) Smaller reporting company ¨
Calculation of Registration Fee
Title of each class of securities to be registered Amount to be registered Proposed maximum offering price per Share(1) Proposed maximum aggregate offering price(1) Amount of registration fee(2) Winklevoss Bitcoin Shares 1,000,000 $[65.00] $[65,000,000.00] $ [ ]
(1) Estimated solely for the purpose of calculating the registration fee pursuant to Rule 457(d) under the Securities Act of 1933. Each Share comprising the initial Baskets of Shares (the Seed Baskets) represents [0.10] bitcoin and is offered at a per Share price equal to the price of [0.10] bitcoin. The price of bitcoin is based on the 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time Gemini Exchange Auction Price (as defined herein). On [ ], 2016, this price was $[ ], and the price of each Share was $[ ]. The Seed Baskets consist of [100,000] Shares worth [10,000] bitcoin.
(2) $2,470.28 was previously paid in the initial filing of the registration statement on Form S-1, filed on July 1, 2013.
The Registrant hereby amends this registration statement on such date or dates as may be necessary to delay its effective date until the Registrant shall file a further amendment which specifically states that this registration statement shall thereafter become effective in accordance with section 8(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 or until the registration statement shall become effective on such date as the Securities and Exchange Commission, acting pursuant to said section 8(a), may determine.
The information in this preliminary prospectus is not complete and may be changed. We may not sell these securities until the registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is effective. This preliminary prospectus is not an offer to sell these securities and we are not soliciting an offer to buy these securities in any jurisdiction where the offer or sale is not permitted.
Subject to Completion
Preliminary Prospectus dated [ ], 2016
[ ] W INKLEVOSS B ITCOIN S HARES
WINKLEVOSS BITCOIN TRUST
The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust (the Trust) will issue Winklevoss Bitcoin Shares (the Shares), which represent units of fractional undivided beneficial interest in and ownership of the Trust. The Trusts purpose is to hold bitcoin, which is a digital asset (Digital Asset) based on the decentralized, open source protocol of the peer-to-peer Bitcoin computer network (the Bitcoin Network). Digital Asset Services, LLC, formerly Math-Based Asset Services, LLC, is the sponsor of the Trust (the Sponsor); Delaware Trust Company is the trustee of the Trust (the Trustee); State Street Bank and Trust Company (State Street) is both the administrator (the Administrator) and transfer agent (the Transfer Agent) of the Trust; and Gemini Trust Company, LLC, an affiliate of the Sponsor, is the custodian of the Trust (the Custodian). The Trust intends to issue additional Shares on a continuous basis.
The Trust is expected to issue and redeem Shares from time to time only in one or more whole blocks of 10,000 Shares (each block of 10,000 Shares is a Basket). The Trust will issue and redeem the Shares in Baskets only to certain authorized firms (Authorized Participants or APs) on an ongoing basis as described in the Plan of Distribution section below. On a creation, Baskets will be distributed to the creating Authorized Participant by the Trust in exchange for the delivery to the Trust of the appropriate number of bitcoin (i.e., bitcoin equal in value to the net asset value per Share of the Trust (NAV) multiplied by the number of Shares in the Basket). On a redemption, the Trust will distribute bitcoin equal in value to the NAV multiplied by the number of Shares in the Basket to the redeeming Authorized Participant in exchange for the delivery to the Trust of one or more Baskets. On each Business Day, the value of each Basket accepted by the Transfer Agent in a creation or redemption transaction will be the same (i.e., each Basket will consist of 10,000 Shares and the value of the Basket will be equal to the value of 10,000 Shares at their net asset value per Share on that day). The Trust will not issue or redeem fractions of a Basket.
Prior to this offering, there has been no public market for the Shares. The Shares will be listed on the Bats BZX Exchange, Inc. (Bats) under the symbol COIN.
Investing in the Shares involves significant risks. See Risk Factors starting on page [14]. Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC or the Commission) nor any state securities commission has approved or disapproved of the securities offered in this prospectus, or determined if this prospectus is truthful or complete. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense.
The Shares are neither interests in nor obligations of the Sponsor or the Trustee.
The Trust is expected to issue and redeem Shares from time to time, as described in Creation and Redemption of Shares. It is expected that the Shares issued will be purchased by Authorized Participants and then be distributed to the public by Authorized Participants through sale on Bats. It is expected that the Shares will be sold to the public at varying prices to be determined by reference to, among other considerations, the price of bitcoin represented by each Share and the trading price of the Shares on Bats at the time of each sale.
On [ ], [INITIAL PURCHASER] (the Initial Purchaser), subject to certain conditions, purchased [100,000] Shares in exchange for [10,000] bitcoin worth $[ ], which comprise the initial Baskets (the Seed Baskets), as described in the Plan of Distribution. Delivery of the Seed Baskets will be made on or about [ ]. It is expected that the Initial Purchaser will distribute these Shares to the public through sale on Bats. The Trust will receive all proceeds from the offering of the Seed Baskets in set quantities of bitcoin in a quantity equal to the full price for the Seed Baskets. Each Share in the Seed Baskets represents [0.10] bitcoin, and each Seed Basket consists of 10,000 Shares worth [1,000] bitcoin.
Neither the Initial Purchaser nor the Authorized Participants will receive a selling commission from the Trust in consideration of their distribution of the Shares to the public through sale on Bats. Purchases of the Shares may be subject to customary brokerage charges. Investors should review the terms of their brokerage accounts for details on applicable charges.
Per Share(1) Per Basket Public offering price for the Seed Baskets $ [ ] $ [ ]
(1) The Seed Baskets were created at a per Share value equal to the 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time Gemini Exchange Auction Price (as defined herein) of 0.10 bitcoin on the date of formation of the Trust.
The date of this prospectus is [ ], 2016.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
This prospectus contains information investors should consider when making an investment decision about the Shares. Investors may rely on the information contained in this prospectus. The Trust and the Sponsor have not authorized any person to provide you with different information and, if anyone provides an investor with different or inconsistent information, that investor should not rely on it. This prospectus is not an offer to sell the Shares in any jurisdiction where the offer or sale of the Shares is not permitted.
The Shares are not registered for public sale in any jurisdiction other than the United States.
i
S TATEMENT R EGARDING F ORWARD -L OOKING S TATEMENTS
This prospectus contains forward-looking statements with respect to the Trusts financial conditions, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance and business. Statements preceded by, followed by or that include words such as may, should, expect, plan, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict, potential or similar expressions are intended to identify some of the forward-looking statements. All statements (other than statements of historical fact) included in this prospectus that address activities, events or developments that will or may occur in the future, including such matters as changes in market prices and conditions (for Digital Assets, bitcoin and the Shares), the Trusts operations, the Sponsors plans and references to the Trusts future success and other similar matters are forward-looking statements. These statements are only predictions. Actual events or results may differ materially. These statements are based upon certain assumptions and analyses the Sponsor made based on its perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors appropriate in the circumstances. Whether or not actual results and developments will conform to the Sponsors expectations and predictions, however, is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including the special considerations discussed in this prospectus, general economic, market and business conditions, changes in laws or regulations, including those concerning taxes, made by governmental authorities or regulatory bodies, and other world economic and political developments. See Risk Factors.
Consequently, all the forward-looking statements made in this prospectus are qualified by these cautionary statements, and there can be no assurance that the actual results or developments the Sponsor anticipates will be realized or, even if substantially realized, that they will result in the expected consequences to, or have the expected effects on, the Trusts operations or the value of the Shares. Should one or more of these risks discussed in Risk Factors or other uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual outcomes may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are made based on the Sponsors beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date the statements are made and neither the Trust nor the Sponsor is under a duty or undertakes an obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, other than as required by applicable laws. Investors are therefore cautioned against placing undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
ii
P ROSPECTUS S UMMARY This is only a summary of the prospectus and, while it contains material information about the Trust and its Shares, it does not contain or summarize all of the information about the Trust and the Shares contained in this prospectus which is material and/or which may be important to you. You should read this entire prospectus, including Risk Factors beginning on page [11], before making an investment decision about the Shares. Trust Structure The Trust is a Delaware statutory trust, organized on December 30, 2014, under the Delaware Statutory Trust Act (DSTA) and operates pursuant to the Trust Agreement between the Sponsor (as grantor) and the Trustee (the Trust Agreement), which sets forth the respective rights and duties of the Sponsor and the Trustee and authorizes the Sponsor, on behalf of the Trust, to enter into a custody agreement (the Trust Custody Agreement) with the Custodian. The Custodian, an affiliate of the Sponsor, serves as custodian to the Trust under the Trust Custody Agreement, which establishes the segregated custody account of the Trust that will be used to hold the bitcoin deposited with the Custodian on behalf of the Trust (the Trust Custody Account). The Custodian will use its proprietary and patent-pending offline (i.e., air-gapped) hardware and software security technology (Cold Storage System) to store the Trusts bitcoin. The Trust only holds bitcoin, which is a digital asset 1 that is not issued by any government, bank or central organization. Bitcoin is a digital asset (Digital Asset) based on the decentralized, open source protocol of the peer-to-peer Bitcoin computer network (the Bitcoin Network or Bitcoin) 2 that hosts the decentralized public transaction ledger, known as the Blockchain, on which all bitcoin is recorded. The Bitcoin Network software source code includes the protocols that govern the creation of bitcoin and the cryptographic system that secures and verifies Bitcoin transactions. The Blockchain is a canonical record of every bitcoin, every Bitcoin transaction (including the creation or mining of new bitcoin) and every Bitcoin address associated with a quantity of bitcoin. The Bitcoin Network and Bitcoin Network software programs can interpret the Blockchain to determine the exact bitcoin balance, if any, of any public Bitcoin address listed in the Blockchain which has taken part in a transaction on the Bitcoin Network. The Bitcoin Network utilizes the Blockchain to evidence the existence of bitcoin in any public Bitcoin address. A Bitcoin private key controls the transfer or spending of bitcoin from its associated public Bitcoin address. A Bitcoin wallet is a collection of private keys and their associated public Bitcoin addresses. The Trust is expected to issue and redeem Shares from time to time only in one or more whole Baskets. The Trust will issue and redeem the Shares in Baskets only to certain Authorized Participants on an ongoing basis as described in the Plan of Distribution section below. On a creation, Baskets will be distributed to the creating Authorized Participant by the Trust in exchange for the delivery to the Trust of the appropriate number of bitcoin (i.e., bitcoin equal in value to the net asset value per Share of the Trust (NAV) multiplied by the number of Shares in the Basket). On a redemption, the Trust will distribute bitcoin equal in value to the NAV multiplied by the number of Shares in the Basket to the redeeming Authorized Participant in exchange for the delivery to the Trust of one or more Baskets. On each Business Day, the value of each Basket accepted by the Transfer Agent in a creation or redemption transaction will be the same (i.e., each Basket will consist of 10,000 Shares and the value of the Basket will be equal to the value of 10,000 Shares at their net asset value per Share on that day). The Trust will not issue or redeem fractions of a Basket. The investment objective of the Trust is for the Shares to 1 Bitcoin is a commodity as defined in Section 1a(9) of the Commodity Exchange Act. 7 U.S.C. § 1a(9). See In re Coinflip, Inc., No. 15-29 (CFTC Sept. 17, 2015) (Coinflip). 2 By common convention, Bitcoin with a capital B typically refers to the Bitcoin Network as a whole, whereas bitcoin with a lowercase b refers to the Digital Asset of the Bitcoin Network, including the Trusts bitcoin. This naming convention is used throughout this document.
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track the price of bitcoin, as measured by the clearing price of a two-sided auction which occurs daily at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time on the Gemini Exchange (Gemini Exchange) (the Gemini Exchange Auction Price), on each day Bats is open for trading (each a Business Day), less the Trusts liabilities (which include accrued but unpaid fees and expenses). The Gemini Exchange is a Digital Asset exchange owned and operated by the Custodian and is an affiliate of the Sponsor. The Gemini Exchange does not receive any compensation from the Trust or the Sponsor for providing the Gemini Exchange Auction Price. The Sponsor believes that, for many investors, the Shares will represent a cost-effective and convenient means of gaining investment exposure to bitcoin similar to a direct investment in bitcoin. The material terms of the Trust Agreement are discussed in greater detail under the section Description of the Trust Agreement. The Shares represent units of fractional undivided beneficial interest in and ownership of the Trust and are expected to be traded under the ticker symbol COIN. The Trusts Sponsor is Digital Asset Services, LLC (formerly Math-Based Asset Services, LLC). The Sponsor is a Delaware limited liability company formed on May 9, 2013, and is wholly-owned by Winklevoss Capital Fund, LLC (WCF). Under the Delaware Limited Liability Company Act and the governing documents of the Sponsor, WCF, the sole member of the Sponsor, is not responsible for the debts, obligations and liabilities of the Sponsor solely by reason of being the sole member of the Sponsor. The Sponsor will be the exclusive licensee, within the field of use of operation of an exchange-traded product (ETP), of certain patent-pending intellectual property regarding the operation of the Trust. Winklevoss IP LLC (WIP), an affiliate of the Sponsor, is the owner of and is licensing to the Sponsor and its affiliates such intellectual property for use by the Trust and the Custodian and other service providers in the operation of the Trust. The Sponsor arranged for the creation of the Trust and will arrange for the registration of the Shares for their public offering in the United States and their listing on Bats. The Sponsor has agreed to assume the following administrative and marketing expenses incurred by the Trust: (i) the Trustees monthly fee and expenses, including indemnification amounts, reimbursable under the Trust Agreement; (ii) the Administrators monthly fee and expenses reimbursable under the Administration Agreement; (iii) the Transfer Agents monthly fee and expenses reimbursable under the Transfer Agency and Services Agreement; (iv) the Custodians monthly fee and expenses reimbursable under the Trust Custody Agreement; (v) Exchange listing fees; (vi) U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registration fees; (vii) printing and mailing costs; (viii) costs of maintaining the Trusts website; (ix) audit fees; (x) marketing expenses; and (xi) up to $100,000 per annum in legal expenses. The Sponsor will also pay the costs of the Trusts organization and the initial sale of the Shares, including the applicable SEC registration fees. Delaware Trust Company, a Delaware trust company, acts as the trustee of the Trust for the purpose of creating a Delaware statutory trust in accordance with the DSTA. The Trustee is appointed to serve as the trustee of the Trust in the State of Delaware for the sole purpose of satisfying the requirement of Section 3807(a) of the DSTA that the Trust have at least one trustee with a principal place of business in the State of Delaware. The duties of the Trustee will be limited to (i) accepting legal process served on the Trust in the State of Delaware and (ii) the execution of any certificates required to be filed with the Delaware Secretary of State which the Delaware Trustee is required to execute under the DSTA. To the extent that, at law or in equity, the Trustee has duties (including fiduciary duties) and liabilities relating thereto to the Trust or the Sponsor, such duties and liabilities will be replaced by the duties and liabilities of the Trustee expressly set forth in the Trust Agreement. The Trustee will have no obligation to supervise, nor will it be liable for, the acts or omissions of the Sponsor, Administrator, Transfer Agent, Custodian or any other person. State Street Bank and Trust Company (State Street), the Administrator of the Trust, is generally responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Trust under the Administration Agreement and in accordance with the provisions of the Trust Agreement. This includes (i) maintaining the Trusts books of account; (ii) calculating the Trusts NAV in accordance with the procedures outlined in the Trusts registration statement;
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(iii) transmitting the NAV per Share to the Transfer Agent, the Sponsor, Bats, and other entities as directed by the Sponsor; and (iv) preparing financial information required for the Trusts periodic reports and assisting with the audit of the Trusts financial statements by the Trusts independent audit firm. State Street is also the Trusts Transfer Agent and is authorized by the Sponsor under the Trust Agreement to serve as the transfer agent in accordance with the provisions of the Transfer Agency and Services Agreement. The Transfer Agent, among other things, provides transfer agent services with respect to the creation and redemption of Baskets by Authorized Participants. The Trusts Custodian is Gemini Trust Company, LLC, an affiliate of the Sponsor and a New York State-chartered limited liability trust company that operates under the direct supervision and regulatory authority of the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS). The Custodian is a fiduciary and must meet the capitalization, compliance, anti-money laundering, consumer protection and cyber security requirements as set forth by the NYSDFS. Although the Trusts bitcoin is not stored in a physical sense, all transactions involving the Trusts bitcoin are recorded on the Bitcoin Networks Blockchain and associated with a public Bitcoin address. The Trusts public Bitcoin addresses are established by the Custodian using its Cold Storage System, which holds the Trusts bitcoin and permits the Trust to move its bitcoin. Access and control of those Bitcoin addresses, and the bitcoin associated with them, is restricted through the public-private key pair relating to each Bitcoin address. The Custodian is responsible for the safekeeping of the private keys used to access and transfer the Trusts bitcoin. The Custodian also facilitates the transfer of bitcoin in accordance with the Administrators instructions pursuant to the terms of the Administration Agreement. Pursuant to the terms of the Trust Agreement and the Trust Custody Agreement, the Custodian will store all of the Trusts bitcoin on a segregated basis in its unique Bitcoin addresses with balances that can be directly verified on the Blockchain. It will provide the Trusts public Bitcoin addresses to the Administrator. The Trusts bitcoin is valued each Business Day using the Gemini Exchange Auction Price. At 4:00 pm. Eastern Time every |
fusillade de son restaurant, dans laquelle il a perdu la mère de sa fille.
M. Sébastien Pietrasanta, rapporteur. Les travaux de notre commission d’enquête obéiront à une double exigence, celle de la vérité et celle de l’efficacité. La vérité, nous la devons aux Français et avant tout à vous, les victimes. Nous entendons enquêter pour connaître la vérité des faits, sans parti pris, dans le respect de nos institutions judiciaires.
Quant à l’efficacité, nous entendons faire œuvre utile pour notre pays, et je veillerai personnellement à ce que le rapport comporte des propositions très concrètes.
Si nous avons souhaité débuter nos travaux par l’audition des victimes, c’est afin de leur exprimer notre solidarité et de montrer que nous travaillons d’abord pour elles, pour vous qui êtes là. Nous attendons que vous vous exprimiez librement, dans le but de nous aider à apporter des réponses aux questions légitimes que vous vous posez.
M. le président Georges Fenech. Mesdames et messieurs, avant de vous donner la parole, je dois, conformément à l’article 6 de l’ordonnance du 17 novembre 1958 relative aux commissions d’enquête, vous demander de prêter serment de dire la vérité, toute la vérité, rien que la vérité.
M. Georges Salines, M. Mohammed Zenak, Mme Sophie Dias, Mme Aurélia Gilbert, Mme Caroline Langlade, Mme Lydia Berkennou, M. Alexis Lebrun et M. Grégory Reibenberg prêtent serment.
M. Georges Salines, président de l’association « 13 novembre : fraternité et vérité ». L’un des objets de notre association est d’agir pour la manifestation de la vérité, ce qui rejoint les objectifs de votre commission, chargée de faire la lumière sur la manière dont notre pays fait face au terrorisme. Nous espérons donc que nos témoignages vous y aideront.
Nous avons parmi nos adhérents des témoins directs de ce qui s’est passé le 13 novembre, qui peuvent témoigner de ce qu’ils ont pu constater sur les lieux des attentats tant en matière de sécurité qu’en ce qui concerne l’intervention des forces de l’ordre ou l’assistance portée aux blessés et aux victimes.
Quant aux personnes dans ma situation, proches de victimes, elles ont aussi des choses à dire, si tant est que les moyens de lutte contre le terrorisme vous paraissent devoir également inclure les moyens d’en atténuer les effets les plus douloureux : il y a en effet des choses à améliorer dans les dispositifs d’information des personnes qui recherchent des disparus, dans le processus d’identification des morts et dans la manière dont sont annoncées les nouvelles, surtout quand elles sont mauvaises, aux parents des victimes. De même, nous pouvons témoigner que des progrès restent à faire dans l’organisation des dispositifs d’aide – financière, juridique ou sanitaire – déclenchés en aval des attentats. En effet, si notre pays dispose en la matière d’outils assez remarquables que beaucoup peuvent nous envier, tout est loin malgré tout d’être parfait, notamment sur le plan de la coordination et de l’unité de doctrine.
Il est difficile notamment, lorsque l’on a souffert d’un traumatisme psychologique, de trouver le bon interlocuteur au sein d’un système psychiatrique français, très fragmenté par les querelles d’école et composé de professionnels plus ou moins compétents dans le domaine du psychotrauma. De même, tous les avocats ne sont pas spécialistes des affaires de terrorisme. Quant aux procédures administratives, leur complexité conduit parfois à des aberrations – certaines des victimes du Bataclan ou des terrasses ne figurent toujours pas, par exemple, sur la liste des personnes à indemniser – qui sont autant de tracasseries difficiles à tolérer pour des victimes en état de grande fragilité psychologique. La nomination d’une secrétaire d’État chargée de l’aide aux victimes au sein du Gouvernement suffira-t-elle à résoudre ces problèmes de coordination? La réponse dépend en partie de l’administration sur laquelle elle pourra s’appuyer pour apporter les solutions appropriées.
Agir pour la manifestation de la vérité, c’est aussi vous interpeller pour obtenir des réponses aux mille questions que nous nous posons. Vous enquêtez sur les moyens mis en œuvre par l’État pour lutter contre le terrorisme depuis le 7 janvier 2015, mais ce qui s’est passé le 13 novembre ne doit-il pas d’emblée nous conduire à dresser un premier constat d’échec? Ces attentats pouvaient-ils être évités? Qu’en est-il de la manière dont ont été mobilisés les moyens policiers et les forces de renseignement pour surveiller les apprentis terroristes et les filières djihadistes? Ne doit-on pas s’interroger sur le déploiement massif des forces de sécurité sur le territoire? De nombreux militaires patrouillent dans Paris en tenue léopard, ce qui est sans doute très adapté pour se camoufler dans la jungle mais ce qui peut apparaître d’une efficacité contestable si, par ailleurs, les lieux de spectacle et de rassemblement sont insuffisamment protégés.
Selon nous, les moyens de lutter contre le terrorisme ne peuvent se résumer aux moyens policiers et sécuritaires, en excluant la prévention. À titre personnel, je m’inquiète d’entendre dire au plus haut niveau de l’État qu’expliquer le djihadisme, c’est déjà l’excuser. Je suis le dernier qui penserais à excuser les personnes qui ont tué ma fille ou celles qui les ont manipulées, mais il me semble absolument essentiel, si l’on veut lutter, d’expliquer les mécanismes qui conduisent de jeunes Français à prendre les armes contre des jeunes de leur âge.
Il faut saluer ici le travail de fourmi accompli par Mme Latifa Ibn Ziaten, que j’ai rencontrée, ou par Dounia Bouzar, qui interviennent auprès de jeunes en danger d’être recrutés par des mouvements radicaux islamistes de type sectaire. Malheureusement, en l’état actuel des moyens mobilisés, leur tâche s’apparente surtout à vouloir vider la mer à la petite cuillère et, si l’on veut être efficace, il faudra sans doute changer d’échelle.
Pour en être arrivée là, notre société doit être bien malade, et nous devons nous interroger sur les moyens de la soigner, ce qui n’est nullement une manière de renverser la culpabilité. La France n’est pas plus coupable de ce qui lui est arrivé le 13 novembre que les États-Unis ne le sont des attentats du 11 septembre ou Londres des attentats de 2005. Les coupables restent les coupables et rien ne justifiera les crimes odieux qu’ils ont commis.
D’autres commissions d’enquête parlementaires se sont déjà penchées sur le terrorisme, notamment celle présidée par M. Éric Ciotti sur la surveillance des filières et des individus djihadistes. Quelles ont été les préconisations de ces commissions? Ont-elles été mises en œuvre?
M. le président Georges Fenech. Je précise à ce stade que notre commission d’enquête a délibérément choisi de concentrer ses travaux sur les moyens mis en œuvre pour lutter contre le terrorisme et non sur les phénomènes de radicalisation qui ont déjà fait l’objet de plusieurs commissions d’enquête.
J’aimerais par ailleurs que vous nous précisiez quelles sont vos marges de man œuvre au plan judiciaire, puisque votre association est nouvellement créée.
M. Georges Salines. Dans la mesure où notre association n’a pas cinq ans d’existence, elle ne peut, en application de l’article 2-5 du code de procédure pénale, se constituer partie civile, ce qui est pour le moins paradoxal, dans la mesure où nous représentons les victimes directes d’actes qui feront l’objet d’une procédure judiciaire.
Quelques jours avant de quitter le Gouvernement, Christiane Taubira m’avait indiqué être favorable à l’alignement de notre régime sur celui des victimes de catastrophes, pour lesquelles est prévue une dérogation qui permet aux associations, sous réserve d’un agrément du ministère de la justice, de se constituer parties civiles. J’ai soumis la même requête à M. Jean-Jacques Urvoas, dont nous attendons qu’il s’engage à son tour sur ce point.
M. le président Georges Fenech. La Commission des lois se penche dès mercredi sur un projet de loi de réforme de la procédure pénale qui pourrait être l’occasion de faire évoluer le droit sur cette question.
Vous vous êtes également plaints de ne pas avoir eu accès aux rapports d’autopsie et de ne pas avoir été reçus par les juges.
M. Georges Salines. La plupart des familles endeuillées souhaitent savoir ce qui est arrivé à la personne qu’elles ont perdue. Cela est possible par l’intermédiaire d’un avocat, ce qui implique de prendre un avocat et de le payer. C’est entre autres la raison pour laquelle nous demandons que les frais d’avocat soient pris en charge par le FGTI. Cela étant, à ma connaissance, les rapports médicaux n’ont pas encore été versés au dossier. Nous souhaitons plus généralement être tenus informés du déroulement de la procédure d’instruction et demandons aux juges, en particulier au juge Teissier, de réunir le plus rapidement possible à cet effet l’ensemble des parties civiles.
M. François Lamy. Disposez-vous d’un canal officiel d’accès à l’information au sein des services de l’État?
Pensez-vous que le nouveau secrétariat d’État à l’aide aux victimes puisse remplir cette fonction?
M. Georges Salines. Nous ne disposons d’aucune source d’information régulière. Bénéficier d’un retour d’expérience, auquel nous participerions, fait partie de nos demandes. La seule action à laquelle nous avons été associés – et encore était-ce à notre demande – est une journée de réflexion organisée par le ministère de la santé, au cours de laquelle nous avons pu nous exprimer sur l’absence de prise en charge sur les lieux des attentats des personnes qui n’étaient pas blessées et qui ont, le plus souvent, été renvoyées chez elles alors qu’elles avaient perdu leurs vêtements, leur téléphone, leur argent ou leurs papiers.
J’ai également beaucoup insisté sur l’atroce insuffisance du dispositif d’information des personnes recherchant des disparus : un numéro de téléphone qui s’est révélé injoignable des heures durant, des plateformes téléphoniques multiples correspondant aux différents hôpitaux et à l’Institut médico-légal et, au final, des ratages au-delà de l’imaginable, pour ce qui est de l’annonce des décès.
Pour le reste nous ne disposons d’aucune information ni régulière ni ponctuelle. Suggérer à la nouvelle secrétaire d’État de remplir ce rôle peut en effet être une bonne idée…
M. Serge Grouard. Vous insistez sur la situation terrible dans laquelle se sont trouvés les parents de victimes qui cherchaient à obtenir des nouvelles de leurs proches lors de la nuit où ont eu lieu les attentats, mais dressez-vous le même constat pour les jours qui ont suivi? Avez-vous eu, ou non, le sentiment que les dispositifs s’organisaient?
M. Georges Salines. Dans la nuit du 13 au 14 novembre, le dispositif d’information des victimes et des personnes impliquées s’est avéré déficient, probablement parce qu’il n’avait pas été correctement dimensionné et que l’on n’avait guère anticipé qu’un attentat pourrait provoquer autant de victimes. C’était pourtant prévisible au regard de ce qui s’est déjà produit dans d’autres capitales et dans la mesure où Paris se savait menacée. Par ailleurs, tous les instruments nécessaires n’ont pas été mis en place. Il n’existe notamment pas de système d’information commun à l’ensemble des établissements de santé de la région parisienne. C’est donc aux proches des victimes de les contacter les uns après les autres, car aucun dispositif d’assistance de recherche n’a été prévu.
Pour les jours qui ont suivi, je dresserai un tableau moins noir de la situation, car certains dispositifs existent, notamment les associations d’aide aux victimes réunies au sein de l’Institut national d’aide aux victimes et de médiation (INAVEM). Cela est vrai en tout cas à Paris, car il semble que les choses soient plus difficiles en province.
Une association comme Paris Aide aux Victimes est un bon portail d’entrée mais ne supprime pas la totalité des obstacles. La prise en charge à 100 % par la sécurité sociale dépend de l’inscription sur la liste des victimes ; or, dans certains cas, on vous suggère pour figurer sur cette liste de vous constituer partie civile, alors qu’il s’agit de deux démarches sans rapport et que se constituer partie civile n’a rien d’obligatoire. Par ailleurs, cette prise en charge court non à partir du 13 novembre mais à partir de la date de demande de prise en charge, ce qui est encore une aberration.
M. Mohammed Zenak, trésorier de l’association « 13 novembre : vérité et fraternité ». Je suis le père de Sonia, 22 ans, blessée au Comptoir Voltaire. Nous avons la chance qu’elle ait toujours été consciente et qu’elle ait donc pu nous prévenir qu’elle était en vie. À trois heures du matin, elle a ainsi pu nous indiquer qu’elle était dirigée vers la Pitié-Salpêtrière, où elle a été prise en charge, comme tous les blessés, sous un numéro. À ce sujet, si l’on peut admettre qu’il y ait eu, cette première nuit, un certain nombre de cafouillages, que dire du fait que, le lendemain et le surlendemain, certains blessés, ceux dans le coma notamment, n’avaient pas encore de nom?
Je voudrais par ailleurs insister sur le manque de suivi après l’hospitalisation. Opérée à cinq reprises, ma fille a quitté l’hôpital au bout de trois semaines, sans que rien n’ait été prévu pour sa sortie, ni médicalement ni psychologiquement, et il a été très compliqué de trouver une cellule d’aide psychologique qui accepte de se déplacer à domicile pour l’aider, sachant qu’elle était dans un état de fragilité psychique qui l’empêchait de sortir.
Mme Françoise Dumas. Je ne peux que rendre hommage au courage et à la résilience dont vous faites tous preuve ici pour surmonter vos souffrances. Il me semble que le fait de vous regrouper en associations est une manière de vous reconstruire en dépassant l’addition de vos solitudes face à un événement traumatique imprévisible, dont les services publics requis n’avaient pas anticipé l’ampleur, ce qui explique sans doute les manquements dont vous avez tous été témoins ou victimes.
Pensez-vous qu’il faille, pour pallier ces manquements, installer au sein de chaque ministère une personne et une cellule référente? Pensez-vous qu’il soit préférable et plus efficace d’organiser ces relais d’information au niveau territorial? Doit-on imaginer une forme de guichet unique?
M. Mohammed Zenak. Certains de nos adhérents en Province se plaignent de ne pas avoir accès à l’information ; l’auront-ils davantage avec un guichet unique? Un guichet unique est-il d’ailleurs envisageable lorsque sont impliqués des services aussi différents que les pompiers, la police, l’armée, les services sanitaires?
M. Georges Salines. Vous expliquez l’impréparation des services par l’ampleur inédite des événements et le nombre de victimes. Sans doute mais, sans refaire l’histoire a posteriori, des attaques comme celles-ci se sont déjà produites – je pense en particulier aux attentats de Bombay qui ont touché simultanément plusieurs points de la ville. Je ne peux donc m’empêcher de penser que l’on a préparé la guerre de 14-18 en 1939.
Concernant les interlocuteurs vers lesquels peuvent se tourner les victimes pour demander de l’aide et résoudre leurs difficultés, on les trouve dans les quelque cent cinquante associations d’aide aux victimes, et notamment à Paris, au sein de Paris Aide aux victimes. Ces associations gèrent en réalité un service public : est-ce pertinent? Je ne me prononcerais pas mais la question mérite d’être posée.
Reste ensuite le problème de l’interlocuteur vers lequel peuvent se tourner ces associations. Il est en effet très compliqué, lorsqu’on est bénévole au sein d’une association, de gérer la multiplicité des interlocuteurs impliqués. J’ai pour ma part un travail par ailleurs, et n’ai pas l’intention de devenir une victime professionnelle ; il est probable qu’avoir un référent unique me simplifierait la tâche.
Mme Sophie Dias, membre de l’association « 13 novembre : fraternité et vérité ». Je suis la fille de Manuel Dias, chauffeur de car, tué, à 63 ans, devant la porte D du Stade de France.
La mise en place d’un guichet unique me paraît en effet indispensable, en particulier pour les personnes habitant la Province, ce qui est le cas de maman. Il m’a fallu proprement implorer un rendez-vous auprès de l’association d’aide aux victimes locale, qui était débordée. Nous n’avons bénéficié d’aucun traitement prioritaire et le psychologue qui nous a reçues nous a expliqué ne pas pouvoir faire grand-chose pour nous, ce qui montre à quel point les moyens de ces associations sont limités.
Quant à l’ampleur imprévisible des attentats, j’aimerais être rassurée sur la protection de nos stades, à l’approche des événements sportifs que notre pays se prépare à accueillir. Les nombreuses victimes du Bataclan ont sans doute détourné l’attention de la seule victime qu’il y a eu au Stade de France, mais cette victime était mon père.
En ce qui concerne le numéro vert à contacter pour obtenir des informations sur les personnes disparues, je signale qu’il était inaccessible depuis l’étranger. Les personnes que ma mère y a eu en ligne n’ont cessé de lui répéter que le fait qu’elle n’ait pas de nouvelles était plutôt bon signe…
Il nous a fallu contacter par nous-mêmes tous les hôpitaux proches du stade de France, en vain, car papa n’était sur aucune des listes. Ce n’est qu’en passant par le consulat du Portugal – puisque papa était portugais – que j’ai pu avoir confirmation de son décès, le samedi à quatorze heures, le Quai d’Orsay ayant attendu quarante-huit heures pour me contacter. C’est inadmissible et c’est grave. On ne peut envisager que de telles erreurs se reproduisent, et il ne me paraît pas si compliqué de gérer informatiquement une liste d’une centaine de noms, sans céder au fatalisme de ceux qui pensent que si les attaques avaient massivement touché le Stade on en serait encore, aujourd’hui, à compter nos morts…
En ce qui concerne le rapport d’autopsie, nous n’y avons toujours pas eu accès, pas plus que nous ne disposons des informations qui pourraient nous aider à faire notre deuil. Il est indispensable que les victimes puissent se tourner vers quelqu’un qui les écoute et les renseigne. C’est l’un des buts de notre association.
M. Grégory Reibenberg, patron du restaurant La Belle Équipe. J’ai perdu le soir du 13 novembre, la mère de ma fille et douze proches dont certains travaillaient avec moi. Je m’étonne qu’il faille mettre en place une commission d’enquête pour en arriver à la conclusion que les victimes doivent pouvoir trouver en face d’elles des interlocuteurs compétents, mais cela s’explique sans doute par l’archaïsme de notre système administratif.
Pour le reste, j’ai un point de vue qui diffère de celui de Sophie Dias et ne pense pas qu’il faille installer des militaires dans chaque stade. Depuis le 13 novembre, j’essaie d’échapper au discours ambiant sur la peur en n’allumant plus la télévision.
Ce soir-là, j’ai eu affaire à des policiers qui m’ont demandé huit fois mes papiers sans me proposer un verre d’eau, j’ai attendu quarante minutes les pompiers, mais nous ne sommes ni à Tel-Aviv ni à Beyrouth, et je n’ai pas envie que nous investissions tout notre argent et toute notre énergie pour nous spécialiser dans ce genre de traumatismes. Tous ces morts, ces blessés, ces victimes indirectes, ces morts vivants à cause de sept individus, ce n’est pas censé se reproduire tous les jours. Et j’espère que cela sera très rare. La résilience, c’est personnel. Certes, on peut être aidé mais vous seul pouvez faire quelque chose pour vous. Je dois à la vérité de dire que les personnes de Paris Aide aux victimes que j’ai contactées fin décembre se sont montrées parfaitement prévenantes, disponibles et compétentes.
On n’empêchera jamais un assassin d’être un assassin, et l’on pourra déployer tous les policiers et tous les militaires que l’on veut, cela n’y changera rien. Il est très facile de tuer, et ce qui doit nous inquiéter, c’est le nombre d’individus lâchés dans la nature qui peuvent passer à l’acte demain. C’est contre cela que nous devons lutter. Or qu’a-t-on fait depuis le 7 janvier, à part mettre sur la table l’idée de la déchéance de nationalité, mesure symbolique à mon sens complètement inutile? Est-il sérieux, quand on a un problème de moteur de se préoccuper de la couleur des sièges? Je ne comprends pas.
M. le président Georges Fenech. Notre commission d’enquête a d’autres ambitions que de résoudre les questions administratives liées à la prise en charge des victimes. Mais améliorer l’organisation de nos services est néanmoins nécessaire et cela fait partie des questions que nous nous devons d’aborder.
Mme Aurélia Gilbert, membre de l’association « 13 novembre : fraternité et vérité ». Je suis rescapée du Bataclan, où je suis restée cachée pendant plus de deux heures avant d’être libérée par les équipes de la brigade de recherche et d’intervention (BRI) juste avant l’assaut de minuit dix, alors que les preneurs d’otages étaient encore dans les lieux. Comme beaucoup, il m’a fallu traverser cette fosse épouvantable où, deux heures auparavant, nous étions réunis pour assister à un concert de rock.
Notre association a pour but d’aider toutes les personnes concernées – proches de victimes et rescapées de l’ensemble des sites – à se repérer face à une multiplicité d’interlocuteurs, sachant que tous ne sont pas dans une situation sociale, psychologique ou physique leur permettant d’avoir accès à la bonne information et à une prise en charge médico-psychologique appropriée.
Pour ma part, je suis la preuve que les choses peuvent bien se passer : je figure sur les listes, je me suis rendue à l’École militaire au bon moment, j’ai été prise en charge correctement et contactée par le FGTI. Mais les choses ne sont pas aussi simples pour tout le monde.
Nous recevons notamment encore à l’association des primodemandeurs, c’est-à-dire des personnes ayant développé un complexe du survivant et que le fait de s’en être sorti indemne a incité à penser que tout allait bien et qu’elles n’étaient pas légitimes à demander de l’aide. Or les troubles peuvent apparaître avec retard, et c’est la raison pour laquelle nous demandons la pérennisation des cellules d’urgence. Il faut également songer au cas des étrangers, qui n’ont pas accès aux mêmes dispositifs dans leur pays de résidence et ne savent pas forcément qu’ils ont le droit à l’aide du Fonds de garantie.
C’est donc pour aider tous ces gens, ceux qui sont blessés à vie et ne pourront pas retrouver une vie normale, que je me suis engagée au sein de l’association, sachant qu’aider les autres fait également partie du processus de reconstruction des rescapés.
Une remarque enfin sur la façon dont vous avez éludé un peu rapidement, monsieur le président, les travaux de la commission d’enquête sur les filières djihadistes. J’ai lu son rapport, qui comportait un certain nombre de préconisations, notamment concernant la mise en place du PNR – Passenger Name Record – ou la collaboration entre services de renseignement et services de police. Savoir lesquelles de ces propositions ont été implémentées depuis le mois de juin et quel est l’état des lieux que l’on peut dresser aujourd’hui sont des questions sur lesquelles nous ne pouvons passer aussi rapidement.
M. le président Georges Fenech. Votre requête est légitime, et notre commission d’enquête s’est aussi créée pour obtenir des réponses à ces questions et déterminer dans quelle mesure les dispositifs ont évolué par rapport aux constats faits par la précédente commission d’enquête, à laquelle le rapporteur et moi-même participions. Où en sont les discussions européennes sur le PNR? Qu’a changé la nouvelle législation sur le renseignement? Les responsables politiques que nous auditionnerons auront le devoir de nous éclairer sur ces questions.
M. Alain Marsaud. Madame Gilbert, vos remarques signifient-elles que vous estimez les hommes politiques incapables de transformer le système? Il est vrai que rien de ce qu’a recommandé la commission sur les filières djihadistes n’a été mis en œuvre et que, depuis cinq ans que l’on en parle, le PNR, ce fichier qui recenserait les données concernant les voyageurs empruntant l’espace aérien européen, est bloqué au motif qu’il constituerait une atteinte aux libertés individuelles – ce qui n’est pas totalement inexact. En tant que citoyenne, comment l’expliquez-vous et comment jugez-vous l’action des politiques que nous sommes?
Mme Aurélia Gilbert. Ce n’est pas à nous de juger l’action des politiques, et il est d’ailleurs trop tôt pour le faire. Nous sommes attentifs à la protection des libertés individuelles, et toute la difficulté, telle qu’elle était déjà pointée dans le rapport de la commission sur les filières djihadistes, va être de trouver le juste équilibre entre les moyens donnés aux services de renseignement et de police pour prévenir les attaques terroristes et la préservation des libertés individuelles.
Nous devons, très en amont, nous préoccuper de la prévention, pour empêcher ces jeunes Français, que j’ai regardé dans les yeux et qui ont voulu me tuer, de tuer d’autres Français. Demandons-nous à quel moment nous les avons perdus. Ce sont des assassins, mais ils restent des êtres humains, qui ont grandi et été éduqués dans notre société. La menace qui nous guette ne vient plus aujourd’hui du GIA mais des enfants de la République.
M. Georges Salines. Il nous est d’autant plus difficile de juger l’action des politiques que nous avons des opinions diverses, notamment sur la déchéance de nationalité. Le fait d’être des victimes ne fait pas pour autant de nous des experts.
À titre personnel néanmoins, je peux témoigner qu’un certain nombre de binationaux nés en France de parents musulmans ont perçu dans le brouhaha actuel un message qui leur été adressé selon lequel ils n’étaient pas tout à fait des Français comme les autres – certainement à tort. Pourtant, nombre de ces binationaux font partie des victimes du 13 novembre, et la réprobation universelle face aux attentats aurait dû nous donner l’occasion de recréer entre les Français de différentes origines un lien bien plus fort que le 7 janvier, où s’opposaient ceux qui étaient Charlie et ceux qui ne l’étaient pas. Or la manière dont s’est construit le débat politique laisse un sentiment de désordre et de cacophonie qui sont venus perturber la solennité du moment. Nous pouvons tous le regretter.
Mme Caroline Langlade, vice-présidente de l’association « Life for Paris – 13 novembre 2015 ». Il y a trois mois, nous avons subi le terrorisme, la barbarie et la violence aveugle. Une fois l'état de sidération passé, il a fallu nous relever et agir. Nous nous sommes alors fédérés autour de l'appel lancé par Maureen Roussel sur Facebook et avons créé l'association Life for Paris, qui regroupe des blessés, des parents de disparus, des victimes psychologiques et des aidants. Cet appel, vu deux millions de fois, a permis le regroupement de plus d'un demi-millier de personnes impliquées directement qui, par-delà le réseau social, se structurent depuis le 13 janvier dernier pour mener une action de long terme. En effet, la prise en charge et l'accompagnement des victimes exigent un travail de longue haleine. Au-delà de l'aide directe au quotidien, du soutien entre victimes et de la volonté de commémorer les disparus, notre voix, représentative et fondée sur notre expérience, doit permettre de contribuer à améliorer l'organisation et la prise en charge des victimes en cas de survenue d'un événement comparable.
En France, lorsque l'on est victime d'un accident ou d'une agression, il existe un certain nombre de dispositifs de prise en charge physique et morale, ce dont nous nous félicitons. Malheureusement, le 13 novembre 2015, ceux-ci n'ont pas suffi pour faire face au nombre considérable de victimes de ces actes de guerre. En outre, les prises en charge des victimes se sont avérées particulièrement kafkaïennes. De leur expérience, les membres de l'association Life for Paris ont constaté certains manquements.
La prise en charge des personnes non blessées physiquement a été unanimement considérée comme très insuffisante, certains individus ayant été renvoyés chez eux sans être vus ni entendus et sans conseils pour mettre en place un accompagnement. D'autres ont dû décliner leur identité à plusieurs reprises sans jamais être recontactés par la suite. Ce soir-là, aucun dispositif de soutien psychologique n'a pu être proposé massivement. Des agents de la protection civile ont été obligés d'écouter des victimes, ce qui a probablement traumatisé davantage de personnes. La grande majorité des gens emmenés en cellule de crise ont été relâchés entre quatre et six heures du matin sans consignes sur les démarches à entreprendre.
Le respect des victimes passe également par la protection de la diffusion de leur image dans les médias. Plusieurs membres de notre association se sont ainsi plaints que leur visage n'ait pas été flouté à la télévision, ce qui a ajouté à leur traumatisme.
De nombreux blessés ne furent soignés qu’après une longue attente dans certains sites. Les examens effectués par des soignants dans l'urgence ont pu donner lieu à des erreurs dommageables ; ainsi une personne a reçu une balle qui n'a pas été vue lors du premier examen.
La prise en charge des personnes décédées s'est avérée très néfaste pour les familles. En effet, l'Institut médico-légal étant débordé, des familles sont restées sans information pendant trois jours. Pourquoi ne pas imaginer le déploiement d'un mécanisme de reconnaissance par prise d'empreintes digitales au scanner?
L'administration s'est montrée pesante, procédurière et n’a parfois pas fait preuve de la moindre empathie pour les victimes ou leurs familles. Il convient donc de replacer l'humain au c œur des dispositifs de prise en charge.
Nous souhaitons saluer le travail extraordinaire accompli ce jour-là par les forces de police, les pompiers, les personnels soignants des hôpitaux, les associations d'aide aux victimes, qui ont su écouter, aider et prendre en charge les victimes au-delà de leur propre peur et de leur propre cadre de travail, en faisant preuve d'une immense empathie pour répondre au mieux aux besoins de chacun. Il serait d'ailleurs urgent de considérer et de traiter le traumatisme chez les aidants.
Lorsque l'on est victime d'un attentat, on perd ses repères, et la moindre démarche administrative apparaît insurmontable. On est incapable de se prendre en charge, tant on a besoin de soutien, d'aide et de simplicité. La prise en charge constitue-t-elle uniquement un droit? Ne devrait-elle pas être une obligation légale, afin que personne n’entame seul son processus de reconstruction? Pourquoi les cellules ministérielles ne cherchent-elles pas à simplifier les démarches, en proposant un parcours de prise en charge allégé reposant sur un référencement commun à toutes les antennes pour la reconnaissance du statut de victime? Est-ce réellement aux victimes ou à leur famille d'accomplir le travail de l'État dans l’accomplissement de ces procédures? Est-ce aux associations de victimes et d'aide aux victimes de pallier les manques d'information, d'organisation et de suivi de la prise en charge des personnes?
Des individus ne bénéfici |
and airborne toxins?
That is what researchers at the University of Illinois are working on.
Professor John Rogers is a materials science engineer and chemist at the University of Illinois. He showed us what they can already do: “This is an example of a transient integrated circuit. It’s a simple radio circuit. It involves transistors, some diodes, resistor lines, capacitors, conductors. It’s all built on a thin film of silk, which is a naturally occurring material.”
‘Transient electronics’ means bio-compatible devices that just disappear or dissolve at the end of their useful life without posing a threat to the environment.
The self-destructing microchip made of natural fibres is part of a project called ‘Born to Die’.
“They are born to die, but born to die in a very controlled way. So we’re not talking about unreliable, flaky electronics. We’re talking about electronics that are very specifically engineered to have excellent properties, time independent, until the programmed moment at which you don’t need the device any more and then it dissolves away. That’s the trick,” added Professor Rogers.
Of course it is a huge jump leap from creating a small vanishing chip, to equally soluble motherboards capable of driving the sophisticated electronics we use every day. But Rogers argues that this is the direction to go.
“If you could make key components or eventually the entire mobile phone out of materials that would last for three, five years and then naturally dissolve, that would be ideal,” he concluded.
The research team is also studying the potential use for such devices in the military and medical care, as well as this technology’s benefits for people and the planet.
The evolution of self-destructing devices could be revolutionary. In the US in 2010 alone, about 150 million used phones were dumped into landfills.
Every year 20 to 50 million tonnes of e-waste is generated worldwideIn April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill changed the Gulf of Mexico in ways that we're still trying to understand. Over the course of 87 days, more than 134 million gallons of oil spilled into the sea. This kind of environmental disaster doesn't end when the cleanup crews head home; it's felt for many years beyond, and marine creatures like bottlenose dolphins are proving that point.
A new international assessment coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and many partners looked at more than five years of data and analysis to understand the long-term impacts of the spill on the health of marine mammals like dolphins and whales.
According to the study, the dolphin population in the Barataria Bay area of the Gulf will have suffered a 50 percent population drop in the decade following the spill. A full recovery is expected to take at least 40 years.
"Despite all the uncertainties, it is clear that many populations of marine mammal were badly affected by the oil spill, and that these negative effects will persist for many years into the future," says Dr. Len Thomas in a press release from University of St. Andrews — home of the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) and the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (CREEM), both of which were partners in the research.With a little help from his friends at the American Civil Liberties Union, Edward Snowden conducted a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session Thursday afternoon. The ex-spy spoke about reforms to the National Security Agency and the Patriot Act. Section 215 of the act, which the NSA uses as the legal justification for the data collection program that Snowden revealed two years ago, is set to expire June 1 unless Congress extends it.
In his answers, he expressed significant skepticism that the U.S. government will stop spying on its citizens altogether, but still encouraged users to call their member of Congress and urge them to vote against the Patriot Act extension.
He also answered questions ranging from his take on Sen. Rand Paul's recent self-described filibuster, to the state of Russian cuisine, to his favorite book. Some of his replies are highlighted below.
Q: What're your thoughts on Rand Paul's filibuster against the renewal of the Patriot Act?
A: It represents a sea change from a few years ago, when intrusive new surveillance laws were passed without any kind of meaningful opposition or debate. Whatever you think about Rand Paul or his politics, it's important to remember that when he took the floor to say "No" to any length of reauthorization of the Patriot Act, he was speaking for the majority of Americans—more than 60% of whom want to see this kind of mass surveillance reformed or ended.
He was joined by several other senators who disagree with the Senate Majority leader's efforts to sneak through a reauthorization of what courts just weeks ago declared was a comprehensively unlawful program, and if you notice that yours did not take to the floor with him, you should call them right now and ask them to vote against any extension of the Patriot Act, because right now it looks like they're going to force the reauthorization vote to occur during the dark of a holiday weekend.
Q: Even if Section 215 is not renewed, do you believe that the NSA/U.S. government will still accomplish phone surveillance without approval and in secret?
A: There are always reasons to be concerned that regardless of the laws passed, some agencies in government (FBI, NSA, CIA, and DEA, for example, have flouted laws in the past) will miscontrue the intent of Congress in passing limiting laws—or simply disregard them totally. For example, the DOJ's internal watchdog, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report claiming, among other abuses, that it could simply refuse to tell government oversight bodies what exactly it was doing, so the legality or illegality of their operations simply couldn't be questioned at all.
However, that's no excuse for the public or Congress to turn a blind eye to unlawful or immoral operations—and the kind of mass surveillance happening under Section 215 of the Patriot Act right now is very much unlawful: the Courts ruled just two weeks ago that not only are these activities illegal, but they have been since the day the programs began.
Q: In your opinion, do you think that a majority of American Citizens care enough that they will call Congress and sign petitions? I think a large issue in America is Political Apathy.
A: Jameel [Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU] probably has a better answer, but we know from very recent, non-partisan polling that Americans (and everyone else around the world) care tremendously about mass surveillance.
The more central question, from my perspective, is "why don't lawmakers seem to care?" After all, the entire reason they are in office in our system is to represent our views. The recentPrinceton Study on politicians' responsiveness to the policy preferences of different sections of society gives some indication of where things might be going wrong:
Out of all groups expressing a policy preference within society, the views of the public at large are given the very least weight, whereas those of economic elites (think bankers, lobbyists, and the people on the Board of Directors at defense contracting companies) exercise more than ten times as much influence on what laws get passed -- and what laws don't.
Q: Whats your opinion about the UK government giving GCHQ spies immunity from anti-hacking laws and does that make them worse than the NSA?
I think it's revealing that the UK government has chosen to change the law without any debate or public declaration. It's a clear red flag.
Q: What do you think about the rise of encrypted messaging apps like Threema and Bleep by Bittorrent? Which (if any) would you recommend? Also, read any good books lately?
Signal for iOS, Redphone/TextSecure for Android.
I have a special fondness for "Secrets," by Daniel Ellsberg.
* * *
Reddit users also had some soul-searching questions for Snowden.
"Do you miss pizza?" one user asked.
"This guy gets it," Snowden responded. "Russia has Papa John's. For real."
"Sorry, I just had to ask, but, Mr. Snowden, during the interview with John Oliver, was that really a picture of his junk in that folder?" another user asked.
Snowden simply replied with an ambiguous emoticon.Organise for a better life at work, Organise for a better life at home.
Nothing will change until we organize. Joining the IWW is easy. Just give us a call. The sooner you do, the sooner things will improve and the sooner we, and not the bosses, will enjoy the good things in life.
If you want to organise a union in your workplace or industry, you are in the right place.
IWW volunteers would be happy to talk with you about strategies for improving your working conditions. The IWW can also provide you assistance if you and your co-workers decide to organize a union with the IWW.
The best place to start is to get in touch with us. Before the first contact, it would be helpful (though not necessary) to know a few things about your workplace:
How many workers are there? What are the different types of jobs at your company? How many workers are there in each department? Does your store/company have other shops or distribution lines in the area? What percentage of your co-workers would initially be excited about a union? How many would be neutral or opposed? Do you think your co-workers at work need to know more about unions?
Here is some advice in the short term.
You will want to keep any union talk, and general conversations about wages, benefits, hours, etc, out of the ears of management.
You will want to be a model employee because you do not want to give management any reason to fire you. Your job is worth defending and improving.
Start a workplace diary, noting positive and negative comments from supervisors and managers. Keep notes from meetings, schedule changes, etc. Make sure you note when, where, why, etc. Save company memos and pay stubs, ANYTHING that you think will help your case.
Lastly, it is legal to talk about union organising and you have a legal right to organise to improve your working conditions.
But you should know that some of the most seemingly friendly companies have waged the most vicious union busting drives The goal of keeping the campaign out of the ears of management is to do as much organizing as possible before your campaign goes public.
Already in a union?
Well, alternatively you can use the IWW as a means of bringing together the most active and militant rank and file workers in your workplace, particular industry, or locality. Many of our members are dual card carriers – in other words, they are members of both a reformist TUC union and the IWW.
AdvertisementsTexas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst has been at the forefront of the late-term abortion battle in the Lone Star State and now, he's receiving death threats as a result.
A woman in Texas could shoot @DavidHDewhurst and use "stand your ground" as a defense. Cause that guy is threatening all women in Texas. — Shit Sexists Say (@shitsexistssay3) July 9, 2013
During an interview on Fox News' America Live Tuesday, Dewhurst explained why he supports current legislation in the Texas legislature that bans abortions after five months and requires abortion clinics to meet basic medical standards."We think we’re protecting women’s health and babies. At the end of the day, our state is a very pro-life state. I mean over the years I’ve passed parental consent, making it a crime to harm an unborn baby, the sonogram bill, a woman’s right to know. And this bill is broken into two parts, just like you said. The first part, we’ve made a decision that with 34 states, Martha, having an earlier deadline than we have in Texas for abortion, and virtually all the countries in Western Europe, including France, we think 5 months is the appropriate time for the deadline on abortion," he said to anchor Marth McCallum. "The second part deals with improving the health care for women. Why in the world, Martha, why would we regulate our clinics differently if we’re taking our child to have their tonsils removed or someone wants cataract surgery versus having an abortion? We want safe facilities."Last week, pro-abortion protestors drowned out pro-life activists by chanting " hail Satan.IBM’s Cloud Video division is releasing the results of a new survey looking at the behavior of subscribers to video-on-demand services like Netflix and Hulu.
Perhaps the most interesting answers were about how many people canceled their subscriptions and why. According to IBM, 31 percent of respondents said they’d canceled a streaming video subscription in the past, but that number was higher (40 percent) among users who identified Amazon or Hulu as their primary service.
As for the issues that people identified as “most likely” to make them cancel a subscription, 27 percent said too many ads would make them quit, just ahead of the 25 percent who pointed to cost and the 20 percent who said they’d quit if there weren’t enough shows.
Meanwhile, 17 percent said they’d quit because of technical issues. Digging deeper into that issue, 73 percent of survey respondents pointed to either buffering or a delayed start as the most common technical problem they’d encountered.
The survey also looked at password sharing. Surprisingly, 48 percent of respondents said they don’t share their streaming video passwords with anyone (maybe they just didn’t want to admit it?), while 42 percent said they shared with their families.
David Mowrey, vice president of strategic planning at IBM Cloud Video, argued that these numbers represent more of an opportunity than a problem for subscription video services. For more one thing, it could “lead to more and more services offering a family plan to capture more revenue.”
More broadly, Mowrey said the survey points to the need for video-on-demand services to use data to understand their customers — including, yes, data that’s offered by IBM.
“All the key questions and results really point towards the value of big data and insights into the behavior of consumers on your service,” he said. “If you’re not looking at the consumer behavior on what devices and what consumers are watching, why are they churning out, why are you acquiring them in the first place, you’re at a huge disadvantage.”
The survey of 1,007 US subscription video-on-demand users was conducted online in April. You can download the full report here.SEATTLE, WA— (Reign release) This Saturday, Seattle Reign FC face the North Carolina Courage for the first time in club history. The two teams will face off against each other in three of their next five matches. This is the first of two matches at Sahlen’s Stadium at WakeMed Soccer Park.
Kickoff is set for 4:30pm PT. Fans can watch the match through the go90 app, go90.com, NWSL app, or nwslsoccer.com. They can also follow live play-by-play of the match at Reign FC’s official Twitter page, @ReignFC, and can join the conversation using the hashtag #NCvSEA.
Reign FC’s (5-2-5, 20 points) previous match was a 2-0 victory over rival Portland Thorns FC. Seattle is now undefeated in their past three matches against Portland going back to 2016, and undefeated in their past four matches in NWSL play this season.
“It was a great ending to the week,” said Seattle Reign FC head coach and general manager Laura Harvey. “Throughout the whole seven days the players put in a phenomenal effort. I think you saw that in the Portland game. We were still putting them under a lot of pressure and not letting them play the way they can do and we took our chances. That’s what you’ve got to do in rival games. It’s going to be tight, it’s going to be feisty.”
It was the second shutout of the 2017 NWSL season for the Reign FC defense. Goalkeeper Haley Kopmeyer made three saves in the match, increasing her league-leading save total to 53 on the season. The match ended a streak of four consecutive games where Reign FC conceded the first goal of the match.
“We’ve got a bit of grit about us right now,” said Harvey. “We pride ourselves on being hard to beat. It’s something we’ve worked on a lot. I felt we’d come away from that a bit during the first part of the season. We spoke about it a lot and as a group we said we need to put that into action. Last week we did.”
A catalyst of the Reign FC offense, Megan Rapinoe has scored a brace in the past two matches for Reign FC. The forward leads the league in goals scored with nine, three more than the next closest player. Reign FC have scored in all but two matches this season, with both shutouts coming on the road.
“The biggest thing is what she [Rapinoe] does when she doesn’t have the ball,” said Harvey. “She’s such a threat, people are worried about her, so teams try to stop her as much as they can which sometimes opens the space for people who get her the ball in the second phase. Her work rate defensively has been phenomenal. This is the best form she’s been in for this club. We need to make sure we aren’t reliant just on her, we don’t want to be that team, but as long as we can keep her in this form then we are going to be okay.”
North Carolina’s (8-4-0, 24 points) previous match was a 1-0 loss against Sky Blue FC at WakeMed Soccer Park. Despite the loss, the Courage remain in first place on the NWSL table, where they have been for most of the season.
Reign FC faced North Carolina, formerly the Western New York Flash, twice during the 2016 NWSL season, with Reign FC going 0-1-1 in the series. Co-captain and midfielder Jess Fishlock was the club’s all-time leading goal scorer against the Flash with five total goals. Seattle had never shutout Western New York.
“They’re a good side and have some really good players who know how to grind out results,” said Harvey. “I think they’re a huge threat. Some of the football they play and some of the goals they score are fantastic. We just know we’ve got to go there, be hard to beat, and work as hard as we have over the past four or five games.”
Rapinoe and Reign FC return to Memorial Stadium on July 15th when they host the Boston Breakers. Kickoff is set for 7:00pm PT. Single match tickets and VIP experience packages are available for Saturday’s match. To purchase tickets, visit reignfc.com/tickets or call the Reign FC ticket office at (855) REIGN-FC.
Reign FC Match Forecast presented by The Seattle Times.
About Seattle Reign FC:
Seattle Reign FC is one of ten teams in the National Women’s Soccer League. The NWSL is the premier women’s professional soccer league in North America, featuring many of the top players from the United States, Canada and around the world. Seattle Reign FC train and host home matches at Memorial Stadium, located in the shadow of the Space Needle on the Seattle Center campus. For more information on the club visit reignfc.com.
#LetItReignInstagram, following the controversial announcement that it would change the order in which images appear in user feeds, now appears to be testing a complete redesign of its app. Instagram has long stuck to the same classic design, but if this redesign rolls out to everyone, the app could finally move forward and fall into line with the design trends being adopted by many other apps.
Sylvania HomeKit Light Strip
According to a pair of tips sent to 9to5Mac, Instagram has recently been testing a design change with a small percentage of its total user base. Commonly referred to as A/B testing, Instagram is testing this design with only a handful of users before it decides whether or not to roll it out to the general public.
As you can see in the screenshots above, the new interface is very monochromatic and bland compared to the classic look of the app. The overall function of the app, however, remains the same.
In a statement to Mashable, Instagram confirmed that it is testing the redesign with a small percentage of its user base, noting that this is a design test only. This means all functionality remains the same, at least in this stage of testing. “We often test new experiences with a small percentage of the global community. This is a design test only,” an Instagram spokesperson said.
Last month, Instagram rolled out support for 60-second videos to all users, saying video viewership has increased by more than 40 percent over the last 6 months. This update followed the company rolling out multiple account support to users. Most notably, however, Instagram recently revealed that it would switch to new personalized algorithms based on each user for displaying content, a change it later backtracked on after backlash from the public.
What do you think of the redesign Instagram is testing? Let us know in the comments.Many Green Bay Packers fans already were bitter about Greg Jennings signing with the Minnesota Vikings. This won't alleviate those feelings.
NFL Bracketology
Vote for the greatest play in NFL history:
NFL.com has picked the 64 best plays ever, and over the next three weeks we are asking fans to cast their votes for the best. Vote now!
Jennings said Brett Favre, the former Packers' and Vikings' quarterback, helped him make the decision.
"Literally, as I got off the plane and (offensive coordinator Bill) Musgrave walked up to me, I'm on the phone with Brett," Jennings said on KFAN-AM, via Min.Scout.com. "I spoke with Brett two or three times throughout this process. He shot me straight. I knew if there was one person that would shoot straight and tell me exactly what I wanted to hear and things I possibly didn't want to hear, it would be Brett. He did that for me."
Jennings joined Favre, Darren Sharper and Ryan Longwell as popular Packers to move on to the Vikings. Favre was an overtime loss to the New Orleans Saints away from taking the Vikings to their first Super Bowl since 1976. The ol' gunslinger had a good experience in Minnesota and surely relayed that to Jennings.
"I'm not the first Packer player to jump on this side," Jennings said during his introductory news conference. "That makes it a bit more relieving."
Sounds like Favre eased some of Jennings' concerns. That will not sit well with Packers fans who still have beef with Favre.
Follow Kareem Copeland on Twitter @kareemcopeland.The further we get into the 21st century the less attention we pay to the last four decades of the 20th century, not surprisingly. What is bizarre, however, is how, due to massive minds like Ta-Nehisi Coates, we increasingly obsess over housing policy in the middle of the 20th Century, all the while memory-holing the tumultuous events that subsequently ensued when liberals got control of race policy.
For example, from Slate:
Discrimination Is Not De Facto A new book takes issue with the prevailing view that we can’t understand what causes segregation. By Rachel M. Cohen … An essential new book takes square aim at these decisions and the very notion of de facto segregation itself. In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute concludes that the court was wrong—and still is—when it described racial segregation as the product of private individual choices. … Rothstein concludes by talking about history; specifically, how it’s taught. Looking at some of the most popular U.S. history textbooks in public schools, he highlights what little they have to say about segregation, especially in the North. This failure to teach children about their country’s history of discrimination, of redlining, of blockbusting, of income suppression leaves people comfortable to assume present inequality is the result of individual decisions and “unknown” factors, not government policy.
So, the TNC Era conventional wisdom is that the current distribution of where people live was locked in stone by FDR’s redlining, the racial covenants in contracts that were outlawed in California in the late 1940s, and so forth. In contrast, events such as the 1968 Fair Housing Act and the massive changes in where people lived in the liberal era can’t have much impact on the present because those events were more recent than the more distant past.
But that raises a number of questions, such as: how many blacks live in neighborhoods today that were black in 1948?
Consider the Los Angeles suburb of Compton of “Straight Outta Compton” gangsta rap fame.
In the late 1940s, it was nice enough that two future Presidents lived in Compton: the Bushes, father and son. Then the California supreme court banned enforcing discriminatory contractual provisions, and this conveniently located suburb close to high paying manufacturing jobs in aerospace with a superb climate shifted heavily toward blacks.
For awhile, Compton with its Bush-quality houses with yards seemed like a huge improvement for the blacks who moved in during the 1950s and 1960s.
But the next generation of young blacks of Compton became world famous for shooting each other over moronic beefs, so more responsible black parents have long been moving out. As of 2010, Compton was 65% Latino, although black politicians still run the place.
In other words, all sorts of well-known stuff has happened in Compton alone since Ta-Nehisi Coates stopped reading his history books, but we know from Rothstein and Coates that everything that has happened in Compton since then is still the fault of whites, because racism.
You see, when the Bushes lived in Compton, it had Magic Dirt. But they took it with them, leaving only Tragic Dirt. Now that Compton is majority Latino, however, the test scores haven’t improved all that much, but the homicide rate is way down from the N.W.A. Era, because now Compton has Boring Dirt.
It’s Science.
Geologists should get a huge grant to study this phenomenon.
[Comment at Unz.com]As we just revealed at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, CA, our next big game update, 'Starbase ARC,' is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One next Wednesday, December 7!
"But, what's in it?," you ask? Let's break it down:
FREE New Arena and Premium Battle-Car
We're huge fans of science fiction here at Psyonix, which made the inclusion of a space-themed Arena and Battle-Car for Rocket League inevitable. Inspired by one of our previous games, ARC Squadron, 'Starbase ARC,' is an octagonal, semi-standard stadium that orbits a huge (but familiar) desert planet where epic space battles are waged in the background and hulking celestial bodies drift about in the vastness of outerspace. Check out the official trailer for a better look:
In addition to the FREE 'Starbase ARC' Arena, we are also releasing a fantastic new premium DLC Battle-Car that comes complete with animated wings and a sleek, futuristic look. Expect to to see it for $1.99 USD or regional equivalent day-and-date with the Arena on December 7.
Steam Workshop Level Support
As you may have heard last week, Steam Workshop support is also coming to Rocket League with our next update as well! PC, Mac, and SteamOS players will be able to upload custom levels they have built to the Steam Rocket League Community Hub! This is a feature we’ve wanted to implement for a long time and we’re excited to see what you can come up with. While you wait, be sure to check out our preview blog and Steam’s excellent knowledge base as your imagination starts to stretch.
Customize Your Training
We’ve been really encouraged by the great work our PC modding community has done (as you could probably tell from our previous blurb), and that's motivated us to introduce our own ‘Custom Training’ feature on ALL platforms that allows you to create your own drills specific to your play style. Want to make your own Wall Shot exercise or hone your dribble game? You can do it! You can also 'Browse,' 'Search, Favorite,' and 'Share' other training sequences from the community. Expect this feature to grow in subsequent updates.
Arena Preferences Are Coming!
You've been asking for something like this for a long time, and we're happy to report that ‘Arena Preferences’ are coming to the Playlist menu next week as well!
With this new feature, you have a limited number of 'Likes' or 'Dislikes' that you can assign to the Arenas of your choice to increase or decrease your likelihood of playing them again in online matches. You can apply these preferences to all game types, but if you want extra control, you can fine-tune your 'Likes" and 'Dislikes' per playlist.
Champion Series IV Crate
The Champion Series continues with the all-new exclusive Garage items to help fund our esports initiative! Use Keys to potentially unlock the highly-request import Battle-Car, 'Octane ZSR!' Of course, the ZSR still has the same hitbox, physics, and turning radii as the iconic original car found in our logo.
Starbase ARC landing page and check 'em out. For a few more looks at the possible contents of our next crate, visit the officialand check 'em out.
FREE Redesigns For Classic Content
It's the season of giving, which means that it's the perfect time to add to add a fresh new look to a pair of classic Rocket League Battle-Cars. This time around, we're updating X-Devil and Gizmo with streamlined new bodies and an artistic recharge to their original Decals. But don't worry about how they'll work in-game, as we're keeping the exact-same handling and hit-boxes that they had before.
In addition to the two new car updates,' two classic arenas will also receive new variant versions, with “Wasteland (Night)” and “Utopia Coliseum (Snowy)” dropping into Exhibition and Private matches, plus all Ranked Playlists.
New Free Community Flags and Holiday Items
As with every update, several Community Flags will be added to your Garage for FREE! These include the Noclip Community Flag, Vikkstar123, SDMN, and NZXT Antennas! Check them out when the update hits and wave them with pride on the pitch. On a related note, you should definitely check out the Noclip’s two-part documentary on ‘The Story of Rocket League’ -- we loved it, and so will you! Also, check out our FREE Holiday items. They will drop through the holiday season and end on January 2.
Color Blind Mode
We’ve also responded to the community feedback and added a ‘Color Blind Mode’ to the ‘Options’ menu. When the update hits, high-contrast Orange and Blue shades will be available alongside High-Contrast Nameplates so that players who may see the world a little differently can play like everyone else.
Summation
Those are the top-level items we have to share about 'Starbase ARC,' but there are still more revisions and fixes planned for the final release. Be sure and watch our official Starbase ARC landing page for the full patch notes when the update hits on December 7.BOSTON (CBS) – A Montreal elementary school decided to cancel a ‘Montreal Canadiens Jersey Day’ on Thursday instead of letting some students show up wearing Bruins jerseys, according to a report from CBC News.
“We don’t think it’s prudent for a student to wear a Boston Bruins jersey in a school during this very intensive playoff play,” English Montreal School Board spokesman Mike Cohen told the CBC. “At this stage in the game, with the Canadiens leading the series 2-1, why ignite things, why create a controversy.”
The school reportedly made the decision after someone complained that an 11-year-old girl was told to ditch her Bobby Orr Bruins jersey on a previous Canadiens jersey day.
The girl’s father, Tony Pasquale told CBC News that while he was not the person who complained to the school, he wondered why they wouldn’t want to encourage students to accept differences of opinion.
“It teaches respect, sportsmanship. We can’t all be from the same thread,” he reportedly said.
Pasquale says his daughter has long been a huge Bruins fan, and that she felt left out on Habs jersey day.
MORE BRUINS NEWS FROM CBS BOSTONSomeone has been sent an iPhone 6 prototype 'accidentally', with the person throwing it up to eBay straight away with a starting bid of $999. The Beverly Hills, California based iPhone 6 owner has offered free shipping if the price exceeds $4,000 - but at the time of writing, the current bid was a massive $58,660.
The iPhone 6 prototype does not feature FCC markets on the rear of the device, or a model number, and its Lightning port is red - proving that it is indeed a prototype. iOS 8 isn't on the device, with the iPhone 6 sitting in Developer Mode. 'kimberlyk1018' has said on the eBay page: "This device is being sold as is. I cannot guarantee that it will make calls or that the camera will work. However I can guarantee you that the device is a 64gb iPhone 6 which was sent to me from Verizon. The device comes with the box, charger, headphones and wall charger as well as all the paperwork. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me. This is a once in a life time opportunity for you to take a part of".
But, $58,660 for the iPhone 6 prototype? How many of the recent bids would you say are Apple's bids to get their prototype back?A reader named Scott alerted us to this video, which is apparently an episode of a local television show Michael Jordan had in 1989 called Michael Jordan's Airwaves. MJ sits down with Chicago sports anchor Jim Rose in front of a live studio audience to talk about the upcoming season. It oozes 80s goodness. Here are some highlights:
0:00
The opening sequence is just tremendous. Jordan leaps from the free throw line and into the clouds, dunking on a floating hoop.
3:28
First-year head coach Phil Jackson makes an appearance. "We've tried to put the skeleton together out there of what we're going to be as a beast," the Zen Master says.
8:30
Rose turns to the audience for questions. One man very awkwardly asks MJ a question about golf. Mike manages to turn it into a discussion about the Air Jordan shoes.
15:50
A cute little girl asks Jordan why he likes playing basketball.
19:40
Jordan predicts the 1989-90 NBA season with impressive accuracy. The Spurs were 21-61 the year before, but Jordan says he thinks they'll be a "surprise team in the West." They went 56-26 that year.
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21:16
MJ goes bowling and nails a spare with a between-the-legs shot. Perhaps he should have given pro bowling a shot instead of baseball.
[YouTube]Mark Webber says Fernando Alonso has "more talent in his little finger" than some of the drivers he was battling in 2015.
Honda's struggles for performance and reliability last year saw McLaren endure its worst season since 1980. The Honda power unit was brutally exposed on straights, with deployment issues meaning McLaren lacked upwards of 160BHP and often saw Alonso and team-mate Jenson Button easily picked off by cars behind.
Before his infamous "GP2 engine" radio rant in Japan last year, Alonso complained his power unit was "embarrassing" after being passed by Sauber's Marcus Ericsson early in the race. Webber says the Honda situation was always bound to frustrate a driver of Alonso's calibre.
"He just wants to be at the front maximising his potential," Webber is quoted as saying by PA Sport. "Last year, when he was fighting with some of the guys he was fighting with, Fernando has got more talent in his little finger.
"If you are knocking around with those guys, week in week out, it wears you down. That is a question for him and his drive and tenacity and determination. It is about that middle step on the podium for him. Would he love to parachute himself into a Mercedes? Of course he would."
Webber says reliability problems are the most frustrating part of a driver's job, especially in the latter stages of their career.
"There is nothing worse than having non-finishes. It is horrible for a driver to go through that effort, and you don't even see the chequered flag. So, they have got to get that reliability going, and that will be important for the drivers and to keep both their boys in the future. If they are operationally poor, in terms of reliability, it is a pain in the arse at that point in your career. It's horrible."It's a heated and polarized election, and people say they are targets of vandalism for supporting their candidate.
"Don't vandalize my darn property, not at all. Leave me alone," said Andrew Peterson, a homeowner in Fargo, North Dakota.
We're less than two weeks out from election day and many people have campaign signs out. And Peterson has a message to the vandals and people out there upset about his campaign signs.
"I think more people come through here than just the people that live in here," explained Peterson.
Peterson and his family live at a busy corner in south Fargo. He says 28 signs he had displayed, supporting the libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, were taken from Saturday into Sunday night.
"They were taken in haste and some of the stakes in the ground were mangled," Peterson said.
Peterson says it was the second vandalism incident that happened in less than two weeks and he wasn't going to let the vandals win. So, he decided to put up 50 more signs in support of Gary Johnson.
"They left the one for Marty Riske and the one for Jack Seaman on the fence," said Peterson.
In addition to putting up the 50 more signs, Peterson put a message up for the vandals and thieves saying he's watching them. He also urges them to find a candidate that they support, so they feel no need to tear down others.
"This political climate, everything, it's just so filled with animosity and I feel it's the wrong way to go about it," explained Peterson. "If you really like your person, if you really stand by your person, build them up. You watch these debates and they are gross."
The signs have gotten the attention of people. With numerous drivers slowing down to read them, Peterson says his message is more for the vandals.
"You are not going to beat me, I support this man." stated Peterson. "I support this man 100 percent and well, by golly, this is my property and I am going to do what I'm going to do and If I have access to more signs, I will put up 50 more."
Fargo police say they've been |
about the two-man cells for medium-risk offenders? In order to increase compatibility and reduce violence, the system lets inmates choose their own permanent cellmates. Both men sign forms saying they want to share a cell, and authorities grant the request unless there are security reasons not to. Needless to say, no one can think of a case in which someone asked for a roommate of another race. Miss Bach of the prison system says, “there is peer pressure when you get to prison to align with a [racial] group for protection.” Charles Hughes, a corrections lieutenant at the Lancaster prison is blunter: “If a black inmate asked for a white celly [cellmate] there is no way in hell that I would do that. I’d refer them both for a mental-health evaluation.”
Given the extraordinary level of racial tension in California prisons, guards would clearly like to segregate the entire system. Initial segregation, before authorities have a sense of whom they are dealing with, appears to be the minimum of common sense, and the California system stands behind it. Prisoners never willingly share a two-man cell with someone of another race. The system wisely refrains from forcing them to do so.
“You cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. You cannot. They will kill each other.”
What is the origin of the challenge to the practice? Garrison Johnson, who filed the original complaint, is a career criminal and former Crip, who was convicted in 1987 of murder, robbery and assault, and sentenced to 25 years to life. Mr. Johnson has been transferred five times, and at each stop along the way he got a black cellmate. In 1995, Mr. Garrison filed a pro se (meaning he represented himself) complaint with the Central District of California against the prison system, arguing that always being paired with a black violated his 14th Amendment rights to equal protection. After several years of procedural give-and-take, including appeals, in 2000 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco instructed the district court to assign Mr. Johnson a lawyer and hear the case. When the district court upheld the segregation policy, he appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which, in 2003, also upheld the policy. That was when he took the case to the Supreme Court.
Since Mr. Johnson is a violent, medium-security prisoner, he lives in a two-man cell. This means he gets to choose his celly — and he has always asked for a black. He says he simply could not ask for a white: “You can’t cross races. That will start racial tension right there. So I know I can’t go to a white guy and say, ‘Hey, I want to move with you’ because he is not going to move with me.”
Mr. Johnson’s reasoning for challenging the system is the following: Racial tension in prisons is so bad it is impossible for him to make friends with anyone who is not black. Blacks would turn on him if he tried, and non-blacks would spurn him. This, he says, puts in him danger whenever there is racial violence, because he does not have a single friend of another race to stick up for him in a riot. If, however, he spent 14 days with a white cellmate when he was transferred, he might make a bosom friend who would protect him the next time blacks and whites are fighting. Mr. Johnson has 25 years to life to make white friends. In effect, he is saying he wants the prison system to make friends for him.
Pelican Bay: the worst of the
racial gang leaders live here.
The Ninth Circuit Ruling
Like so many court cases, Johnson v. California has a complex but interesting legal background. The equal protection clause, on which Mr. Johnson hung his case, has generally been interpreted to require that government pretend race does not exist. In Shaw v. Hunt in 1996 (which challenged the creation of two largely black North Carolina congressional districts), the Supreme Court wrote, “Racial classifications are antithetical to the Fourteenth Amendment, whose central purpose was to eliminate racial discrimination emanating from official sources in the States.” The Court has established a standard of “strict scrutiny” when it comes to race (or religion, national origin, and sometimes sex), meaning a government agency must have a very compelling reason to take any notice of race at all.
The Supreme Court did not formally end prison segregation until the 1968 case of Lee v. Washington, when it ruled that Alabama could no longer segregate cellblocks. The court did note that “prison authorities have the right, acting in good faith and in particularized circumstances, to take into account racial tensions in maintaining security, discipline, and good order in prisons and jails,” but never offered guidelines for when racial classification was legitimate. Several lower courts have cited Lee to argue that “unsubstantiated” fears of racial violence do not justify segregation. These courts have usually limited racial separation to lockdowns following race riots or other violence.
In 1987, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Turner v. Safley that prison administrators may limit constitutional rights of inmates if limiting those rights serves a “legitimate penological interest.” Turner had nothing to do with race — the question was whether prisoners could write letters and get married — but the Court held that the standard of “legitimate penological interest” applied to all constitutional claims, which would include equal protection. The justices wisely pointed out that “courts are ill equipped to deal with the increasingly urgent problems of prison administration and reform,” and that “the problems of prisons in America are complex and intractable, and, more to the point, they are not readily susceptible of resolution by decree.”
In Turner, the Supreme Court established four rules for deciding whether a prison policy that limits inmate rights meets the standard of “legitimate penological interest.” The first is whether there is a “valid, rational connection” between the policy and the goal it is supposed to achieve. The second is whether there are “alternative means” by which prisoners can exercise the rights they lost because of the policy. The third is how much trouble it will make for a prison if inmates exercise their rights, and the fourth is whether there are any “ready alternatives” to the policy in question.
Mr. Johnson’s lawyers argued that segregation did not meet the Turner standard because there was no rational connection between temporary segregation and preventing violence. They claimed — amazingly — that since California prisons could not point to a single act of violence that had been caused by integrating two-man cells, the system’s reasons for segregation were “unsubstantiated fears” of racial violence and therefore unconstitutional. Of course, there have been no such acts of violence because two-man cells are never integrated.
The Ninth Circuit found a clear Turner standard connection between the segregation policy and its objective of reducing racial violence. It noted that one of the worst prison riots in US history was triggered in large part by the forced integration of cells (see next article). “Under Johnson’s view,” it added, “the same violence would have to occur within the CDC [California Department of Corrections] in order to permit race to be considered as a factor in making initial housing decisions. We disagree... The CDC simply does not have to wait until inmates or guards are murdered specifically because race is not considered in assigning an inmate’s initial cell mate; instead, Turner allows the administrators to stave off potentially dangerous policies without first ‘seeing what happens.’” In other words, California was under no obligation to integrate prison cells just to see if its decades-old segregation policy really was preventing murder.
The Ninth Circuit also refuted Mr. Johnson’s argument that the policy of temporary segregation increased racial animosity by perpetuating racial stereotypes. It pointed out there was already plenty of racial tension in prisons with or without segregation, and that it was silly to argue that a measure designed to keep violence down was actually increasing it. Mixing up the races in cells would probably lead to more racial violence, not interracial friendship. The court also went to great pains to point out just how pervasive racial tension is in California prisons. It listed case after case in which racial gangs attacked each other, and noted that some prisons have been kept locked down for years at a stretch because race riots would erupt if there was the slightest contact.
Meal time.
At the end of this grisly recitation, the court noted dryly, “In short, this is hardly a case where the prison administrators are acting on an unsubstantiated record.” Therefore, “administrators are well within their discretion to attempt to rectify or to reduce further violence by taking reasonable measures.”
The second Turner test is whether there are “alternate means” for a prisoner to exercise his rights, that is, whether blacks and whites have other opportunities to get acquainted despite the segregation policy in the reception centers. The Ninth Circuit found this was obviously true, since the same-race cell assignment never lasted more than 60 days. Mr. Johnson can meet all the whites he wants in the dining hall or the recreation yard.
The third Turner standard, whether granting prisoners constitutional rights would make a lot of trouble for the prison authorities, was met by testimony from prison officials. Then-California prison system director Steven Cambra told the court, “If race were to be disregarded entirely... there will be problems within the individual cells. These will be problems that the staff will have a difficult time controlling. I believe there will be fights in the cells and the problems will emanate onto the prison yards... [I]t would be very difficult to assist inmates if the staff were needed in several places at one time.” In other words, there would be fights in the cells, violence would spill into the rest of the prison, and the guards would be overwhelmed.
As for the fourth Turner standard, whether there was a simple alternative to segregation, it was the responsibility of Mr. Johnson, as plaintiff, to offer one. His solution? Ask prisoners if they have ever been in a racial gang or if they don’t like people of other races. The Ninth Circuit called this “disingenuous,” adding, “There is little chance that inmates will be forthcoming about their past violent episodes or criminal gang activity so as to provide an accurate and dependable picture of the inmate.” That, of course, is why the system has a staff of 75 investigators — prisoners lie.
The Ninth Circuit therefore concluded that the 14th Amendment permits temporary segregation. Because of the special circumstances of prisons, this form of racial classification need meet only the looser standards of Turner and not the “strict scrutiny” standard that prevails elsewhere. Mr. Johnson did not accept this ruling and appealed to the US Supreme Court.
A prison dormitory.
Before the Supreme Court
By this time, of course, Mr. Johnson had a hot, court-appointed lawyer, a prominent litigator named Bert H. Deixler with the nationally-known firm of Proskauer Rose. Mr. Deixler argued that the Ninth Circuit was wrong to apply the Turner standard and that by doing so, the lower court had “carved out a wholesale ‘prison exception’” when it came to race. He repeatedly invoked the Supreme Court’s ruling in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, Gratz and Grutter (see “What the Supreme Court Did,” AR, August 2003), pointing out that “all nine Justices were in agreement that strict scrutiny applies whenever the government classifies based on race” and arguing that this should be the standard everywhere and without exception.
Mr. Deixler bought Mr. Johnson’s claim that even brief segregation fed dangerous racial stereotypes, and proposed that the best way to undermine the influence of race-based gangs in prison was to integrate two-man cells. Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the Court’s most liberal members, was especially pleased by this silly argument.
Mr. Johnson found an ally in the Bush administration, which sent the acting solicitor general, Paul D. Clement, to argue that given the country’s “pernicious history of race” — from which prisons are not exempt — it is vital that all racial classifications be subject to strict scrutiny. Otherwise, he implied, the innate racism of prison administrators would take over.
A convict’s shiv.
During oral arguments, the justices seemed most concerned that the segregation policy applied to prisoner transfers as well as newcomers, wondering why they needed to be segregated when they had already been under prison system control, and had already been evaluated. The response of California senior assistant attorney general Frances T. Grunder was weak. She said it was often hard to get a prisoner’s records transferred at the same time as the prisoner. Justice David Souter wondered if instead of segregating transfer prisoners, the system should just send the papers more quickly. Miss Grunder could have made a different argument: No one already in the prison system ever asks for a roommate of a different race, so the system should not court trouble by forcibly integrating two-man cells.
The segregation policy also seems to have suffered because of its success. The justices wanted to know if there had ever been racial violence because people of different races were put in a reception cell. No, there hadn’t, because the cells are never integrated. Rather than see this as proof the policy works, some justices seemed to think it showed the prison system’s fears were exaggerated.
The Decision
In its February ruling, Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy and Souter joined Sandra Day O’Connor in sending the case back to the Ninth Circuit where the segregation policy will be subject to “strict scrutiny.” In her view, any consideration of race by government is “immediately suspect” and must clearly promote a “compelling state interest.” Any lower standard will fail to “ferret out invidious uses of race.” Justice O’Connor also fell for Mr. Johnson’s claim that segregation — even for as few as 14 days — may increase interracial violence by “perpetuating the notion that race matters most.”
Doing the perp walk.
Justice John Paul Stevens issued a dissent, but only to insist that the housing policy was unconstitutional on 14th Amendment grounds and did not need any further “strict scrutiny” review. He wants the cells integrated right away.
Chief Justice Rehnquist was sick with thyroid cancer during the case, and did not participate. Justice Clarence Thomas issued a real dissent, in which Justice Scalia joined.
Justice Thomas pointed out that the case required the Court to choose between two conflicting lines of precedent. On the one hand, the Court has stated that all racial classifications by government must be subject to strict scrutiny. At the same time, the Court has said the Turner standard applies every time a prison policy limits a prisoner’s constitutional rights.
Which precedent should the Court choose? To Justice Thomas, decisions about race and violence “are better left in the first instance to the officials who run our nation’s prisons.” He accused his colleagues of indifference to the reality of prison life, writing, “The majority is concerned with sparing inmates the indignity and stigma of racial discrimination. California is concerned with their safety and saving their lives.” Justice Thomas even wrote that he thought temporary segregation might survive “strict scrutiny.” Keeping Americans from killing each other is surely a “compelling state interest.” If the Ninth Circuit decides it is not, the California prison system will start mixing up the two-man cells. Mr. Johnson’s white celly might turn out to be a 200-pound Skinhead who has always wanted to strangle a black man in his sleep. As Justice Thomas put it, somewhat more delicately, Mr. Johnson, “who concedes that California’s prisons are racially violent places, and that he lives in fear of being attacked because of his race... may well have won a Pyrrhic victory.”
Once again, the justice
with the most sense.
In fact, it is whites who will suffer most from forced integration. Blacks and Hispanics have a well-documented history of raping whites, especially the young and the weak. For many convicts, night after night of uninterrupted sodomy with a terrified white cellmate would be a dream come true (for a discussion of prison rape, see “Hard Time,” AR, April 2002).
Whites who have served time know how much race matters. Joshua Englehart is a white man who served 37 months in San Quentin on drug charges. He wrote in the Los Angles Times that prisoners will pay the price for this foolish decision “because the truth is that mixing races and ethnic groups in cells would be extremely dangerous for inmates.” “[P]rison is an undeniably racist place, and court rulings aren’t going to stop it,” he explained. “Rule No. 1: The various races and ethnic groups stick together.” Mr. Engelhart concluded that segregation “is looked on by no one — of any race — as oppressive or as a way of promoting racism. It is done for their own safety, and they know it... This ruling will strike dread in the hearts of all California inmates when they read about it.”
This Supreme Court decision is a particularly dangerous example of how our nation lets ideology blind it to reality. That Sandra O’Connor and five other justices of the Supreme Court of the United States could actually think that briefly separating blacks from whites from Hispanics during evaluation adds to racial tensions in prison simply beggars belief. Can they really believe convicts show up without strong racial feelings, notice they got a same-race roommate in the reception center, and then decide the races are not supposed to get along? These six justices — who hold more power than even the President — have a completely fantasy-land view of what race means, either in prison or in the country at large. This is the view that guides them and our other rulers when they make important decisions that affect our very survival as a nation and a people.
ARTICLE
The Lucasville Riot
Integration and its discontents.
The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility is a maximum-security prison in Lucasville, about 80 miles south of Columbus. In the words of one Ohio supreme court justice, it gets “the worst of the worst.” On April 11, 1993 — Easter Sunday — prisoners rioted and took control of L Block (one of the three main cellblocks) taking a dozen guards hostage. They beat all of them severely, and quickly released four they were afraid would die. During the 11-day siege that followed, they murdered nine inmates and a guard, making it the longest and third-most deadly prison riot is US history.
Prison guard on patrol with assault rifle.
Although the spark that started the riot was a plan to inoculate black Muslim inmates with a TB vaccine containing alcohol, which they say violated their religion, racial hatred played a major role. At the time of the riot, the prison was under a court order to integrate double cells, and a new warden named Arthur Tate, a black man, appears to have enforced the order with blind enthusiasm. In just a few months, the number of integrated double cells went from 1.7 percent to 31 percent. Inmates complained that men were not allowed to choose their cellies, and that random assignments put known racial enemies in the same cell. They said the warden told them that the only way they could refuse integration was to attack their new cellmates. In one case, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood told the warden that if he “put a nigger” in his cell, he would kill him. Guards ignored him and gave him a black celly. The white convict immediately smashed him in the face with a padlock wrapped in a sock.
Some people thought Mr. Tate was trying to provoke a riot, presumably to support his campaign to have the prison upgraded to an even higher security rating. White prisoners, a minority, thought Mr. Tate and his chief deputy, also black, were discriminating against them.
Three main gangs operated in the prison — the Black Muslims, the Black Gangster Disciples, and the Aryan Brotherhood. The Black Muslims started the riot by attacking the guards, and during the first few hours of chaos, prisoners settled scores, most of them racial. At a dangerous point in the riot Keith Lamar, a black man not in either black gang, found his path blocked by Black Muslims. He promised that if they let him pass he would kill white “snitches,” and the Muslims agreed. He then organized a “death squad” to find and kill whites whom he accused of cooperating with prison authorities. His group murdered four men, including one who was 69 years old and used a walker. He also forced one white prisoner to beat another white to death.
The Lucasville riot did solve the integration problem in maximum-security prisons in Ohio. All men now get single cells.
After the initial confusion, any man who could sought protection from one of the gangs, each of which controlled a section of L Block. The leader of the Black Muslims, Carlos Sanders, was afraid there would be race war when the Aryan Brotherhood started taking revenge for Mr. Lamar’s killings, and proposed a truce to its two leaders, George Skatzes and Jason Robb. The men agreed that henceforth, only whites would kill whites, and only blacks would kill blacks. The whites appear to have kept their word. Mr. Skatzes of the brotherhood had already killed one white informer, and he and Mr. Robb killed another before the riot ended. However, Mr. Sanders was later accused of ordering the death of a white inmate who had allegedly raped a black prisoner. The Gangster Disciples also agreed to the truce, and for the remainder of the siege, the gangs managed an uneasy coexistence.
Not all prisoners rioted. Some escaped to other parts of the prison and turned themselves over to authorities. The ones who could not escape were traitors in the eyes of the rioters. The gang leaders rounded them up and kept them in cells under gang “security.” After the initial violence, whites managed whites, and blacks managed blacks.
The gang leaders negotiated with prison authorities, and even broadcast their demands on local radio and television. One of their chief demands was an end to the policy of integrating double cells, but they also wanted less crowding, and the removal of the warden and his deputy. In order to convince authorities they were serious, the gang leaders agreed to murder one of the eight guards they were still holding. They chose Robert Vallandingham, a 40-year-old white man. It isn’t known who actually killed Mr. Vallandingham, but inmates have testified that Anthony Lavelle, leader of the Black Gangster Disciples, strangled him.
As food ran out and conditions worsened, the prisoners lost their bravado. On April 21, 1993, they surrendered peacefully. More than 50 inmates faced charges in connection with the riot, and Black Muslim leaders Carlos Sanders and James Were, Aryan Brotherhood leaders Jason Robb and George Skatzes all got the death penalty for killing Officer Vallandingham. Anthony Lavelle, who may actually have killed the guard, testified against the others in exchange for a lighter sentence. Keith Lamar, who organized the anti-white hit-squads, was also sentenced to death. As of publication date, no one has been executed. Arthur Tate, the warden whom all the prisoners hated, continued his career in prison administration.
In the end, the Lucasville riot did solve the integration problem in maximum-security prisons in Ohio. All men now get single cells.
BOOK REVIEW
Hurrah, Hurrah, for Southern Rights, Hurrah!
The League of the South’s roadmap to secession.
Michael Hill (Editor), The Grey Book: Blueprint for Southern Independence, Traveller Press, 2004, 170 pp., $20.00.
More than eight decades ago, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote the now-famous lines, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” That the center of the American Empire cannot hold has at no time been more evident than now, with the current wave of secessionist movements rising up across the country: the Alaskan Independence Party, the California Secessionist Party, the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, the New England Confederation Movement, the North Star Republic, the Cascadian National Party, the Aztlan movement, the Republic of Texas, and the Green Mountain Republic of Vermont.
And then there’s Dixie. In 1994, 27 Southern patriots organized the League of the South (then known as The Southern League) around the time-honored principle of Southern independence. Ten years later, their manifesto for a new nation is here, in The Grey Book: Blueprint for Southern Independence.
Why secession? As The Grey Book explains:
“Since the War for Southern Independence, the South has been redefined by an alien and revolutionary vision radiating from Washington, DC: the American Empire. It has imposed on its once-free citizens a vast and oppressive bureaucracy in the form of welfare and affirmative action programs that squander our wealth and incite racial strife... It has assumed control over the education of our children, who are taught little except to hate their ancestors and to despise their own people. It has, while pursuing empire abroad, refused to defend its own people against an epidemic of crime, the invasion of our borders by illegal aliens, and the international agencies that are bit by bit chipping away at the sovereignty of these United States.”
Reform is impossible, according to the League, for these and a dozen other reasons neatly outlined in chapter three. The League understands that because the South is the most “culturally distinct” region of the US, it is often at odds with the rest of the country. For example, representatives of the South voted against the Immigration Reform Acts of 1965 and 1986, both of which passed nonetheless, with disastrous consequences.
The League defends the principle of secession by reminding readers that the United States came into being because the American colonies seceded from England. Furthermore, the League contends that because the US Constitution does not expressly forbid states from seceding from the union, the right of secession is reserved to the people of the states, in accordance with the Tenth Amendment.
A new Confederation of Southern States (CSS) composed of the 11 states of the original Confederate States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) would be home to 80 million people and trail only the remaining United States and Japan in gross domestic product. This new CSS would be based on the foundation of family, faith, and community under a limited and decentralized government. Beyond protecting its borders and its people, the CSS would leave governance to its sovereign states.
“But is it realistic?” members of the League are always asked. Yes, they say. According to a Southern Focus Poll conducted annually by the Odum Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a full 12 percent of Southerners say they would favor Southern independence if it could be achieved by peaceful means. Another seven percent are not sure. The League asserts that the American Revolution began with not much more support from the colonists (it estimates about one in six colonists were in favor of secession.)
Even so, the League acknowledges that secession it not an immediately practical goal and that the first step toward an independent Dixie is to create a mass base of like-minded Southerners. To this end, members urge cultural secession or “abjuration of the realm.” Culture, according to the League, is the essential organizing principle of a nation, and they reject the Democratic/Republican argument that America is a proposition nation. Rather, the League maintains that a shared culture is “the only legitimate, long-lasting foundation for genuine peace, for genuine order, and genuine, shared prosperity.”
“Though the Left will claim this as evidence of our ‘racism,’ to allow non-Western peoples and their institutions to dominate the South would destroy our civilization as we know it.”
Without a culture, the people perish, and without its core Anglo-Celtic population, the culture of the historic South will be lost. The League understands that Southern heritage and values are under attack by institutions of both the Left and the neoconservative Right, and it points out that the government, the media, and academia are waging a culturally genocidal war against the descendants of the great civilizations of Europe. The League argues that America’s historic population being replaced with “more compliant Third-World peoples” who are accustomed to the kind of government “now being put in place on the ruins of the constitutional, limited government established by the Founders.”
In response, the League promises to act on the following ten points:
“Advance the interests and independence of the Southern people. “Defend the historic Christian faith of the South. “Educate Southerners (and other Americans of good will) about our history and our civilisation. “Protect the symbols and heritage of the traditional South. “Maintain our link with the great civilisations of Europe, especially that of the Anglo-Celts, from which the South has drawn its inspiration. “Encourage the development of healthy local communities and institutions by seceding from the mindless materialism and vulgarity of contemporary American society. “Restore the traditional rights reserved to the States under the Constitution. “Form friendships and alliances with sympathetic movements striving for devolution of government and independence for authentic nations and regions, both inside and outside of these United States. “Stimulate the economic vitality and self-sufficiency of the Southern people. “Pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honour to the cause we have undertaken.” (The Grey Book, like the League’s other publications, uses British spelling.)
The authors of this book are what American Renaissance would call racial realists; therefore, they reject the “flawed Jacobin notion” of egalitarianism that underlies America’s current public policy. They would eliminate affirmative action as well as all attempts to “remake society in their image of diversity” and that serve “profiteers with endless streams” of cheap labor:
“Though the Left will claim this as evidence of our ‘racism,’ to allow non-Western peoples and their institutions to dominate the South would destroy our civilization as we know it.”
At the same time, the League “disavows a spirit of malice” towards Southern blacks and welcomes their cooperation “in areas where we can work together as Christians to make life better for all people in the South.”
Much of this 170-page book is an outline of policies for a new Southern nation. Of particular interest are discussions of immigration and race relations, which are worth quoting at length. On immigration, the League states:
The CSS would eliminate welfare, in accordance with Second Thessalonians 3:10: “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”
“The strength of a country is continuity from the past to the future. Consequently, the CSS immigration policy shall not bring radical changes to an area or its people. Southern immigration policy will limit overall numbers of immigrants to prevent burgeoning population growth and attendant problems of overcrowding, excessive urban and suburban development, and environmental stress. Southern immigration policy also will not permit extensive change of the South’s cultural, ethnic and socio-economic make-up. Change of this sort is not conducive to true good will and tolerance, but rather to mistrust and division which unscrupulous interests will exploit. “Immigrants wishing to become citizens of the CSS would be required to reside in one of its states for at least a decade.” They would need to renounce “all loyalty to their countries of origin” and obtain character references from leaders of their communities. Mastery of the English language would be required of them as would extensive knowledge of Southern history and civics. The League states unequivocally, “Citizenship will not be granted to the children of foreign parents simply because they are born in the CSS.”
Illegal immigration would not be tolerated. Borders would be well patrolled, and law enforcement officers at all levels would have authority to arrest and deport illegal aliens.
On race relations, the League acknowledges that “historically the interests of Southern blacks and whites have been in part antagonistic.” As a Christian nation, the CSS would look to Scripture for guidance. Blacks would be treated as “brothers in Christ” and would be afforded the same constitutional protections as other law-abiding citizens:
“[The government] shall leave the races alone to work out their problems in private spheres (e.g. between individuals, families, churches, businesses, etc.) Race relations, especially between whites and blacks in the South, have been poisoned by the interference of various agencies of the federal government and by the cultural scourge of ‘political correctness.’ To remedy this problem, government shall have no place in favouring or handicapping one racial group in relation to another. All shall be free to pursue their own interests under the law.”
That being said, the League makes clear that its first duty is to self-preservation. “White Christian Southerners are the blood descendants of the men and women who settled this country and gave us the blessings of freedom and prosperity. To give away this inheritance in the name of ‘equality’ or ‘fairness’ would be unconscionable.”
The CSS would eliminate welfare, in accordance with Second Thessalonians 3:10: “if any would not work, neither should he eat.” Voluntary organizations would attend to those truly in need, whatever their race. “Though many blacks may be taught to hate us in their homes and institutions,” the League cautions, “our response to them must be grounded in Christian charity.”
This flag was surrendered
at Appatomox Court House,
April 9, 1865.
The Grey Book ends with two appendices. The first is a collection of “snapshots” by various unidentified authors on the growth and development of the League. Although interesting, these short essays are largely restated material covered earlier in the book. The second appendix answers questions most frequently asked about the League, and is a quick overview of the League’s philosophy, goals, and plan for secession.
Southern secession is not the Confederate flag-waving delusion its critics would have us believe. Authors as diverse as Gore Vidal (The Decline and Fall of the American Empire), Robert D. Kaplan (The Coming Anarchy), Thomas W. Chittum (Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America), and Michael Hart (in The Real American Dilemma) have warned that secession, partition, or actual civil war may be act three in the drama of American political life. Describing the “disturbing freshness” of Edward Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, Mr. Kaplan writes:
“The Decline and Fall instructs that human nature never changes, and that mankind’s predilection for faction, augmented by environmental and cultural differences, is what determines history.”
Since the publication of The Grey Book, a call has gone out to make South Carolina the first state of the new unreconstructed South. Cory Burnell, the former director of the League of the South’s Texas chapter, has founded ChristianExodus.org, an online organization urging fundamentalist Christians to relocate to South Carolina. Rather than try to “redirect the entire nation,” Mr. Burnell hopes to “redeem States one at a time.” Working with the League’s South Carolina chapter, Christian Exodus.org plans to relocate 12,000 Christians annually to South Carolina with a secession date set for 2016.
Yet, there is a problem with the League’s plan for secession that may be more intractable than domination by the American Empire. Reversing a 35-year trend, blacks are now returning to the South in record numbers as they flee the high unemployment and crime rates of northern cities. As appealing as an independent Dixie may be for white Southerners, it is hard to imagine that Southern blacks will share that enthusiasm. Blacks make up nearly 30 percent of the population of South Carolina, according to the 2000 US census, and a high percentage of most of the rest of the South (Alabama, 26 percent; Arkansas, 16; Florida, 15; Georgia, 29; Louisiana, 33; Mississippi, 36; North Carolina, 22; Tennessee, 17; Texas, 12; and Virginia, 20.)
As their population continues to grow, southern blacks will increasingly take political control — first of the major cities — just as they have in Atlanta. Whites will flee to white enclaves and the new black establishment will gorge itself on what is left behind.
Thomas Chittum predicts an independent black nation in the South, with Atlanta as its capital. If that should happen, Mr. Chittum believes whites will abandon the South, but some, like the authors of The Grey Book one suspects, will stay and fight.
Readers of AR may not be ready to join Mr. Burnell when he moves his family to South Carolina next year. Some may not agree with the League’s position on every social and economic issue, and others may find its fundamentalism incompatible with a more scientific worldview. Still, The Grey Book is worth reading, if only for its unwavering defense of white people from a future that looks increasingly dark.
Pauline Tate is a descendant of Confederate soldiers. She lives in North Carolina.
ARTICLE
The Crime the Media Chose to Ignore
Mass murder, incest, rape — and media silence.
During 2004 and 2005, Americans were fixated on Scott Peterson’s murder of his wife and unborn son. News channels reported breathlessly on the smallest developments in the investigation and trial, and scrutinized Mr. Peterson, his mistress Amber Frey, and the lawyers’ performances.
The national media has virtually ignored another case that is even stranger and more shocking: Marcus Wesson’s murder of nine of his own children in Fresno, California. Not only were there more victims, but the circumstances were much stranger. Mr. Wesson carried on incestuous relations with several of his daughters and nieces for years, brainwashed the family into believing he was a Messiah, and made a murder-suicide pact with them. The media silence must certainly be due to the fact that Mr. Wesson is black. The media soft-pedal news about black crime because editors do not want to show non-whites in an unflattering light.
People who have known Marcus Wesson say he is highly eccentric and moderately intelligent. He has a large vocabulary and expresses himself in flowery language. He undoubtedly has an unusual influence on others.
In 1968, Mr. Wesson left the army, which had sent him to Europe as a medical orderly, and moved to San Jose, California. Then in his 20s, he moved in with a Hispanic woman, Rosemary Maytorena, who was in her 30s; the two had one son. In 1974, Mr. Wesson married Miss Maytorena’s daughter Elizabeth, who was 15 at the time. Over the next 16 years, he had ten children with her. His wife Elizabeth had a sister named Rosemary Solorio, who also appears to have been under Mr. Wesson’s spell. In 1986, she sent her seven children to live with the Wessons. The children had been molested in their own home and were reportedly happy to make the change. The result was a household of considerable size.
Mr. Wesson could not keep a steady job, and got most of his income from welfare. The family drifted from place to place, and some of its living arrangements were inventive. At one time the family lived in a 26-foot boat moored in Santa Cruz harbor. Mr. Wesson sometimes scavanged hamburgers out of a McDonald’s dumpster for his family to eat. The boat got him in trouble, however: He failed to list it as an asset on his welfare forms, and went to jail for welfare fraud in 1990. In the mid- and late |
was overcome. “His face dropped when he saw the photos.”
In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded upon launch, killing the seven crew members on board. Christa McAuliffe, one of the crew members, was to be the first teacher in space. The set of 26 images starts with the launch, the shuttle, the takeoff and ends with unforgettable plumes of white smoke against a blue January sky.
Hindes shared the images on Reddit, and users flocked to express their appreciation for the historical images. More than a few participants recalled memories of where they were when the tragedy occurred.
“I was in kindergarten living in Florida when Challenger went up. I was pretty young but I remember that it was a very nice day out,” said Reddit user Bonte. “The teachers took all of the kids out to the playground to watch the launch. When we saw the explosion we didn’t know what exactly we saw, it just ‘stopped’ in the sky.”
“These people were some of the best minds and bodies that we could offer to the stars, and yet they died. They rode the most sophisticated vehicles ever, and those vehicles crumbled and burned before our very eyes,” wrote user LordQuagga, adding that “no astronaut’s death has ever, or need ever be in vain. Every death has taught us something new about our technology, practices and our resolve. Every flight into space is one more to teach us about the universe; every single one matters.”
Hindes himself commented that seeing the pictures for the first time had a particular effect on him, since he also bore witness to the tragedy.
“I watched this happen live on TV in with my class in fourth grade, and anyone who knows what that was like also knows that it’s something that will stick with you forever.”The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden.
A Red Notice is a kind of international wanted poster seeking the provisional arrest of a fugitive, with an eye towards extradition to the nation that issued the underlying arrest warrant. Interpol transmits the notices to its 188 member countries, including Britain, where Assange is believed to be located. Interpol has no authority to compel a subject’s arrest. It issued 5,020 Red Notices last year for a variety of crimes.
A terse extract of Assange’s notice appeared on Interpol’s website Tuesday, without a photograph, reporting that the 39-year-old Australian is wanted for “sex crimes” by the International Public Prosecution Office in Gothenburg, Sweden.
A Swedish judge on November 18 ordered Assange “detained in absentia” to answer questions in a rape, coercion and molestation investigation in Stockholm. A court approved an international arrest warrant for the ex-hacker two days later, at which point Sweden reportedly applied to Interpol for the Red Notice. Assange’s lawyer appealed the detention order to the Svea Court of Appeal, but lost. Assange filed a new appeal Tuesday to the Swedish Supreme Court.
The investigation stems from separate encounters Assange had with two women during his August visit to Sweden, where he was applying for Swedish residency and attempting to secure the protection of Swedish free-press laws for his secret-spilling website. According to local news reports, the women told investigators the sexual encounters began as consensual, but turned nonconsensual. One woman said Assange ignored her appeals to stop when the condom broke.
Assange has denied any wrongdoing, and hinted that the complaints are the result of a US "smear campaign" targeting WikiLeaks—leading some supporters of the group to publicly investigate the two women and their families.
After the investigation began, Assange left Sweden with the permission of the government, and then turned up in London in October, where he unveiled nearly 400,000 leaked US Army documents from the Iraq war.
On Sunday, he outraged top US officials and sent shock waves through the world of global diplomacy when he began rolling out a leak of a quarter-million US State Department diplomatic cables that revealed the private views of US diplomats towards foreign leaders around the world.
The Obama administration is exploring possible criminal charges against Assange under the Espionage Act, The Washington Post reported Monday—in what would be a virtually unprecedented move against a journalistic organization.
In a statement earlier this month, Assange’s British counsel said that his client repeatedly offered to cooperate with local investigators while he was in Sweden, and has offered to answer questions remotely from Britain since then.
“All of these offers have been flatly refused by a prosecutor who is abusing her powers by insisting that he return to Sweden at his own expense to be subjected to another media circus that she will orchestrate,” wrote attorney Mark Stephens. “Pursuing a warrant in this circumstance is entirely unnecessary and disproportionate.”Follow John
Texas is the land of pickups and SUVs, of oil wells and full-day drives from your Texas home to Grandma’s Texas home.
Your everyday driver had better be your highway car, because every drive involves a highway.
I’ve owned every size of SUV, from Chevy Suburban to Toyota Land Cruiser to BMW X1 to Subaru Outback (not exactly an SUV, but…).
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This is another in our ongoing series of articles in which buyers of green cars explain their reasoning. The author is Phil Ganz, of Texas.]
DON'T MISS: Chevrolet Volt: Green Car Reports' Best Car To Buy 2016
My sedan of choice for the past four years has been a Volvo S60.
My last American-built vehicle was a Mercury Explorer, although the company called it a Mountaineer.
You’ll note that high gas mileage and low exhaust emissions haven’t exactly been in the forefront of my criteria.
But I’m a bit of a tech nerd. I've owned far too many cellphones, tablets, and computers. If it helps make life easier, has a battery, and plugs in, it gets my attention.
2017 Chevrolet Volt, leased by Phil Ganz of Texas
I also firmly believe that we are negatively impacting our delicate environment. I cringe when I read that Texas is fighting the EPA on just about every level.
I live deep in the heart of coal-burning power plants, oil wells, and rampant fracking. And, Al Gore tells me I’m not helping.
Guilt, tech, or just plain want... well, I just bought a 2017 Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid.
ALSO SEE: 2016 Chevrolet Volt: Gas Mileage Review
Actually, I leased a Volt.
My fear (or anticipation) of technology advances over the next few years led me to gift my federal tax incentive to a leasing company in exchange for the security of knowing exactly what the Volt will cost me over the next 36 months.
General Motors has much deeper pockets to cover depreciation risk than I do.
2017 Chevrolet Volt, leased by Phil Ganz of Texas
Texas, of course, offers absolutely no incentives to help drivers clean the air. The ‘bidness’ of oil rules here—except for wind power, more of which is produced in Texas than anywhere else.
Many, many back roads are punctuated with huge windmill farms. Perhaps our politicians never stray from the Interstates.
It helped that GM offers attractive leases on the Volt, as it seeks to entice mainstream buyers who may magically convert the Volt into a mainstream automobile.
CHECK OUT: 2016 Chevrolet Volt First Drive: Plug-In Hybrid Home Run
In the end, I made what I thought was a very aggressive offer—which was accepted in full, within a reasonable “we need to work the numbers on this” period.
Once I'd decided to lessen my vehicular impact on the environment, the choice came down to the Volt or the Nissan Leaf.
In the end, the choice was an easy one. It came down to two words: range anxiety.
2017 Chevrolet Volt, leased by Phil Ganz of Texas
My Monday-to-Friday routines are typically well within the range of the Leaf, but my weekend excursions are not.
I wanted a full-time, 7-days-a-week vehicle, and the Volt offered unlimited range, albeit at the cost of using some gasoline.
No range anxiety for me.
WATCH THIS: 2016 Toyota Prius Vs 2016 Chevrolet Volt: Video Test
The Volvo will stick around for a few months as its lease approaches the end date.
I’ve enjoyed the Volt for four weeks now, and the Volvo has been driven only twice: to the dealership for regular maintenance, and back again.
During those four weeks, I’ve used about 4 gallons of gas in the Volt during 1,000 miles of driving.
Why use gasoline when I’m trying to save the environment? Al Gore is smiling.
Writer Phil Ganz is an advertising sales professional living in Texas with his wife and his dog. His fascination is with anything that has a battery and is capable of being charged. And, of course, cars. He's also the father of IB Automotive editor Andrew Ganz.
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Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook and Twitter.Every programming language comes with a certain syntax, a certain feel for what feels like native use of that syntax, and the semantics of the syntax. Escapes and mixing with a completely different feeling language are generally not a good idea. My favorite example of this is Objective-C, which is a really strange mixture of C and Smalltalk. C as you will know is a curly brace language, it has a way of doing things. It’s a low-level system programming language. Smalltalk is a high-level programming language that feels very different and looks very different.
Objective-C is C with some Smalltalk bolted on to it, which gives it a strange feel:
MyObject* o = [[MyObject alloc] initWithNum: 20 andString: @”Hello world!”];
In C, a function call has the syntax function_name(arg1, arg2). However, when moving into Objective-C object land, a method call looks like: [object aMethodCall: arg1 andArg: arg2]. Alien, if you ask me.
In Lisp land, an example of this is the common-lisp loop macro:
(loop for x in ‘(a b c d e)
for y from 1
if (> y 1) do
(format t “, ~A” x)
else do
(format t “~A” x))
If you’ve ever written any Lisp code, you’ll see that although this is very readable and concise, like Objective-C, by the way, it feels completely weird in a Lisp-style language.
I have a similar problem with ClojureQL, a query language for Clojure. Queries expressed in ClojureQL change the meaning of Clojure in a way that I feel is bad language design because it it breaks assumptions that hold true for the rest of Clojure.
Consider the following snippet of code:
(let [first-name “zef”]
…
(= first-name “zef”) …)
This piece of code binds the value “zef” to the symbol first-name. The programmer’s expectation is that when the first-name symbol is used anywhere within the let, its value will be “zef”, unless it is rebound to something else with another let. However, this assumption breaks when using ClojureQL:
(let [first-name “zef”]
(query users * (= fname first-name)))
This is legal in ClojureQL, although it is a bit unclear where fname would come from, it comes from the * there, we can make this more explicit:
(let [first-name “zef”]
(query users [fname lname] (= fname first-name)))
This is perfectly valid ClojureQL code, except it doesn’t do what you would expect it to do. It does not find all users with first name “zef”, no, it will throw an SQL exception saying that the table users does not have a field “first-name”. Huh?
It turns that when we use the query macro, we step into a different world, a world where we have to let our previous assumptions go. When first-name is used, it no longer refers to the value bound to it before, instead it’s simply a name referring to a column in a table. It is still possible to escape to “normal” Clojure semantics by escaping back into the Clojure world with a ~ prefix:
(let [first-name “zef”]
(query users [fname lname] (= fname ~first-name)))
I’m not very fond of this type of language design. It would probably be better if a ~ would not be necessary, in that case you could read the query as a kind for loop where each result row is destructured and bound to [fname lname], which are then used in the body expression. However, still, intuitively in this interpretation the names of fname and lname should not refer to column names in the users table, but instead are only to be used for binding in the code, referring to the first and second column in the result set. Still confusing.
A syntax that is more Clojuresque, if you will, albeit more verbose would be:
(let [first-name “zef”]
(query [u users] (= (:fname u) first-name)))
Intuitively, the query iterates over all users binding each user to u and filtering on the value of the :fname key of each user entry. I’m still not confortable with the use of users there, which seems some type of magic symbol, but I suppose that could be fixed too. Maybe of having a (deftable users) statement somewhere else in the code, or replacing with with (table :users), which, again, would make it slightly more verbose:
(let [first-name “zef”]
(query [u (table :users)] (= (:fname u) first-name)))
The point is that with great power comes great responsibility. The macro facilities of Lisps give you enormous power to create your own language extensions, which is great. It makes experimenting with languages very easy. However, it turns out that language design is very difficult. The language syntax is the user interface of your language. Whereas typical languages like Java and C# evolve very slowly and are designed by experienced language designers, in a Lisp anybody can do it, which can result in very confusing abstractions.
Abstractions like these have to be designed very, very carefully.As the Russian Army swept into Gori from where the Georgian Army had launched its assault on Tshkinvali they came face to face with its most infamous son. The statue of Josef Vissiaronovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin, still gazes down on the town of his birth. Stalin would have absolutely approved of the iron response the Putin-Medvedev regime gave to the reckless attack on South Ossetia by the Saakashvili regime. Stalin, despite his birth, was one of the great oppressors of all minority groups, but with particular ruthlessness towards Georgia.
Lenin, Luxemburg and the National Question
Many are aware that, in his final months, Lenin became aware of the danger posed by Stalin and began to take steps against him. What few remember, however, is that it was over the issue of Georgia and the Caucasus that Stalin’s real political character was fully revealed to him. Lenin’s position on nationalism was a complex one. He was painfully aware that the Tsarist Empire had been built on the seizure and oppression of hundreds of minorities. One of his greatest hatreds was thus “Great Russian chauvinism”. This was one of the reasons why he saw the national question in an entirely different way from Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg, born Polish and Jewish, was from two of the oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire. Whereas Lenin saw the national question as primarily a political issue, she saw that it was the shift in the stage which capitalism had reached that had rendered all support by Marxists for “national liberation” as antiquated. In the epoch of imperialism there was no point supporting any future bourgeois national revolutions. Looking at the Polish bourgeoisie in the 1890s, she considered it incapable of founding a new independent nation since it would always be tied “by chains of gold” to one imperialism or another. Lenin did not at first link the national question to the issue of imperialism. He considered it a powerful force which had to be taken into account when addressing any political issue. For our tendency there is no question that Lenin was wrong and nowhere was this revealed more than in Imperialism - the Highest Stage of Capitalism where he put his faith in the overthrow of capitalism in the struggle against imperialism by the oppressed people of the colonies. The decolonisation which followed World War II demonstrated that imperialism could actually benefit from conceding so-called national independence. Neo-colonialism was a lot more profitable than an increasingly expensive military occupation. The retreat from Empire of the old colonial power thus did not provoke the crisis of the system that Lenin had hoped for. As the isolation of the Russian working class from the rest of the world’s workers became more obvious in the 1920s, the error on the national question was to have dire consequences for many workers around the world. The failure of the European working class to come to the aid of the Russian Revolution also mistakenly encouraged the Communist International to promote alliances with the national “anti-colonial” bourgeoisies in places like China and Turkey. In both places, these same bourgeoisies bided their time and carried out savage massacres of their working class “allies”.
“Great Russian Chauvinism”
However within the territory of the old Russian Empire the question of the constitutional arrangement of the new society was a slightly different one. Lenin was convinced that any future union of proletarian states had to be a voluntary one. This was why the first declarations of the new Soviet power stated that each national territory had the right to determine its own future “up to the point of secession”. Rosa Luxemburg castigated this policy as allowing the local bourgeoisie, with the aid of German imperialist forces, to take over working class territory as in Finland and the Ukraine. This was true enough but it is unlikely that any policy statement actually made much difference since the Bolsheviks were in no position to materially help their working class allies in these areas in 1918. It was only after the collapse of German imperialism that the Russian Civil War could enter, for example the Ukraine. By 1920, at the Ninth Party Congress, Lenin was already warning “Scratch some communists and you will find Great Russian chauvinists.”
With over 70% of the Communist Party membership being of Great Russian origin Lenin was concerned about this, but the worst “Great Russian chauvinists” were actually from the minority nationalities of the former Tsarist Empire. First amongst these was the Georgian, Stalin, who by virtue of his origins, had been made Commissar for Nationalities following the October Revolution.
After the October Revolution, giving material confirmation to the theory of Rosa Luxemburg, the borderlands of the former Russian Empire fell under the influence of the competing imperialisms. In the Caucasus, the republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia were all set up but all were heavily dependent on imperialist support. At first this support was German and Turkish, but later it was British. Under the British, who were supporting the Whites (Kolchak and Denikin) in the Russian Civil War, there was at first no recognition of these republics out of deference to the Great Russian chauvinism of former Tsarist officers who intended to re-establish the Russian Empire. However, by January 1920 the Whites were in full retreat, so the British hastily recognised these governments de facto. At the same time though the British pulled out of the Caucasus and left their new allies defenceless.
Immediately there was a communist rising in Baku which overthrew the British-backed bourgeois government in Azerbaijan. In May 1920, the Menshevik-dominated Georgian Government signed a treaty recognising the new Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic in return for recognition by Soviet Russia of its own independence. This was similar to the treaties signed between Soviet Russia and the Baltic states who remained independent until the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. As confirmation of this, on May 4th 1920, Lenin telegraphed Ordzhonikidze, telling him to withdraw all Red Army troops from Georgia’s frontiers as “peace with Georgia is not ruled out”. This telgram was even counter-signed by Stalin (1). But, in a curious parallel with today the Georgian Government made a series of provocative miscalculations. It first legalised the Communist Party but then imprisoned its entire leadership and most of its membership. In September, it invited a delegation of prominent social democrats from Western Europe to Georgia with the aim of supplying them with “material for anti-Bolshevik propaganda” (2) and tried to enter the “robber” (as described by Lenin) League of Nations in December 1920, in order to get the Western powers involved in the defence of Georgian territory.
Ordzhinikidze’s Invasion
From this point on relations between the two states deteriorated with the Russians now denouncing the “destroying and exterminating” of Ossetians and the “burning of whole villages” in Abkhazia. These are precisely the sort of statements being made by the Putin-Medvedev regime today. Ordzhonikidze now only needed a small border fight between Armenians and Georgians as an excuse for the Red Army, led by Georgian communists, to invade Georgia on February 21st 1921. Tiflis was captured in four days and a Georgian Socialist Soviet Republic was set up. The Russian Communist party, and the commander of the Red Army, Trotsky only heard about it afterwards and were thus presented with a fait accompli. Within a few months Ajaria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were formed as autonomous republics or regions within the Georgian SSR. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 has now brought this question back to haunt the region but we should stress (as we show in other articles in this issue) that the real casus belli is not in the national question but in the much more serious international conflict of imperialist interests today.
Back in 1921, Lenin was not at all happy about the manner in which Georgia was brought back into the territory which would soon be dubbed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On March 3rd 1921 he wrote to the Georgian leader (and henchman of Stalin) Ordzhonikidze urging “a policy of concessions” in relation to the Georgian intelligentsia and small traders” and even a “coalition with Jordania or similar Georgian Mensheviks”. (3) The Mensheviks were allowed to operate legally but no coalition took place. This is hardly surprising given that Stalin and Ordzhonikidze were in charge. In fact they were soon on the attack against their own comrades in the Georgian Communist Party.
RSFSR or USSR?
With the victory of the Red Army in Georgia the civil war was finally over and the Communist Party now turned to the question of the constitutional arrangements for soviet territory. In August 1922 Stalin drafted a resolution “On the Relations between the RSFSR and the Independent Republics” which made it quite clear that these independent republics (Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) would cease to be such and would simply be absorbed into the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics (RSFSR) especially as:
The agencies for combating counter-revolution in the above-named republics would be subordinated to the orders of the GPU of the RSFSR. (4)
The GPU was the successor to the Cheka so this was a formal statement that the “independent republics” would be ruled from Moscow. In short, Stalin was already proposing a revival of the old Russian Empire. (5) Lenin rejected this and on September 27th 1922 proposed the creation of a new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the basis of equality of each participant. This did not end the problem since the ailing Lenin was in no physical shape to do more than sporadically intervene, especially as Stalin, who had responsibility for his communication with the Central Committee, deliberately denied him materials.
Stalin, having failed to emasculate the republics once now tried a new tack by insisting that Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan unite in a Transcaucasian Republic. This was rejected by the leaders of the Georgian Communist Party, and its entire Central Committee unwisely resigned in protest on October 22nd. This was just what Ordzhonikidze wanted and appointed a new one made up of his young supporters. However, the old Central Committee attempted to carry on the debate until Ordzhonikidze assaulted one of them in his own home. Lenin sent Stalin and Dzerzhinski to investigate, but Dzerzhinski (a Pole by origin) shared the same “Great Russian” perspective as Stalin and between them they whitewashed Ordzhonikidze’s actions. Had older Georgian communists not contacted Lenin privately he may never have heard of the issue. Instead, Lenin had one of his brief moments of recovery and on the last two days of December 1922, just as the Central Committee were voting to adopt his proposal calling the new federation the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, dictated his The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”. It was not to be published until 1956 for the reason that it was explicitly critical of not only Ordzhonikidze, but also Dzerzhinsky and, most decisively of all, of Stalin. The document begins by apologising to Russian workers for not intervening in the affair of “autonomisation” (6) sooner. Then he gets to the immediate issue:
If matters had come to such a pass that Ordzhonikidze could go to the extreme of applying physical violence, as Comrade Dzerzhinsky informed me what a mess we have got ourselves into. Obviously the whole business of “autonomisation” was radically wrong and badly timed. (7)
But soon Lenin was revealing that wider issues were at stake;
It is said that a united apparatus is needed. Where did that assurance come from? Did it come from that same Russian apparatus which, as I pointed out in one of the preceding sections of my diary, we took over from Tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?...
... the apparatus we now call ours is, in fact still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and Tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the past five years without the help of other countries, and because we have been “busy” most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.
This passage not only shows that the dying Lenin and ruthlessly resurgent Stalin were not only on different paths, they were going in different directions. It puts the lie to all those commentators and so-called historians who have spent the last ten years grubbing around in the ex-Soviet archives trying to prove that Lenin set up the apparatus which Stalin then refined. It also gives a very clear critique of the failure of the revolution and the reasons for it - the isolation of the Russian proletariat, the fight against international imperialism and the dire economic situation inherited from Tsarism’s war. And Lenin went on immediately to denounce Stalin’s actions.
It is quite natural that in such circumstances the “freedom to secede from the union” by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is... are we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russian with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully... I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious “nationalist-socialist” played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.
This is almost prophetic of Stalin’s future behaviour in which his “spite” towards, not only Georgia, but also to any of his own comrades who had crossed him in the past, ultimately led to their execution in their hundreds, if not thousands in the 1930s (8).
The Future World Revolution
However Lenin’s comments, whilst apposite about Stalin, were aimed at a higher goal. He was still concerned for the future spread of revolution and how workers in the rest of the world would perceive the Soviet Union. He wanted his comrades to look further to the future. The next day he dictated two more passages. The first begins from a general premise which we would now regard as flawed
A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation, and that of a small nation.
Today we can see that small nation nationalism is hardly ever independent but usually takes on the same form as big nation nationalism as the client of one or another imperialism. This is precisely what Luxemburg predicted. For example, Vietnam would not have maintained a decade or more of war against US imperialism without the weapons of the USSR. Today in Georgia, Saakashvili wants the world to see that plucky little Georgia is standing up to Russian imperialism when, in fact, he is inciting this conflict precisely in order to cement Georgia within the Western alliance.
However, Lenin was actually thinking of the problem differently here. His argument is better made as a specific point about the fact that, by chance, the first proletarian revolution took place in a multi-national Empire which had behind it a century of attempted Russification and crushing of all non-Russian cultural expression. For Lenin, it was important that the USSR set a new tone and a new example of real proletarian internationalism for the rest of the world’s workers. Earlier, he had himself been seduced by the prospect of the Red Army spreading the revolution by bayonets. After the Polish state, urged on by Western imperialism, invaded Soviet territory it suffered a massive defeat. By autumn 1920, the Polish Army had been driven back to Warsaw. At this point military success took over from political reality amongst the ranks of the Russian Communist Party. No-one listened to the Polish Communist, Karl Radek, who predicted that the sight of a Russian Army (however proletarian) at the gates of Warsaw would be a propaganda gift to the nationalist Pilsudski regime who would be able to unite the nation (including the proletariat) to fight the invader. This is precisely what happened in 1920 and Lenin was trenchant in his own self-criticism for not siding with Radek. He did not want another such mistake to be made. Thus he finished (after calling for the removal of Ordzhonikidze and putting the main blame on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky) with a rallying call for the future
...the harm that can result to our state from a lack of unification between the national apparatuses and the Russian apparatus is infinitely less that that which will be done not only to us, but to the whole International, and to hundreds of millions of the peoples in Asia which are destined to follow us onto the stage of history in the near future... The need to rally against the imperialists of the West, who are defending the capitalist world is one thing. There can be no doubt about that and it would be superfluous for me to speak of my unconditional approval for it. It is another thing when we ourselves lapse, even if only in trifles, into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities, thus undermining all our principled sincerity, all our principled defence of the struggle against imperialism. But the morrow of world history will be a day when the awakening peoples oppressed by imperialism are finally aroused and the decisive long and hard struggle for their liberation begins.
As we stated earlier Lenin was to be disappointed that the revolts of the oppressed people of Asia (and other colonised areas) did not provoke the collapse of the imperialist order that he had so wished. Today we can see that it is the exploited of the world, wherever they are to be found that will form the solid nucleus of the future revolution to liberate humanity. However our analysis of this complex issue demonstrates that the vision of Lenin for the future of both the USSR and humanity was infinitely different from the future which Stalin was already preparing even as Lenin entered the final months of his life. Lenin saw the future communist world as created by “freely-associated producers” (Marx - The Communist Manifesto) not by invading armies. Lenin’s third stroke in March 1923 prevented him from finishing the fight he had begun. Stalin survived and succeeded in shaping the USSR as the Russian Empire reborn. It is this legacy that today’s Kremlin have picked up once again.
JD
(1) The telegram is in V.I. Lenin Collected Works Volume 35 (Progress Publishers 1966 edition). This was the first time it had appeared in English.
(2) E.H. Carr The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 1 p.352. The delegation included Kautsky, Vandervelde and Ramsey Macdonald. The Menshevik-dominated Government of Jordania had come to power in 1918 via the local soviets but had then entered into a coalition with local bourgeois nationalists. Lenin now seemed to have considered that as the question of proletarian power had been settled it was now possible to re-engage with Menshevism.
(3) Carr, loc cit p.354. This letter does not appear in the English version of Lenin’s Collected Works (Volume 35) but Carr is quoting the original Russian Sochineniya (Vol 26). The English version does have other telegrams to the Military Revolutionary Committee of Georgia, and Ordzhonikidze, which state similar things, such as,
you are instructed...to observe particular respect for the sovereign bodies of Georgia; to display particular attention and caution in regard to the Georgian population. Vol. 35, p479
(4) Quoted in Roy Medvedev Let History Judge, p71.
(5) And, of course in his lifetime he was to surpass the Tsars. Although he failed to recapture Finland in the Winter War of 1940, he not only re-invaded the Baltic States but after the Second World War established a physical empire over virtually all Eastern Europe. It is not accidental that Putin today makes constant reference to the achievements of Stalin’s Great Patriotic War.
(6) “Autonomisation” was Stalinspeak to criticise those who advocated a true federation in the USSR. Lenin in the document says that the real issue is the nature of the USSR.
(7) All the quotations from this document are taken from Lenin Selected Works, Vol 3, pp 687-692.
(8) For a more incisive analysis of the nature of Stalinism see “Stalinism is Anti-communism” in Internationalist Communist 22. [£3 including postage from our group address]. A corrected version has been published as a pamphlet, Stalin and Stalinism by the Internationalist Workers Group, our US comrades. It is $1 plus postage from PO Box 14173, Madison, WI 53708-0173.Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s recent proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. has far from hurt his poll numbers; in fact, a poll released Wednesday found that almost two-thirds of GOP primary voters back the widely-condemned plan.
In a new Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies poll, 37 percent of all likely general election voters said they support Trump’s plan while 65 percent of likely Republican primary voters said they back the ban.
Support for the controversial proposal remained nearly unchanged after those surveyed were presented with more information about the plan, including the statement “it will make our country less safe by alienating the allies we need to fight ISIS.”
“We believe these numbers are made up of some people who are truly expressing religious bigotry and others who are fearful about terrorism and are willing to do anything they think might make us safer,” Doug Usher, leader of Purple Strategies’ research arm, said of the results.
Trump’s anti-Muslim plan makes 18 percent of all general election voters more likely to vote for the real estate mogul, Bloomberg reported. Thirty-three percent of voters said they were less likely to back Trump after the plan, while 44 percent reported the proposal has no impact on their vote.
The national overnight poll of 605 likely 2016 voters was conducted online Dec. 8 using an opt-in representative panel. It has a 4 percent margin of error.1.1k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
A thousand pardons for veering off into the Politicus Sports realm for this offering, but I couldn’t let the latest bigoted A-hole blather pollute the social environment without some kind of rejoinder. An aging corporate jag-off, B.J. “Red” McCombs, who has enough money to make headlines when he opens his mouth, just bitched about the hiring of Louisville coach, Charlie Strong, to head the once-mighty Texas Longhorns back to their football glory days.
In trying to out-bigot Just Ducky Phil Robertson (quite a feat), McCombs opined on a San Antonio ESPN radio station that the Strong hiring was “a kick in the face.” Strong is black. McCombs, ivory white, was said to favor Aryan blond, Jon Gruden, a decent guy and excellent coach now working football commentary on TV. He complained he wan’t consulted (wonder why?) and insisted that Texas got the selection “wrong.” But Strong was the pick, not Gruden; not the mandatory white guy who McCombs would have insisted upon had he had the final say. And in spite of directing $100 million of his CC and auto dealership bucks to the University of Texas, non-racist heads prevailed. Sadly, $50 million of McCombs’ money bought his name on the Texas School of Business. Oh, where did I put that eraser?
McCombs was one of the founders of Clear Channel Communications, the most right-wing propagandized outfit in all media. It was Clear Channel that paved the way for the embarrassment that is a grid-locked, racist and hateful America. McCombs and a Texas oilman named Lowry Mays (now deceased) co-founded this political and media juggernaut back in 1972. They both became billionaires with the most ultra-conservative talk radio ever heard. CC would ‘network’ entire states by buying stations in such patterns that the whole state was covered. An impotent and scared sh**less 2003 FCC brothel, with head Madame, Michael Powell (yeah, Colin’s son), allowed for cross ownership of radio and TV stations and newspapers in the same markets and nationally. CC even owns syndication rights to Limbaugh, Hannity and other top wing-nuts. Bain (you remember them) has since taken CC private and God only knows what these “anything” goes corporate doofae are up to.
There were two main goals of McCombs and the May’s family. Paint the U.S. red and make money doing it. Clear Channel also owned music, religious and TV stations, but their core was talk radio.
I know just about everything there is to know about this operation. Some day I’ll tell you why. I know that in most markets, if you crossed the local Republican hierarchy, you could expect to be called into the General Manager’s office and |
1 or more “The Fang of Critias”
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■ Your Main Deck contains 1 or more “Legend of Heart”
■ Your Extra Deck contains 1 or more “Timaeus the Knight of Destiny”
Frightfur (Shiunin Sora)
■ Your Main Deck contains 15 cards in total that are “Fluffal” AND “Edge Imp”
Predator Plants (Yuri)
■ Your Main Deck contains 12 or more “Predator Plant” cards
■ Your Main Deck contains 5 or more “Predator Plant” cards
Cubic (Aigami)
■ You use 7 or more different “Cubic” monsters
■ You use 12 or more “Cubic” monsters
■ You use 4 or more different “Cubic” Spell/Trap Cards
■ You use 10 or more “Cubic” Spell/Trap Cards
Lunalight (Serena)
■ Your Main Deck contains 15 or more “Lunalight” monsters
■ Your Main Deck conains 5 or more different “Lunalight” monsters
Vehicroid (Marufuji Sho)
■ You use 6 or more different “roid” monsters (that aren’t “Speedroid” monsters)
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Flower Cardian (Tokumatsu Choujirou)
■ Your Main Deck contains 15 or more “Flower Cardian(花札衛)” monsters of 10 different kinds
■ Your Extra Deck contains 3 or more “Flower Cardian(花札衛)” monsters
Aesir (Team Ragnarok)
■ Your Main Deck contains 10 or more “Nordic” cards
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■ Your Extra Deck contains at least 1 “Loki, Lord of the Aesir”
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Synchron (Fudo Yusei)
■ Your Main Deck must contain 8 or more different cards from among the following:
• “Junk(ジャンク)”
• “Synchron(シンクロン)”
• “Warrior(ウォリアー)” (except “Symphonic Warriors”)
■ Your Main Deck must contain 10 or more cards from among the following:
• “Junk(ジャンク)”
• “Synchron(シンクロン)”
• “Warrior(ウォリアー)” (except “Symphonic Warriors”)
■ Your Extra Deck contains at least 1 “Stardust Dragon”
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Rose (Izayoi Aki)
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■ Your Extra Deck contains 1 or more “Black Rose Dragon”
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Paradox (Malefic)
■ Your Main Deck contains 10 or more “Malefic” cards
Speedroid (Yugo)
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■ Your Main Deck must contain 15 or more “Speedroid” monsters
■ Your Extra Deck must contain at least 1 “Clear Wing Synchro Dragon”
■ Your Extra Deck must contain at leaat 1 “Hi-Speedroid” monster
Superheavy Samurai (Gongenzaka Noboru)
■ Your Main Deck contains 25 or more “Superheavy Samurai” cards
■ Your Main Deck contains only Monster Cards
Morphtronic (Rua)
■ Your Main Deck contains 15 or more “Morphtronic” cards
Blackwing (Crow Hogan)
■ Your Main Deck contains 8 or more different “Blackwing” cards
Resonator (Jack Atlas)
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■ Your Extra Deck contains at least 1 “Red Dragon Archfiend”
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Gimmick Puppet (IV)
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Shark (Shark)
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Onomatopia (Tsukumo Yuma)
■ Your Main Deck contains 10 or more “Zubaba”, “Gagaga”, “Gogogo” and/or “Dododo” cards
■ Your Extra Deck contains at least 1 “Number 39: Utopia”
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Harpie (Kujaku Mai)
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Phantom Knights (Yuto)
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Galaxy-Eyes (Tenjou Kaito)
■ Your Main and Extra Decks combined have 25 or more cards from among the following:
• “Photon”
• “Galaxy”
• “Cipher”
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Heraldic Beast (Tron)
■ Your Main Deck contains 8 or more different “紋章 (Heraldic/Heraldry)” cards
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Rank-Up-Magic (Nasch)
■ Your Main Deck contains 7 or more “Rank-Up-Magic” cards
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• Cards whose names include “Number” but must be between “Number 101” to “Number 107”
• “CXyz Barian Hope”
Raidraptor (Shun)
■ Your Main Deck’s Monsters can only be “Raidraptor” monsters
■ You must use 5 or more different “Rank-Up-Magic” Spell Cards
■ Your Extra Deck must contain 4 or more different “Raidraptor” monsters
Lyrilusc (Ruri)
■ Your Main Deck contains 3 or more different “Lyrilusc” monsters
■ Your Main Deck contains 7 or more “Lyrilusc” monsters
■ Your Extra Deck contains 2 or more “Lyrilusc” monsters
Abyss Actor (Sawatari)
■ You use 15 or more “Abyss Actor” cards
■ You use 6 or more “Abyss Script” cards
Yosenju (Sawatari)
■ Your Main Deck must use 10 or more “Yosenju” cards
■ Your Main Deck must contain 2 or more “Yosenju Shinchu L”
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Cyberse-Type (Yusaku)
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Gouki (Onizuka Go)
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Trickstar (Zaizen Aoi)
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■ Your Main Deck contains 10 or more “Trickstar” monsters
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■ You cannot use “Droll & Lock Bird”
Rokket (Revolver)
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■ You must use 7 or more “Rokket” monsters
■ Your Main Deck contains 1 or more “Cracking Dragon”
■ Your Extra Deck contains 1 or more “Borreload Dragon”
Altergeist (Besshou Emma)
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Magician (Supreme King Z-ARC)
■ You must use 2 or more “Astrograph Magician”
■ You must use 2 or more “Chronograph Magician”
■ You must use 2 or more “Double Iris Magician”
■ You must use 2 or more “Black Fang Magician”
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■ You must use 2 or more “Purple Poison Magician”
■ Your Extra Deck contains 1 or more “Suprme King Z-ARC”
Insect-Type (Insector Haga)
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Water Dragon (Misawa Daichi)
■ You must use 2 or more “Water Dragon”
■ You must use 2 or more “Water Dragon Cluster”
■ You must use 2 or more “Duoterion”
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■ You must use 2 or more “Bonding – H2O”
Performapal Sky Magician (Sakaki Yusho)
■ You must use 2 or more “Performapal Sky Magician”
■ Your Main Deck contains 3 or more different “Magician” Continuous Spell Cards
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■ Your Main Deck can only contain “Performapal” and “Magician(魔術師)” monsters
Ojama (Manjoume Jun)
■ Your Main Deck must contain 10 or more “Ojama” or “Ojamuscle” cards
Divine Beast
■ Your Main Deck contains 5 or more among the following: “Slifer the Sky Dragon”, “Obelisk the Tormentor” and/or “The Winged Dragon of Ra”
■ You cannot use Pendulum Monsters
Entertainment (Sakaki Yuya)
■ Your Main Deck contains at least 1 “Odd-Eyes Dragon”
■ Your Main Deck contains at least 1 “Stargazer Magician”
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■ Your Main Deck’s monsters can only be “Odd-Eyes”, “Performapal” and/or “Magician” monsters
Silent (Muto Yugi)
■ Your Main Deck contains 3 or more different “Silent(サイレント)” cards
■ Your Main Deck contains 6 or more “Silent(サイレント)” cards
■ Your Main Deck’s monsters can only be Warrior-Type, Spellcaster-Type or Fairy-Type
Cyber-Style (Marufuji Ryou)
■ Your Main Deck contains 10 or more “Cyber(サイバー)” Machine-Type monsters
Cyber Angels (Tenjouin Asuka)
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■ Your Deck contains 8 or more “Cyber Angel” monsters
■ Your Deck contains 3 or more “Machine Angel” cards
Timelords (Z-ONE)
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Gate Guardian (Paradox Brothers)
■ Your Main Deck contains 2 or more “Suijin”
■ Your Main Deck contains 2 or more “Kazejin”
■ Your Main Deck contains 2 or more “Sanga of the Thunder”
■ Your Main Deck contains 2 or more “Gate Guardian”
■ You cannot use Pendulum Monsters
Prediction Princess (Houchun Mieru)
■ You use 5 or more different “Prediction Princess” monsters
■ You use 10 or more “Prediction Princess” monsters
Destiny Board (Yami Bakura)
■ You must use 2 or more “Dark Necrofear”
■ Your Deck must aim for winning using “Destiny Board”
Twilight Ninja (Tsukikage)
■ Your Main Deck contains 3 or more different “Twilight Ninja(黄昏の)” monsters
■ Your Main Deck contains 6 or more “Twilight Ninja(黄昏の)” monsters
■ Your Main Deck contains 3 or more different “Ninjutsu Art” Trap Cards
■ Your Main Deck contains 6 or more “Ninjutsu Art” Trap Cards
D/D (Akaba Reiji)
■ Your Main Deck can only contain Monsters that are “D/D” or “D/D/D” monsters
Legendary Fisherman (Kaiji Ryota)
■ You must use 2 or more “The Legendary Fisherman”
■ You must use 2 or more “The Legendary Fisherman II”
■ You must use 2 or more “The Legendary Fisherman III”
■ There can not be any cards in your Extra Deck
Toon (Pegasus)
■ Your Main Deck contains 10 or more “Toon” cards (and/or “Manga Ryu-Ran”)
Destruction Sword (Yami Yugi)
■ You must use 6 or more different “Destruction Sword” cards in your Main Deck
■ You must use 12 or more “Destruction Sword” cards in your Main Deck
■ You must use 3 “Buster Blader”
Fortune Lady (Carly)
■ Your Main Deck contains 12 or more “Fortune Lady (フォーチュンレディ)” monsters in the Main Deck in total.
Dark Magician/Gaia the Fierce Knight (Yami Yugi)
■ Your Main Deck must contain 10 or more cards related to “Dark Magician” OR “Gaia the Fierce Knight”
■ You must use 1 or more “Kuriboh”
Blue-Eyes White Dragon (Kaiba Seto)
■ Your Main Deck must contain 15 or more cards related to “Blue-Eyes White Dragon”
■ Your Deck must contains 1 or more “Obelisk the Tormentor”
Crystal (Johan Andersen)
■ Your Main Deck must contain 15 or more “Crystal(宝玉)” cards
Magician Girls (Muto Yugi)
■ You use 4 or more different “Magician Girl” monsters
■ You use 12 or more “Magician Girl” monsters
Red-Eyes
■ Your Main Deck contains 6 or more different “Red-Eyes” cards
■ Your Main Deck contains 12 or more “Red-Eyes” cards
SourceThe UK is in danger of losing its gold-plated triple A grade, leading ratings agency Standard & Poor's has warned.
It has downgraded its outlook on the UK's sovereign rating to "negative". It is the only one of the big three credit agencies that still gives the UK a prized AAA rating.
"We believe that the UK Government's decision to hold a referendum on EU membership by 2017 indicates that economic policymaking could be at risk," the agency said.
S&P said: "There are important risks to the UK's longer-term economic prospects should it leave the EU." It said there is at least a one-in-three probability that the UK will lose its AAA rating within the next two years.
The UK could be "more exposed to party politics than we had previously anticipated, similar to the situation in the US when we lowered that sovereign rating in 2011", S&P said.
Brexit "raises questions about the financing of the economy's large twin deficits and high short-term external debt", the ratings agency said, in reference to the UK's substantial budget and current account deficits.
S&P said that a withdrawal from the EU would threaten the country's access to financing, noting that on its preferred measure of external liquidity, the UK ranked weaker than any of the 129 sovereigns it rates.
Economists have warned that the UK's large and persistent current account deficits make it vulnerable to shocks, and that foreign investors could become less willing to finance these if the country left the EU.
S&P suggested that the referendum may hold back efforts to make progress in other areas, "such as how to address the supply bottlenecks in UK infrastructure and in the housing market".
The ratings agency said the UK's triple rating might be returned to a "stable" outlook if the environment returned to levels of "predictability similar to that in the past", or if Government debt fell below 80pc of GDP more quickly.
• Why the UK's 'other deficit' has economists scared
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, currently expects public sector debt to fall beneath 80pc of GDP in the 2016-17 fiscal year.
S&P's decision follows warnings from ratings agency Moody's, which has said that Brexit could imperil the UK's growth prospects and damage its high sovereign debt rating.
There are "implications for external financing and the role of sterling as a reserve currency, although this would also depend on what sort of relationship with Europe and the single market the UK could negotiate were it to leave the EU," S&P said.K.A.R.D‘s Somin showed off her incredible dance moves during a performance of the group’s newest song “Rumor”.
On April 25, K.A.R.D held a showcase event where they performed their songs “Oh NaNa” and “Don’t Recall”, along with their third and latest song “Rumor”.
During the performance of “Rumor”, the audience were left in awe as Somin showed off her dance moves. Her strong performance showed that the former leader of APRIL is one of the most elegant dancers around.
Combined with her beautiful appearance and lethal charms, Somin is able to effortlessly captivate the entire audience. Her flawless dancing is just one of the group’s many strengths, who have quickly gained a strong following after their first release just four months ago.
Watch the full performance of “Rumor” below:Water taxation and the double dividend hypothesis
July 13th, 2015
Dr. Nicholas Kilimani, Prof. Jan van Heerden & Dr. Heinrich Bohlmann, University of Pretoria, South Africa
This research investigates the possibility of designing a tax policy that is capable of minimizing the costs of environmental regulation while achieving economic objectives such as raising tax revenue.1,2 In this regard, a specially developed water CGE model (UgAGE-water) is used to investigate the economic impact of a water tax on the economy.
Water resources are increasingly becoming stressed in terms of quantity and quality. These strains are emanating from increased economic activity, population growth, as well as changes in climate.3 Unfortunately, the current water pricing policy in Uganda is largely market based and does not seem to adequately capture the full cost of increasing water scarcity or the cost of delivering water supply to communities and industries. In this regard, we contend that a well-designed tax can induce efficient water use and also harness resources for financing the development and expansion of an efficient water supply infrastructure.
This research was motivated by a policy of the Ministry of Finance, Planning & Economic Development of the Government of Uganda to levy a Value Added Tax (VAT) on commercially distributed water.4 While the primary objective is assisting in raising revenue to match fiscal targets, we study the extent to which it might lead to other costs and benefits.
The notion of a “double dividend” was introduced in the early 1990s based on the idea that revenues from an environmental tax could be used to offset other distortions and simultaneously reduce environmental degradation.5,6. However, given the fact that the impacts of such policy measures are likely to vary from one country to another, one cannot know apriori, the effects of such a policy on an economy.7 Most importantly, policy makers need to understand the environment-economy specific impacts in order to balance between the need to maximise the economic gains from the tax and the associated costs.
In this study, a weak double dividend is found to hold. This is in line with a large volume of literature where environmental taxation and revenue recycling policies often result in the price interaction effects outweighing the revenue recycling effects. As a result, it is not possible to realise a strong dividend from such taxation policies. Furthermore, the realisation of any form of dividend depends upon the design of the taxation and revenue recycling regime. (see here for our empirical test of the double dividend in Uganda).8
The model
We developed a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for Uganda to analyze the impact of a tax on water on Uganda’s economy. These class of models allow for economy-wide interactions when evaluating a policy intervention, rather than relying on estimating the effects in a single industry. We evaluate three revenue recycling schemes following the tax. The first set of simulations is an imposition of a UGX 500 (USD 0.20 per m3) tax on commercially supplied water.9 In the second set, we sequentially simulate how the revenue can be recycled in the economy to offset other distortions through the provision of sales, production, and export tax breaks, making the overall scheme revenue neutral.
The theoretical structure of UgAGE is based on the ORANI-G model documented in Horridge10 with various add-ins to facilitate the detailed modelling of water accounts in the country. In this version of UgAGE, we use an aggregated 13-sector database. In UgAGE, all industries share a common production structure, but input proportions and behavioural parameters vary between industries based on available base year data and econometric estimates, respectively. In this regard, the model parameters used are derived from the IFPRI model for Uganda,11 in addition to other relevant studies in the literature12,13,14,15 and informed by the authors’ knowledge of the Ugandan economy.
The research employed different taxation and revenue plough-back scenarios in order to answer questions which are at the core of the double dividend hypothesis:
What is the impact of the policy on the key macroeconomic variables? What are the environmental impacts of a water tax? How is employment affected by the policy intervention?
1) Impact of a water tax policy on the key macroeconomic variables
When a tax is imposed: (i) it increases the cost of production which therefore results in a decrease in the supply of most commodities (the “price interaction effect”); and (ii) it increases government revenue, which can be used to offset other distortionary taxes (the “revenue recycling effect”). Without a concomitant increase in government expenditure, a tax decreases aggregate demand.
The fall in aggregate demand causes a significant reduction in price levels and a decline in real GDP. This leads to a decline in the volume of taxable water used as the level of economic activity is reduced. Taxes also have the effect of increasing domestic prices, which leads to a decline in exports of most commodities and an increase in imports. The effect of a revenue plough-back scheme works in the opposite direction.
2) Environmental impacts of a water tax
In analyzing the environmental effects of the tax (the first dividend), the results show that a tax reduces water use. This implies that for all the policy scenarios, changes in water use following a tax yield an environmental dividend. The same benefits of reduced water use hold for all the three revenue plough-back schemes. From the results, a tax on water consumption always leads to a decrease in water use. In our modelling procedure, this tax is levied on metered water. As such, it is collected as a part of an entity’s water consumption bill. Furthermore, the tax rate was set to in order to ensure compliance and equity, while ensuring more regulated water use than would have been the case without a tax.
3) Impacts of a tax on employment
Generally, changes in employment are closely linked to changes in real GDP. In this research however, the results for the changes in employment per UGX 1 billion of tax revenue follow a slightly different trend for some sectors of the economy. In other words, a double dividend with respect to employment is realized for taxes to certain sectors as well as for certain revenue plough-back schemes, but not for all. For instance, a tax on water for the agriculture and mining sectors results in a decline in employment.
Generally, a tax on industries for which water is a major input in their production activities (such as mining or agriculture), results in a decline in employment. For the agricultural sector, employment declines by an average of 0.85% for all the taxation scenarios both in the short and long-run. In fact, all plough-back schemes fail to generate employment in the sector. The policy implication for such a result is that a careful identification of sectors for this tax is key for the overall success of the policy. Such an approach is critical since the agricultural sector alone employs over 75% of Uganda’s population.
Policy implications
Given the limited use of taxes in environmental regulation and fiscal policy in Uganda, the modelling results highlight the possibility for instituting policy measures that yield double dividends. As this research demonstrates, it is possible to design a policy which widens the tax base, and also regulates the use of environmental resources at the same time. However, this depends upon the sectors on which the tax is imposed, the tax rate and the choice of revenue plough-back scheme. This implies that a deeper understanding of a given economy, and careful policy design are fundamental for the realization of benefits from environmental taxes.
The findings of this study can be extended to other developing economies whose use of environmental tax instruments is still limited and yet such economies stand to suffer from the adverse effects that may arise from environmental resources mismanagement.
References:
A. Yusuf, B.P. Resosudarmo, On the distributional effect of carbon tax in developing countries: The case of Indonesia. Working Paper No. 200705, Centre for Economics and Development Studies, 2007. Fullerton, A. Leicester, S. Smith, Environmental taxes, Prepared for the Report of a Commission on Reforming the tax system for the 21st Century, Chaired by Sir James Mirrlees.[On-line]. Available at: http://www.ifs.org.uk/mirrleesreview/reports/environment.pdf, 2008. C. Bates, Z.W. Kundzewicz, S. Wu, J.P. Palutikof, Eds, Climate Change and Water. Technical Paper for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Secretariat, Geneva, 2008 MFPED, Budget speech for the 2013/14 Fiscal Year. Ministry of Finance Planning and Economic Development-Government of Uganda Kampala-Uganda, 2013. H. Van Heerden J.N. Blignaut, M. Mabugu, R. Gerlagh, S. Hess, R, Tol, M. Horridge, M.P. De Wit, A. Letsoalo, Redistributing environmental tax revenue to reduce poverty in South Africa: the cases of energy and water. S. Afr. J. Econ. Manage. Sci. 9, 4 (2006) 537-552. Letsoalo, J. Blignaut, M. de Wit, S. Hess, R. Tol, Triple dividends of water consumption charges in South Africa, Water Resources Research, 43, 5:(2007)1-32. [On-line]. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.175.5992&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Blignaut, J.H. Van Heerden, M. Horridge, “Integrated water and economic modelling of the impacts of water market instruments on the South African economy,” Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(1),105-116, 2008. EEA. Environmental tax reform in Europe: Implications for income distribution, European Environmental Agency, Technical report No: 16/2011, 2011. Kilimani, J. Van Heerden, H. Bohlmann, Water taxation and the double dividend hypothesis, Water Resources and Economics, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wre.2015.03.001. Pearce, The role of carbon taxes in adjusting to global warming. Econ. J, 101, 938-948, 1991. M. Horridge, ORANI-G: A Generic Single-Country Computable General Equilibrium Model. Practical GE Modelling course 18-22:2001. Centre of Policy Studies, Monash University, 2001. V. Dimaranan, R.A. McDougall, T.W. Hertel, Behavioural Parameters, in Betina, V and Dimaranan (eds) Global Trade Assistance and Producton: The GTAP 6 Data base. Lafayette, IN: Centre for Global Trade Analysis, Purdue University, 2006. Hertel, D. Hummel, R. Keeney, How confident Can we e of CGE-Based Assessments of Free Trade Agreements? Economic Modelling, 4 (2007) 611-635. Boysen, A. Mathews, Impact of EU Common Agricultural Policy reform on Uganda. [On-line]. Available at: http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/7889.pdf [Accessed on 16th Nov 2013]. 2012. Boysen, A Food Demand System Estimation for Uganda, Discussion Paper 396. Dublin: Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College-Dublin, 2012.
Nicholas Kilimani is a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of economics, University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Lecturer in the Department of Policy & Development Economics, Makerere University, Uganda. Jan van Herdeen is a Professor in Economics at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is also the Deputy Director, Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA). Dr. Heinrich Bohlmann is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The article is based on an original piece of research published in Water Resources and Economics titled, ‘Water taxation and the double dividend hypothesis‘.
The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.In this Monday, Nov. 6, 2017 photo, U.S. Marines build a military site during a sandstorm in western Anbar, Iraq. The US-led coalition's newest outpost in the fight against the Islamic State group is in this dusty corner of western Iraq near the border with Syria where several hundred American Marines operate close to the battlefront, a key factor in the recent series of swift victories against the extremists. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
QAIM, Iraq (AP) — The US-led coalition’s newest outpost in the fight against the Islamic State group is in a dusty corner of western Iraq near the border with Syria. Here, several hundred American Marines operate close to the battlefront, a key factor in the recent series of swift victories against the extremists.
The Americans directed Iraqi troops in their victory last week recapturing the nearby border town of Qaim, the militants’ last urban holding. Now the Marines will lead the equally difficult task of clearing the extremists from their last redoubt: a large stretch of empty desert north of the Euphrates River adjoining the border with Syria.
They also face the possibility of friction with Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias that are increasing their own presence in the border region.
Under a plastic tent, the Marines run an austere joint command center about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the border. A dozen monitors relay surveillance footage and troop positions in the town of Qaim nearby. Using racks of radio and satellite equipment, the coalition forces and Iraqi officers at the base pass information between forces on the ground and al-Asad air base, the coalition’s main base in Anbar province some 130 kilometers (80 miles) to the east.
Such outposts have become more common the past year, bringing the Americans out of main bases and closer to the action. U.S. commanders say the tactic has paid off in the swift rollback of the Islamic State group.
The capture of Qaim completed the sweep driving IS from major towns along the Euphrates Valley in Iraq. Along the river on the Syrian side, Syrian government forces took the city of Deir el-Zour last week and the border town of Boukamal facing Qaim on Thursday.
All that remains from the so-called “caliphate” that once stretched from northwest Syria to the edges of Baghdad are a small stretch of villages on the Euphrates in Syria and the enclave of desert straddling the border into both Syria and Iraq.
U.S. Marines Col. Seth W. B. Folsom, commander of Task Force Lion, oversaw the Qaim fight and said he expects clearing and holding the retaken territory in Anbar to be more difficult than the assault itself.
“It’s much more challenging, no doubt in my mind it’s more challenging,” he said. Motivating troops to attack to regain their country is easy, he said. “What’s less easy to motivate men to do, is to stand duty on checkpoints.”
Much of Anbar and Iraq’s border with Syria has been beyond central control for decades. The deserts there have served as havens for smugglers for generations.
Iraqi forces are stretched thin. Many are deployed in support of local police in liberated towns and cities and along major roadways. Others have been diverted to the borders of the Kurdish region amid the military standoff between Baghdad and Kurdish forces.
Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces — the mostly Shiite and largely Iranian-backed paramilitary forces — have also built up their presence along Iraq’s border with Syria.
They make no attempt to hide that they are working to physically extend the influence of U.S. rival Iran. Jaafar al-Husseini, a spokesman for the Hezbollah Brigades, a group under the PMF, boasted during the Qaim fighting that the forces are securing a route from “Iran to Beirut.”
“We have foiled the American project in Iraq and on the Syrian borders, and we have succeeded in securing the road that links Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon,” he told The Associated Press.
Coalition forces do not directly coordinate with the PMF, but rely on the Iraqi military to relay their movements to avoid striking the fighters.
U.S. Marines Maj. Greg Duesterhaus said the PMF presence complicates things but is not a great concern. “They are part of the forces that are out there on the battlefield,” he said.
The growing numbers of coalition troops are stretching the capacity of Anbar’s bases. Notices warning of water shortages hang in bathrooms and showers at al-Asad. At Qaim, Marines ration water.
“Anbar is the far reaches of Iraq,” said Col. Folsom. “The challenge that we’ve got here that they have not had as much up in the north is really just the tyranny of distance.”
Daily convoys leave from al-Asad to the Qaim outpost carrying water, food, ammunition and building supplies. They travel along desert roads for a tedious seven-hour journey. Storms whip up powder-fine sand, reducing visibility and halting traffic for hours. Lack of Iraqi military escorts sometimes leaves convoys stuck for hours.
Without electricity, cell phone service or internet, Marines at the Qaim outpost pass the evening hours smoking cigarettes and talking.
Sitting between an armored vehicle and the rubble of a partially collapsed building, a group of Marines and soldiers joked about camp conditions and the monotony of their field rations. They also reflected on their mission in Iraq with a mix of sobriety and cynical humor.
They may feel a sense of accomplishment in the gains against IS — “but it’s not a sense of finality,” one Marine staff sergeant said. He served in Anbar in 2007, unlike most of his comrades, who are on their first deployment to Iraq. He never thought he’d be back, but now believes there will be a U.S. presence in Iraq for generations to come.
“When my son joins the Marines, he’ll probably be deployed to Iraq,” he said with a laugh. He spoke on condition that he only be identified by his rank in line with regulations.
Col. Folsom said he hoped within the next year Iraqi forces would be able to hold the western edge of Anbar on their own and coalition forces can fall back to al-Asad air base.
“We have to find some sort of sustainable presence,” he said. “What that will look like, I don’t know. There may still be some commuting to work in one way or another.”
____
Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salah in Baghdad contributed to this report.The moves comes a day after the Tulsa County Election Board announced it had verified enough signatures on the petition for it to move forward.
The group "We the People" launched the petition drive after the April shooting death of Eric Harris by Reserve Deputy Bob Bates.
Sheriff Stanley Glanz said he welcomes an investigation but isn't sure the group followed the law during the petition process.
In its motion to dismiss the petition, the Sheriff's Office says the group did not get signatures on the actual petition that was approved by the judge. Instead, it argues, the group used a "stand-alone Signature Form, calling
it
the Petition." It calls that form "unapproved, inaccurate, and misleading."
Harris' brother talked exclusively with News On 6 reporter Allison Harris on Tuesday.
He told her even though people doubted they could get the signatures needed, he believes his brother's death will shine a light on what he calls corruption in the sheriff's office that dates back to a special investigation in 2009
Terry Simonson, spokesperson for the Sheriff's Office, released a statement about the motion Wednesday morning:
"Today the Sheriff has challenged the process used by the Petitioner. He believes they have not followed either the letter or intent of the laws governing grand juries in Oklahoma.
The Sheriff is neither afraid nor hesitant to appear before a properly called and legally empaneled grand jury. However, at this point, that has not occurred. Those circulating the Petition to empanel a grand jury did not follow the laws of the State of Oklahoma.
The grand jury laws in Oklahoma protect the citizens of Oklahoma from being subjected to frivolous actions.
For the legal system |
are responsible for the heritabilities of these tests.60,61 Genetic correlations estimate the extent to which genetic effects on one trait are correlated with genetic effects on another trait independently of the heritabilities of the two traits. They can be thought about roughly as the probability that genes associated with one trait are also associated with the other trait. Genetic correlations are derived from the genetic analysis of covariance between traits using the same quantitative genetic methods used to analyse variance.6
These general genetic effects permeate not only cognitive abilities such as spatial and vocabulary that are used as part of the assessment of intelligence but also extend to education-related learning abilities such as reading and arithmetic. Figure 2 shows the results of a multivariate genetic analysis of 14 tests that comprise four distinct test batteries—intelligence, reading, mathematics and language—for more than 5000 pairs of 12-year-old twins.62 The genetic correlations (and 95% confidence intervals) between intelligence and learning abilities are uniformly high: 0.88 (0.84–0.92) with reading, 0.86 (0.81–0.90) with mathematics and 0.91 with language (0.87–0.94). Weighting these genetic correlations by the heritabilities of the latent factors, it can be shown that about two-thirds of the phenotypic correlations between the factors can be explained genetically. One advantage of using such latent factors is that they exclude uncorrelated measurement error. As a result, these genetic correlations are higher than those found when uncorrected composite scores rather than latent factors are analysed: 0.66 (0.05 standard error) for reading, 0.73 (0.03) for mathematics and 0.80 (0.06) for language.63
Figure 2 Multivariate (common pathway) genetic analysis in which each latent variable is indexed by three or four tests and the twin method is used to estimate additive genetic (A), shared (common) environmental (C) and nonshared environmental (E) contributions to the variance and covariance among the latent variables. Squares represent measured traits; circles represent latent factors. The lower tier of arrows represents factor loadings; the second tier represents genetic and environmental path coefficients. The curved arrows at the top represent correlations between genetic and environmental latent factors, although only the genetic correlations are shown here. (From Davis et al.62). Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
The first attempts to use bivariate GCTA (see Box 1) to verify these twin findings support the hypothesis of general genetic effects on broad cognitive and learning ability-related differences. The GCTA estimates of genetic correlation (and standard error) between intelligence and learning abilities are highly similar to the twin study estimates just mentioned for composite scores uncorrected for error: 0.89 (0.26) for reading, 0.74 (0.15) for mathematics and 0.81 (0.15) for language, estimated from unrelated individuals from the same sample.63 Within intelligence, the major group factors of verbal and nonverbal ability yielded a genetic correlation of 1.0 (0.32) in a bivariate GCTA in the same sample.64 The high GCTA genetic correlation between verbal and nonverbal based on unrelated individuals supported the twin study estimate of 0.60 (0.09) in the same study.
An important feature of bivariate GCTA is that it yields genetic correlations similar to genetic correlations estimated from the twin method, even though heritabilities are considerably lower for GCTA than for twin estimates. In the study just mentioned, GCTA heritabilities were consistently lower than twin heritabilities: 0.35 vs 0.47 for intelligence, 0.16 vs 0.59 for reading, 0.32 vs 0.48 for mathematics and 0.35 vs 0.41 for language. As noted in Box 1, GCTA heritability estimates are limited to the additive effects tagged by the common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) used on DNA arrays (i.e., the direct effects of the SNPs on the array and those variants with which they are in linkage disequilibrium); GCTA heritability is lowered by imperfect tagging of causal SNPs. As a result, GCTA heritability estimates are typically about half the heritability estimates from twin studies. This ‘missing GCTA heritability’ is due in part to non-additive effects and the effects of rarer DNA variants. Why then are GCTA estimates of genetic correlation so similar to twin study estimates? The likely reason is that the GCTA estimate of the genetic correlation is derived from the ratio between genetic covariance and the genetic variances of the two traits. Because GCTA’s underestimation of genetic influence applies to genetic covariance as well as to genetic variance, the ratio between genetic covariance and genetic variance cancels out this bias, leaving an unbiased GCTA estimate of genetic correlation.63
This finding of strong genome-wide pleiotropy across diverse cognitive and learning abilities, indexed by general intelligence, is a major finding about the origins of individual differences in intelligence. Nonetheless, this finding seems to have had little impact in related fields such as cognitive neuroscience or experimental cognitive psychology. We suggest that part of the reason for this neglect is that these fields generally ignore individual differences.65,66 Another reason might be that the evidence for this finding rested largely on the twin design, for which there have always been concerns about some of its assumptions;6 we judge that this will change now that GCTA is beginning to confirm the twin results.
This finding of strong genome-wide pleiotropy across diverse cognitive and learning abilities is compatible with multiple neurocognitive models of causal pathways. The modularity model of cognitive neuroscience might suggest that genetic correlations among cognitive abilities are epiphenomenal in the sense that multiple genetically independent brain mechanisms could affect each ability, creating genetic correlations among abilities. However, the genetic principles of pleiotropy (each gene affects many traits) and polygenicity (many genes affect each trait) lead us to predict that generalist genes have their effects further upstream, creating genetic correlations among brain structures and functions, a prediction that supports a network view of brain structure and function.25,67
In summary, multivariate genetic research—both from twin studies and GCTA—suggests that most of the genetic action is general across diverse cognitive abilities rather than specific to each ability. Intelligence is a good target for gene-hunting because it indexes these generalist genes.
Assortative mating is greater for intelligence than for other traits
Although the phenotypic correlation between spouses, assortative mating, might seem an esoteric topic, it has important implications for the genetic architecture of intelligence. Assortative mating is far greater for intelligence than for most other traits. For example, assortative mating is about 0.20 for height68 and for weight,69 and about 0.10 for personality.70 For intelligence, assortative mating is about 0.40.19,71 Moreover, verbal intelligence shows greater assortative mating (~0.50) than nonverbal intelligence (~0.30), perhaps because it is easier to gauge someone’s verbal ability such as vocabulary than their nonverbal intelligence such as spatial ability. Assortative mating for intelligence is caused by initial selection of a mate (assortment) rather than by couples becoming more similar to each other after living together (convergence).72,73 In part, spouses select each other for intelligence on the basis of education—spouses correlate about 0.60 for years of education19—which correlates about 0.45 with intelligence.50 Assortative mating may be greater than it is for intelligence for a few other traits such as social attitudes, smoking and drinking, although these traits might be affected by convergence. It should also be noted that not all of the genetic variance for intelligence is additive. For example, dominance, which involves interaction among alleles at a locus, is indicated by research showing inbreeding depression for intelligence.74 When assortative mating is taken into account in variance components analysis, some evidence for nonadditive genetic variance emerges.73,75
The significance of high assortative mating for intelligence is that assortative mating for polygenic traits increases additive genetic variance. Additive genetic variance refers to the independent effects of alleles or loci that ‘add up’, in contrast to non-additive effects of dominance within a locus, and epistasis across loci in which the effects of alleles or loci interact. Assortative mating of parents increases additive genetic variance in their offspring because offspring receive a random sampling of half of each parent’s genes and resemble their parents to the extent that each allele shared with their parents has an average additive effect. Because offspring inherit only one of each of the parents’ pairs of alleles, offspring differ from their parents for non-additive interactions.
For example, if spouses mated randomly in relation to intelligence, highly intelligent women would be just as likely to mate with men of low as high intelligence. Offspring of the matings of women of high intelligence and men of low intelligence would generally be of average intelligence. However, because there is strong positive assortative mating, children with highly intelligent mothers are also likely to have highly intelligent fathers, and the offspring themselves are likely to be more intelligent than average. The same thing happens for less intelligent parents. In this way, assortative mating increases additive genetic variance in that the offspring differ more from the average than they would if mating were random. The increase in additive genetic variance can be substantial because its effects accumulate generation after generation until an equilibrium is reached. For example, if the heritability of intelligence with random mating were 0.40, the additive genetic variance of intelligence would increase by one-quarter at equilibrium given assortative mating of 0.40, Falconer and MacKay76 equation 5, Table 10.6, p. 176.
The extra additive genetic variance for intelligence induced by assortative mating is important for three genetic reasons. First, parents share only additive genetic variance with their offspring, so that genetic predictions from parent to offspring ought to be greater for intelligence when polygenic scores, composite scores based on associations of many loci with intelligence, are available. Second, because GCTA has so far been limited to detecting additive genetic variance, GCTA heritability should be greater for intelligence than for traits that show less assortative mating such as personality. Some evidence supports this prediction in that GCTA heritability estimates for personality appear to be much lower than for intelligence, even taking into account the lower twin-study heritability estimates for personality than for intelligence.77, 78, 79 Moreover, GCTA heritability estimates are greater, although not significantly so, for verbal than non-verbal intelligence,41,80 which is consistent with the greater assortative mating for verbal than non-verbal intelligence. Third, because both GWA and GCTA are limited to detecting additive genetic variance, the GCTA estimate of substantial additive genetic influence on intelligence makes intelligence a good target for GWA studies.
Two additional points about assortative mating for intelligence warrant mention. First, unlike inbreeding, which reduces heterozygosity across the genome, assortative mating is trait specific—it increases additive genetic variance (changing genotypic frequencies but not allelic frequencies) only for genes associated with the trait for which mates assort and its genetically correlated traits. Second, assortative mating induces a genetic correlation between mates for a particular trait to the extent that the trait is heritable, regardless of whether assortative mating is driven by genetic assortment or by environmental factors such as propinquity. A recent study using genome-wide genotypes showed that spouses are more genetically similar than two individuals chosen at random.81 This DNA estimate of genetic similarity between spouses is substantially less than assortative mating for education levels, suggesting that assortative mating may be driven by ‘social sorting processes in the marriage market’.81
Thinking positively: the genetics of high intelligence
Unlike psychiatric and other disorders, intelligence is normally distributed with a positive end of high performance as well as a problematic end of intellectual disability. High intelligence is responsible for exceptional performance in many societally valued outcomes, as documented in long-term longitudinal studies.82 Although many other traits, such as those related to athletic performance, are also normally distributed, the importance of high intelligence makes it especially interesting. Genetic exploration of the positive tail of normally distributed traits is important conceptually because it moves away from the notion that we are all the same genetically except for rogue mutations that cause disorders, diseases and disabilities.
Quantitative genetic research on intelligence indicates that the genetic causes of high intelligence are quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from the rest of the distribution. A recent study of 11000 twin pairs found that the top 15% of the intelligence distribution was just as heritable (0.50) as the rest of the distribution (0.55).83 Most recently, in a study of 370 000 sibling pairs and 9000 twin pairs in Sweden from 3 million 18-year-old males whose intelligence was assessed as part of compulsory military service, not only was high intelligence (top 4%) just as familial and heritable as the rest of the distribution, a method called DF extremes analysis suggested that the same genetic factors are at work.84 DF extremes analysis focuses on the genetic causes of the average difference between an extreme group, however defined, and quantitative trait scores for the population, comparing the differential regression to the population mean for the co-twins of identical and fraternal twin probands.85 To the extent that genetics is found to account for this average difference (called ‘group’ heritability), it implies that there is a high genetic correlation between the extreme group and the quantitative trait.60 In the Swedish study, DF extremes analysis showed that genetics explained about half of the mean difference between the high-intelligence group and the rest of the distribution, which was similar to the traditional heritability of individual differences and implies strong genetic links between high intelligence and normal variation in intelligence.
It is possible that scores more extreme than the top 4% of the intelligence distribution are aetiologically different from the normal distribution, which has been called the Genetic Discontinuity Hypothesis.86 The most persuasive argument for genetic discontinuity for extremely high intelligence was made by David Lykken who noted that a key problem of genius is ‘its mysterious irrepressibility and its ability to arise from the most unpromising of lineages and to flourish even in the meanest of circumstances’ (Lykken87 p. 29). Lykken87, 88 proposed that genius emerges from unique combinations of genes; he referred to these higher-order nonadditive (epistatic) interactions as emergenic. The emergenesis hypothesis does not necessarily predict that different genes affect high intelligence, but it does predict that genetic effects are non-additive for high intelligence. The hallmark of an epistatic trait is one for which identical twins are more than twice as similar as fraternal twins. However, in the two twin studies described above, high intelligence did not show this pattern of twin results and model-fitting analyses found that all genetic influence was additive for high intelligence as well as for the entire distribution of intelligence. Although these results do not support the Discontinuity Hypothesis, the studies were limited to the top 15% and top 4% of the intelligence distribution, which is far short of the extremes of genius, which Galton89 benchmarked as the top 0.1%.
The aetiology of high intelligence is also interesting in comparison to intellectual disability. Similar to high intelligence, most intellectual disability is the low end of the normal distribution of intelligence. This has been shown most recently in the Swedish conscript sample mentioned above, with results replicated in a similarly large conscript sample in Israel.90 However, extremely severe intellectual disability appears to be aetiologically distinct, as proposed by Lionel Penrose91 in 1938 and confirmed in the Swedish and Israeli studies. One critical piece of evidence is that siblings of persons with severe intellectual disability have an average intelligence quotient (IQ) near 100 whereas siblings of persons with mild intellectual disability have an average IQ of about 85, about one standard deviation below the population mean. The absence of genetic links between severe intellectual disability and normal variation in intelligence fits with current molecular genetic research that finds noninherited de novo mutations associated with severe intellectual disability.92
An hypothesis to integrate these genetic results for the low and high ends of intelligence is this: Normal development of intelligence can be disrupted by any of many mutations including non-inherited de novo mutations as well as prenatal and postnatal trauma, but high intelligence requires that everything works right, including most of the positive alleles and few of the negative alleles associated with intelligence. This hypothesis is the rationale for a recent genome-wide case–control association study for cases with extremely high intelligence (IQ>150).84 However, one study93 has found no association between rare SNPs and intelligence in the normal range of intelligence. In addition, several studies have found no association between copy-number variants, which are typically rare variants, and intelligence in the normal range, although such studies may have been underpowered both in terms of sample and difficulties in assessing copy-number variants.94
Although the normal phenotypic distribution of intelligence makes it an obvious target for investigating the high as well as low extremes, the larger significance of positive genetics for psychiatric genetics is that polygenic scores created from GWA studies of psychiatric disorders will be normally distributed, which means that there is a positive end with just as many people as the negative end. This implies that at the level of DNA variation there are no common disorders, only normally distributed quantitative traits.95 It also raises the question of who these people are at the positive end of the polygenic distribution of ‘risk’ for psychological and other traits. Are they merely individuals at low risk for problems or do they have special powers? Thinking positively begins by thinking quantitatively—about ‘dimensions’ rather than ‘disorders’ and about genetic ‘variability’ rather than genetic ‘risk’.
Intelligence brings (some) genetics to ‘social’ epidemiology
It has long been known that intelligence, education and class are correlated. The causes of these associations and their relative contribution to social mobility is much disputed.96 Education and social class are also well-established associates of health inequalities, including all-cause mortality.30 However, intelligence is a new player in health; its associations with many health and illness outcomes and all-cause and several specific causes of mortality have been discovered in the last decade or so.97
We shall explain in this section that, akin to, but broader than cognitive and learning abilities, intelligence shares genetic causes with education and social class, which are touchstone ‘environmental’ variables of diverse social scientists. Major human phenomena studied by these social scientists are social mobility and health inequalities, which are unarguably important. They are studied by sociologists, epidemiologists and economists. Finding out why some people more than others make positive progress in their social position through the life course, and why some people are more prone to illnesses and early death have drafted in the two favourite ‘environmental’ social science variables of education and social class. Education and parental social class are predictors of people’s social position in adulthood.98,99 Both, and the person’s own adult social class, are associated with health, illness and mortality: less educated people and those in less professional jobs tend to die earlier.100, 101, 102, 103 However, there is a third variable in social mobility research, and a third variable in health inequalities research: intelligence.104 Both education and social class are substantially correlated with intelligence.29,61,105
Education and social class (which is indexed by occupation, or income, or by the relative deprivation-affluence of where a person lives) are often assumed to be indicators of a person’s environmental influences,106 but they are correlated with intelligence, which has a high heritability. Indeed, epidemiologists even use height—shorter stature is associated with earlier mortality—as an indicator of childhood social-environmental influences, though it has high heritability. For example, a recent social epidemiology article described height ‘as a marker of early life insults’.107 Here, we emphasise that it is an empirical question rather than something that can be assumed a priori as to whether the three key variables in social mobility and health inequalities research—education, social class and intelligence—correlate because of shared genetic and/or environmental causes.
Twin and family studies have shown that educational attainment and social class are somewhat heritable. For example, the pedigree-based estimates of heritability (here as percentages of phenotypic variance explained) in the Generation Scotland family-based study of over 20 000 people were 54% (s.e.=2%) for general intelligence, 41% (2%) for education and 71% (1%) for social deprivation using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.108 The genetic correlation was 0.65 (s.e.=0.02) between intelligence and education, 0.40 (0.02) between intelligence and deprivation and 0.48 (0.02) between education and deprivation. An earlier report on a smaller sample (N>6000) of the same study found genetic correlations between intelligence and being physically active outside work (0.25), fruit and vegetable intake (0.23), ever smoking (0.45), smoke exposure (0.53) and income (0.45), with high bivariate heritabilities for all of these.109 Another study identified over 2500 pairs of school-age twins from population samples totalling over 300 000 in England and the Netherlands and found moderate to large genetic correlations and bivariate heritability between intelligence and national examination results in language, mathematics and science.61 Analyses of older Danish twins found evidence for genetic correlation between cognitive ability and education and health.110,111
GCTA studies have recently explored the heritability and genetic correlations of intelligence, education and social class. A combined analysis of Swedish and Australian unrelated subjects (N~11 500) used GCTA to provide an estimate of 22% (s.e.=4%) for the heritability of years in education and 25% (8%) for attending college.16 In the Twins Early Development Study for 3000 unrelated children, GCTA-based estimates of heritability were 21% (12%) for parental social class and 28% (17%) for children’s IQ at age 7 and 32% (14%) at age 12. The GCTA-estimated genetic correlation between parental social class and IQ was 1.00 (s.e.=0.47) at age 7 and 0.66 (0.31) at age 12.56 GCTA-based estimates of heritability on over 6500 unrelated people with genome-wide SNP data in the Generation Scotland study were 29% (5%) for general intelligence, 21% (5%) for education and 18% (5%) for social deprivation.112 The genetic correlations were 0.95 (0.13) for intelligence and education, 0.26 (0.16) for intelligence and deprivation, and 0.45 (0.18) for education and deprivation. Therefore, some of the variance in the social scientists’ key environmental variables can be found in DNA variation, some of which is shared with the DNA variation that causes some of people’s differences in intelligence. Another ‘environmental’ social science variable, height, shows a similar set of findings in the Generation Scotland study sample.108 The GCTA-estimated heritability of height was 58% (5%), its phenotypic correlation with intelligence was 0.16, the GCTA-based genetic correlation was 0.28 (0.09), and the bivariate heritability was 71%. Bivariate GCTA-derived genetic correlations between intelligence and health variables will require large numbers which are rare, as yet. An analysis of data from the Swedish Twin Registry (N=5650 unrelated individuals) found GCTA-derived genetic correlations of 0.13 (s.e.=0.23) and 0.33 (s.e.=0.33) between self-rated health and, respectively, years in education and attending college16).
The genetics of intelligence has a special place, therefore, in the heretofore-named ‘social’ epidemiology. Indeed, these new findings from twin/family-based and GCTA-based studies give a corrective to the suggestion that ‘cognitive epidemiology’ be re-named ‘social epidemiology’. Singh-Manoux’s 113 suggestion was partly made because epidemiologists preferred to use cognitive epidemiology for those studies in which cognition was the outcome, and so there was an objection to Deary and Batty’s (2007) 104 definition, that is, ‘the use of cognitive ability test scores as risk factors for human health and disease outcomes, including mortality’. Relevant to the genetic associations discussed in this section was Singh-Manoux’s further discussion, ‘Given the association between intelligence and education, extensively discussed by Deary and Johnson, 106 this definition of cognitive epidemiology puts it squarely in the domain of social epidemiology, a discipline concerned with the social distribution of determinants of health. Location in this broader church, rather than the micro-discipline of cognitive epidemiology, will avoid a narrow focus on intelligence that ignores its associations with markers of social position such as education, income and occupation.’
One might say in reply that this conceptualisation ignores possible genetic contributions to social/cognitive epidemiology. To sum up: there are genetic causes of some of the educational and social class differences in the populations studied, and these overlap with the genetic causes of intelligence differences. Intelligence genetics is special here, because it offers the possibility of finding some of the connections between social and medical outcomes, perhaps via genetic contributions to system integrity, allostatic load and the adoption of health-promoting/reducing behaviours.114RSS leader Indresh Kumar on Thursday urged people of all the religions to boycott Chinese goods to inflict a “surgical strike” on China’s economy and help in addressing the issue of unemployment in the country. He said that the government carried out surgical strikes in Pakistan in the interest of the country’s security, similarly, a “surgical strike” on the economy of China was also needed. “I have urged members of all the religions that they should not purchase Chinese products in at least one festival. This will also help in addressing the issue of unemployment in the country,” Kumar told reporters at a press conference at Jaipur.
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The RSS leader also heaped praise on Narendra Modi, saying the prime minister has worked hard with full commitment and tried to revive the work culture in the bureaucracy.
He is liked by the youths and younger generation for his dedication and commitment to his work and radio programme ‘Mann ki baat’, Kumar added.
Exuding confidence in Modi, on completion of three years of the BJP-led NDA government, he said that he will not only win 2019 Lok Sabha elections even in 2024.
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“It is a public opinion that he (Modi) is the best available leader and strategist who is fully committed to the nation. Not only in 2019 Lok Sabha elections, but also in 2024 elections, he would retain the power,” he said.
Expressing concern over increasing cost of education and medical and health facilities, he said that they should be made available to all on cheaper cost.
He stressed that moral values should be included in the education so that the young generation inculcates them.
“The institutions which are imparting religions education should also focus on moral education so that their students do not become fanatic,” he said.
On the issue of triple talaq, Kumar said that this has set the stage for a major reform in the interest of Muslim women who face hardship due to “unconstitutional” and “unislamic” practice.
Supporting Major Nitin Gogoi’s decision to tie a Kashmiri youth in front of a jeep as a “human shield” to thwart stone pelters, Kumar said that those who pelt stone on defence forces violate human rights of the defence personnel.
Citing the example of a national shooter Ayesha Falaq, who rescued her brother-in-law from kidnappers by shooting at the abductors in Delhi on Sunday, he said Ayesha is being praises for her bravery while Major Gogoi’s action is being questioned.
On the 2007-Ajmer bomb blast case, he said there was a grand conspiracy against him.
“I was not named in the FIR and the investigating agency also did not name me it the report,” he said.
A special NIA court gave verdict in the blast case in March this year and awarded life imprisonment to Bhavesh patel and Devendra Gupta in the case.
In April, the NIA submitted a closure report in the case while giving clean chit to the RSS leader and three others, saying no prosecutable evidences were found against them but the court issued notice to the complainant of the case to hear his side before giving decision on the closure report.
On the issue of Ram temple in Ayodhya, he said that it would attain its completion as the people have shown faith on political parties and religions as they have risen above the party and religion line to construct the Ram temple.
He claimed that foreign invader demolished the Ram temple to construct masjid and it was named after Babar and this in itself is “unislamic” because majid is not named after a person.
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On the issue Kashmir, the RSS leader said that at the time of the partition, entire Kashmir was made the part of India and Pakistan illegally occupies one portion of it.In the end, Herb Brooks' long-awaited plaque in the Hall of Fame isn't just the product of an Olympic gold won almost three decades ago, but rather the enduring message of hope that seminal victory continues to represent.
Sound like a subtle distinction? Maybe.
But the victory of the U.S. Olympic team in 1980 over the powerful Russians, a victory that paved the way for a gold medal with a victory over Finland two days later, remains a timeless parable about the power of commitment and belief and perseverance.
"His legacy is taking a group of talented kids that nobody gave a chance of winning to molding them into a group that would play at the top of their ability at the proper time," explained Brooks' longtime friend and confidante Lou Nanne.
That's all Brooks wanted.
All that other stuff -- opening up hockey in the United States and the social and political implications of beating the Russians at a time in history when the two countries were neck-deep in the Cold War -- was irrelevant to Brooks.
"All that stuff is lore that came after," said Nanne who, along with USA Hockey's Walter Bush, spearheaded the campaign to have Brooks named head coach leading up to the 1980 Olympics.
For many years, Nanne has lobbied for Brooks' inclusion in the Hockey Hall of Fame. That it takes place more than three years after he died in a car accident will lend a bittersweet texture to the weekend's festivities.
Funny, Brooks wasn't even the first choice to coach the 1980 team. American hockey czars had already offered the job to legendary college coach Jack Parker, but as with all things surrounding the 1980 team, it seemed fate had other ideas. Parker declined and Nanne and Bush became involved in the selection process.
Nanne, a native of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, became a naturalized U.S. citizen and played on the U.S. Olympic team in 1968. Among his teammates was Brooks, who'd also played on the 1964 Olympic squad and had been the final cut of the 1960 team that won gold at Squaw Valley. The two had become friends playing together at the University of Minnesota and it was Nanne who helped Brooks get his first coaching job, handling the freshmen at the University of Minnesota. At the time, Brooks was selling insurance.
"To me, it didn't seem that he was really happy selling insurance," Nanne recalled.
Brooks would go on to take over the University of Minnesota hockey program and guide the Gophers to three NCAA titles, in 1974, 1976 and 1979. When Nanne took over as manager of the Minnesota North Stars, the first person he called was Brooks. It was 1978 and Nanne offered Brooks a two-year deal to coach in the NHL. But Brooks begged off, saying his main goal was to coach the 1980 Olympic team.
So, Nanne switched gears, and along with Bush, campaigned for Brooks to get the job. "I said to the committee, 'I think Herb would be the perfect guy for that,' " Nanne said.
He turned out to be perfect, in a way that no one could ever have imagined.
So much mythology has surrounded the 1980 team that it has become difficult to find the threads of reality in the event. There was the recent movie with Kurt Russell, aptly entitled "Miracle," that told the story to a new generation of Americans; the statue of Brooks outside the Lake Placid arena which now bears his name, the same arena where Al Michaels uttered that timeless phrase, "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"; the naming of the team and its accomplishments as the most significant of the last century by more than one prominent news organization.
"I think of Herb as a genuine American hero in hockey," said Lou Vairo, a scout for the 1980 team and Brooks' assistant coach with the U.S. team in Salt Lake City in 2002. "He did it all.
"The thing that always impressed me more than anything else, more than his stubbornness and more than his passion, was that he was one of the most intelligent people I've ever dealt with. He was extremely bright. I don't believe that team would have won without Herb Brooks, and that was a hell of a team."
Given Brooks' mythical status, it's somehow difficult to think of him the way his son Dan does, as the college coach who was so poorly paid that, like many of his coaching brethren, he had to work hockey schools and do other hockey-related work in the summer to make ends meet.
Dan Brooks, a former draft pick of the St. Louis Blues, recalled his father being so consumed by coaching that he and his sister, Kelly, would sometimes watch out the picture window of their home, hours after normal dinnertime had passed, agreeing that they would go ahead and eat if the next car wasn't their father's. Or the next or the next.
"He was a tireless worker," Dan Brooks said of his father. "Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it was hockey."
Later, when he'd stopped coaching, Brooks found it difficult being in arenas or around the game.
"Every time he was in a rink, it was like being with a recovering alcoholic, he was missing it so much," his son said.
The stories about Brooks and his treatment of his players are, like all things connected to the 1980 story, legendary. How he galvanized their commitment to winning, their commitment to following his game plan, by forging what for many was an intense dislike of him. He criticized, cajoled, belittled, all part of his master plan to create a team that would accomplish what few thought possible.
Speaking at Brooks' funeral in August 2003, Mike Eruzione admitted that he would still feel he had done something wrong whenever Brooks called his home years after the Olympics.
Fear, loathing, respect, admiration, all of those were qualities or feelings Brooks evoked in his players, said John Harrington, a member of that team who has been coaching college hockey since 1984 and who recruited and coached Dan Brooks at the University of Denver.
Yet, if there is one enduring memory from that period for Harrington, it was hearing Brooks tell reporters after the gold-medal win that he loved his players like a father loves his sons.
"It was like, wow, you never would have guessed that," Harrington said.
Over the course of a few months, using those tactics might have paved the way to immortality for Brooks and his players, but it is also one of the main reasons Brooks never achieved the same kind of success in the NHL.
During a five-year coaching career spread over 19 years, Brooks was 219-222-66 during the regular season and 19-21 in the playoffs during stops with the New York Rangers, New Jersey, Minnesota and Pittsburgh.
"He could have spent more time in hockey in bigger, more glamorous roles," Dan Brooks said. But Brooks could never abide the politicking and the agents and all the other things that were less a factor at the collegiate or international level.
"If he really lobbied and sold himself, he could have coached 20 more years," Brooks said. But he didn't.
"He turned down jobs on principle," his son said. "He was kind of a martyr in many ways."
It is both unfortunate and inevitable that Herb Brooks will be remembered by many for that one glorious moment in early 1980. But as seminal a moment as that gold-medal victory was, it does not begin to explain the breadth and depth of Brooks' impact on hockey.
His son still has a copy of a letter penned by his father to commissioner Gary Bettman in 1997 outlining in a prescient way what Brooks saw as a series of problems facing the league, including the inevitable dumbing-down of the game because of the size and speed of players and the small ice surfaces in NHL arenas. Brooks predicted there would be a major work stoppage because of the economics of the game and he suggested changes, including removing the red line for two-line passes and moving the net back, changes that took place after the end of the lockout in the summer of 2005.
The foundation that bears Brooks' name remains committed to building the Herb Brooks Hockey Institute in Blaine, Minn., home of the world's largest indoor ice facility. The institute will focus on grassroots hockey development for both players and coaches, or as Brooks was fond of saying, on broadening the base of the hockey pyramid.
"He was always for some cause," Dan Brooks said. "He was a guy that loved to stir the pot."
For years, Brooks warred with USA Hockey over some of its decisions and what he viewed as a bloated bureaucracy. Yet, as time passed, he softened and learned to work with the group.
That evolution led directly to Brooks being named coach of the 2002 Olympic team. Some viewed the decision as a nod to sentimentality, yet, after the disastrous performance in 1998 when American NHL players not only finished out of the medals but embarrassed themselves by trashing dorm rooms in Nagano, Brooks turned out to be the perfect tonic.
The Americans lost only one game in the 2002 tournament, the gold-medal final to Canada. In guiding his team to the silver, Brooks closed the circle on an unparalleled coaching career. Having won a gold with a group of unheralded collegians, he was able 22 years later to win silver with a group of millionaire NHL players, many of whom grew to love the game in part because of the inspiration of that 1980 team.
For Vairo, working alongside Brooks in Salt Lake City was a revelation.
"Well, he was a bit of a p---- in 1980 and when he was younger. But he evolved |
the application. But in a microservice architecture, the monolith has been replaced by a collection of services. Consequently, a key question we need to answer is what do the clients interact with?
An application client, such as a native mobile application, could make RESTful HTTP requests to the individual services as shown in figure 4.
Figure 4 - calling services directly
On the surface this might seem attractive. However, there is likely to be a significant mismatch in granularity between the APIs of the individual services and data required by the clients. For example, displaying one web page could potentially require calls to large numbers of services. Amazon.com, for example, describes how some pages require calls to 100+ services. Making that many requests, even over a high-speed internet connection, let alone a lower-bandwidth, higher-latency mobile network, would be very inefficient and result in a poor user experience.
A much better approach is for clients to make a small number of requests per-page, perhaps as few as one, over the Internet to a front-end server known as an API gateway, which is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5 - API gateway
The API gateway sits between the application’s clients and the microservices. It provides APIs that are tailored to the client. The API gateway provides a coarse-grained API to mobile clients and a finer-grained API to desktop clients that use a high-performance network. In this example, the desktop clients makes multiple requests to retrieve information about a product, where as a mobile client makes a single request.
The API gateway handles incoming requests by making requests to some number of microservices over the high-performance LAN. Netflix, for example, describes how each request fans out to on average six backend services. In this example, fine-grained requests from a desktop client are simply proxied to the corresponding service, whereas each coarse-grained request from a mobile client is handled by aggregating the results of calling multiple services.
Not only does the API gateway optimize communication between clients and the application, but it also encapsulates the details of the microservices. This enables the microservices to evolve without impacting the clients. For examples, two microservices might be merged. Another microservice might be partitioned into two or more services. Only the API gateway needs to be updated to reflect these changes. The clients are unaffected.
Now that we have looked at how the API gateway mediates between the application and its clients, let’s now look at how to implement communication between microservices.
Inter-service communication mechanisms
Another major difference with the microservice architecture is how the different components of the application interact. In a monolithic application, components call one another via regular method calls. But in a microservice architecture, different services run in different processes. Consequently, services must use an inter-process communication (IPC) to communicate.
Synchronous HTTP
There are two main approaches to inter-process communication in a microservice architecture. One option is to a synchronous HTTP-based mechanism such as REST or SOAP. This is a simple and familiar IPC mechanism. It’s firewall friendly so it works across the Internet and implementing the request/reply style of communication is easy. The downside of HTTP is that it doesn’t support other patterns of communication such as publish-subscribe.
Another limitation is that both the client and the server must be simultaneously available, which is not always the case since distributed systems are prone to partial failures. Also, an HTTP client needs to know the host and the port of the server. While this sounds simple, it’s not entirely straightforward, especially in a cloud deployment that uses auto-scaling where service instances are ephemeral. Applications need to use a service discovery mechanism. Some applications use a service registry such as Apache ZooKeeper or Netflix Eureka. In other applications, services must register with a load balancer, such as an internal ELB in an Amazon VPC.
Asynchronous messaging
An alternative to synchronous HTTP is an asynchronous message-based mechanism such as an AMQP-based message broker. This approach has a number of benefits. It decouples message producers from message consumers. The message broker will buffer messages until the consumer is able to process them. Producers are completely unaware of the consumers. The producer simply talks to the message broker and does not need to use a service discovery mechanism. Message-based communication also supports a variety of communication patterns including one-way requests and publish-subscribe. One downside of using messaging is needing a message broker, which is yet another moving part that adds to the complexity of the system. Another downside is that request/reply-style communication is not a natural fit.
There are pros and cons of both approaches. Applications are likely to use a mixture of the two. For example, in the next section, which discusses how to solve data management problems that arise in a partitioned architecture, you will see how both HTTP and messaging are used.
Decentralized data management
A consequence of decomposing the application into services is that the database is also partitioned. To ensure loose coupling, each service has its own database (schema). Moreover, different services might use different types of database – a so-called polyglot persistence architecture. For example, a service that needs ACID transactions might use a relational database, whereas a service that is manipulating a social network might use a graph database. Partitioning the database is essential, but we now have a new problem to solve: how to handle those requests that access data owned by multiple services. Let’s first look at how to handle read requests and then look at update requests.
Handling reads
For example, consider an online store where each customer has a credit limit. When a customer attempts to place an order the system must verify that the sum of all open orders would not exceed their credit limit. It would be trivial to implement this business rule in a monolithic application. But it’s much more difficult to implement this check in a system where customers are managed by the CustomerService and orders are managed by the OrderService. Somehow the OrderService must access the credit limit maintained by the CustomerService.
One solution is for the OrderService to retrieve the credit limit by making an RPC call to the CustomerService. This approach is simple to implement and ensures that the OrderService always has the most current credit limit. The downside is that it reduces availability because the CustomerService must be running in order to place an order. It also increases response time because of the extra RPC call.
Another approach is for the OrderService to store a copy of the credit limit. This eliminates the need to make a request to the CustomerService and so improves availability and reduces response time. It does mean, however, that we must implement a mechanism to update the OrderService’s copy of the credit limit whenever it changes in the CustomerService.
Handling update requests
The problem of keeping the credit limit up to date in OrderService is an example of the more general problem of handling requests that update data owned by multiple services.
Distributed transactions
One solution, of course, is to use distributed transactions. For example, when updating a customer’s credit limit, the CustomerService could use a distributed transaction to update both its credit limit and the corresponding credit limit maintained by the OrderService. Using distributed transactions would ensure that the data is always consistent. The downside of using them is that it reduces system availability since all participants must be available in order for the transaction to commit. Moreover, distributed transactions really have fallen out of favor and are generally not supported by modern software stacks, e.g. REST, NoSQL databases, etc.
Event-driven asynchronous updates
The other approach is to use event-driven asynchronous replication. Services publish events announcing that some data has changed. Other services subscribe to those events and update their data. For example, when the CustomerService updates a customer’s credit limit it publishes a CustomerCreditLimitUpdatedEvent, which contains the customer id and the new credit limit. The OrderService subscribes to these events and updates its copy of the credit limit. The flow of events is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6 - replicating the credit limit using events
A major benefit of this approach is that producers and consumers of the events are decoupled. Not only does this simplify development but compared to distributed transactions it improves availability. If a consumer isn’t available to process an event then the message broker will queue the event until it can. A major drawback of this approach is that it trades consistency for availability. The application has to be written in a way that can tolerate eventually consistent data. Developers might also need to implement compensating transactions to perform logical rollbacks. Despite these drawbacks, however, this is the preferred approach for many applications.
Refactoring a monolith
Unfortunately, we don’t always have the luxury of working on a brand new, greenfield project. There is a pretty good chance that you are on the team that’s responsible for a huge, scary monolithic application. And, every day you are dealing with the problems described at the start of this article. The good news is that there are techniques that you can use to decompose your monolithic application into a set of services.
First, stop making the problem worse. Don’t continue to implement significant new functionality by adding code to the monolith. Instead, you should find a way to implement new functionality as a standalone service as shown in Figure 7. This probably won’t be easy. You will have to write messy, complex glue code to integrate the service with the monolith. But it’s a good first step in breaking apart the monolith.
Figure 7 - extracting a service
Second, identify a component of the monolith to turn into a cohesive, standalone service. Good candidates for extraction include components that are constantly changing, or components that have conflicting resource requirements, such as large in-memory caches or CPU intensive operations. The presentation tier is also another good candidate. You then turn the component into a service and write glue code to integrate with the rest of the application. Once again, this will probably be painful but it enables you to incrementally migrate to a microservice architecture.
Summary
The monolithic architecture pattern is a commonly used pattern for building enterprise applications. It works reasonable well for small applications: developing, testing and deploying small monolithic applications is relatively simple. However, for large, complex applications, the monolithic architecture becomes an obstacle to development and deployment. Continuous delivery is difficult to do and you are often permanently locked into your initial technology choices. For large applications, it makes more sense to use a microservice architecture that decomposes the application into a set of services.
The microservice architecture has a number of advantages. For example, individual services are easier to understand and can be developed and deployed independently of other services. It is also a lot easier to use new languages and frameworks because you can try out new technologies one service at a time. A microservice architecture also has some significant drawbacks. In particular, applications are much more complex and have many more moving parts. You need a high-level of automation, such as a PaaS, to use microservices effectively. You also need to deal with some complex distributed data management issues when developing microservices. Despite the drawbacks, a microservice architecture makes sense for large, complex applications that are evolving rapidly, especially for SaaS-style applications.
There are various strategies for incrementally evolving an existing monolithic application to a microservice architecture. Developers should implement new functionality as a standalone service and write glue code to integrate the service with the monolith. It also makes sense to iteratively identify components to extract from the monolith and turn into services. While the evolution is not easy, it’s better than trying to develop and maintain an unwieldy monolithic application.
About the Author
Chris Richardson is a developer and architect. He is a Java Champion, a JavaOne rock star and the author of POJOs in Action, which describes how to build enterprise Java applications with POJOs and frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Chris is also the founder of the original Cloud Foundry, an early Java PaaS for Amazon EC2. He consults with organizations to improve how they develop and deploy applications using technologies such as cloud computing, microservices, and NoSQL. Twitter @crichardson.In what is the highest-reaching revelation from Wikileaks, President Barack Obama lied to the American people when detailing his knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and further, evidence indicates he bribed the FBI investigation.
In an email entitled Fwd: POTUS on HRC emails, Clinton’s spokesman, in reference to questions from Katherine Miller (a reporter with Buzzfeed) Josh Schwerin (Clinton’s spokesman) wrote:
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Trending: Federal Prosecutor Admits – Russia Collusion Story was ‘Made Up’!
““Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.”
The email is then forwarded to John Podesta from Hillary’s Chief of Staff who wrote:
“We need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov
The emails can be seen in their original form here: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31077#efmAABABT
The most disturbing thing about this email chain is the indication that Obama knew about Clinton’s private email accounts, corresponded with her on it often, and lied about it when asked. When interviewed about it by CBS News, Obama claimed he didn’t know anything about a private email address of Hillary’s and that he had learned about her private server “like everyone else”. Sure Mr. President, if everyone else had been emailing her on that address.
When coupled with the fact that on the same exact day that Cheryl Mills told John Podesta they needed to “clean up” the email scandal, Virginia Governor and Hillary surrogate Terry McCauliffe met with the FBI agent who oversaw the Clinton email case and his wife and promised financial support (500k) if she ran for office and there is a clear path of Obama lying and then doing exactly what the email indicated – they “cleaned” it up with a 500k bribe.
These revelations are the most damning yet and indicate the corruption that has permeated Hillary Clinton’s campaign has deep roots at the highest levels of the liberal, Marxist White House led by Barack Obama.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author and are not not necessarily either shared or endorsed by iPatriot.com.Annie Mac delves into the history of Ed Banger Records and meets the characters making up the influential French house label's family, including Busy P, Justice and Cassius.
Join Annie Mac on a journey through the story of Ed Banger Records to meet the characters that make up the family led by Daft Punk's former manager, the charismatic Busy P.
Through the eyes of early signings Cassius and Krazy Baldhead, through to the most famous leather jacketed geeks in electronic music, Justice, everyone has their story to tell about the most epic boat party, the stupidest fashion trend, or how they got signed. Including anecdotes from friends of the label Erol Alkan, A-Trak and Sebastien Tellier.
House legend Todd Terry and a host of artists and radio DJs from both sides of the channel remember the unrivaled success of Justice's remix of Simian's 'We Are Your Friends'. While Uffie spits beats over radio favourite 'Pop the Glock', former boyfriend and label mate the hip hop influenced Feadz has other ideas about her fashion sense.
A year after the passing of Ed Banger's much-missed DJ Mehdi, his Carte Blanche DJ partner Riton remembers Mehdi's legendary dancing and everyone has a fond memory of the universally-loved DJ.
Busy P reveals how the label's villain SebastiAn nearly didn't get signed and how the aloof Mr Oizo, of 'Flat Beat' fame, is a huge asset to the label, yet both can be difficult so-and-sos to work with.
We hear from the man behind the image of the whole label, the artist whose work forced the great Kanye West to apologise, Ed Banger's own Art Director, the quietly spoken So-Me.
Annie also hears from Mickey Moonlight, Boys Noize, promoters and clubbers about how the label not only puts on the best parties, but also came to change the face of electronic music.
This is part of Radio 1's Behind the Label series and, together with the other episodes in the series, will be available to listen to until 9.00pm on Monday 8 October.Image copyright AP Image caption At least three people were injured in Thursday's attack
The so-called Islamic State group has said it carried out an attack on a Shia mosque in Bangladesh on Thursday, according to reports.
At least one person was killed and three were injured after gunmen opened fire during evening prayers at a mosque in Bogra in the north-west.
Bangladesh's government says IS is not active in the country and blamed local militant groups.
Two suspects are being held for questioning, police say.
Who is behind the Bangladesh killings?
Behind the Bangladesh blogger murders
A statement on an IS-affiliated Twitter account claimed the group was behind the attack, saying that "soldiers of the caliphate targeted a place of worship for the apostates", according to SITE monitoring service.
The incident comes a month after a grenade attack on a Shia shrine in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka, which killed one and injured 80.
IS claimed it was behind the attack but the government blamed local militant groups including Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB).
On Wednesday, police said they had killed Al Bani, who headed the military wing of JMB, and that he died in an exchange of fire as they tried to arrest him.
Image copyright AP Image caption Last week, an Italian priest was attacked and injured by gunmen
Bangladesh is a predominantly Sunni Muslim nation, but attacks on Shia Muslims are extremely rare.
However, there has been a rise in attacks on foreigners and secular bloggers in recent months.
An Italian aid worker was killed in September and a Japanese citizen in October.
Both attacks were claimed by IS but the government blamed the killings on local militants.
Last week, gunmen wounded an Italian priest in north-west Dinajpur district. No group said it carried out the attack.
Extremists have carried out a series of high-profile attacks on secular writers, hacking to death four bloggers - one a US citizen - so far this year.Tracey Emin is planning to leave east London, where she has lived and worked for decades, after a losing a protracted battle with Tower Hamlets council to expand her art studio, she has told the Guardian.
The Turner prize-nominated artist was refused planning permission to build a studio and living space adjoining her Spitalfields studio space after the project faced vocal opposition from local conservation groups.
Now she says she plans to search for a new space on the Kent coast, where she grew up, after withdrawing her appeal against the refusal last week.
“Why would you want to be somewhere you’re not wanted?” she said, discussing the project in public for the first time. “What I’m going to do now is move out of London. I don’t have any choice on that … There’s places now in Britain that are desperate for artists – Margate’s thriving, Folkestone, Hastings. All that Kent coast. And I could have a giant studio and be really relaxed.”
Emin says she is joining a wave of artists leaving London, although she faces fewer financial constraints than most. “A lot of the creative people are having to move out of London because it’s not conducive,” she said. “Berlin, for example, helps artists build studios, helps them find land. Berlin understands that having artists inside the inner city is good karma, interesting.”
Her decision to withdraw from the fight to extend her base in Spitalfields was due in large part to the death of her mother, Pam, two months ago. “I was going to have my mum live there. That was part of my big plan … And that’s not going to happen now,” she said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tracey Emin at her studio in east London in 2009. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
Bereavement also made Emin reassess whether she wanted to fight on. “I’m in a vulnerable place right now,” she said, describing the prospect of appearing at formal appeal hearings as daunting. “I was scared about having to take all these people on my own – it’s a big thing.”
Emin had planned to demolish a listed 1920s property to build a studio, showroom and living space designed by the Stirling prize-winning studio David Chipperfield Architects. It would have been connected to the existing studio and offices she converted in 2008, which she says are too small for her needs.
“I’m an international artist who hasn’t got enough room to swing a cat at the moment,” she said, sitting on a couch in her studio, a high-ceilinged room lined with paintings in progress and dominated by a giant plaster maquette of a woman’s torso. The basement houses a softly lit swimming pool, and upstairs are two floors of offices, one of which is currently being renovated, where eight staff work.
“It does feel like a huge amount of space but I can assure you it’s not, especially compared to some of my male counterparts,” she said.
Chipperfield’s design would have been “a dream come true for Tower Hamlets”, Emin said, particularly as he rarely does private buildings: his current projects include remodelling the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Mughal Museum in Agra, India.
The plans would have allowed her to live and work on the same site – something she said was increasingly important with age. “As an artist you work till five in the morning … You don’t have 9-5, you work when it takes you,” she said. “I’m a single woman and I walk home.”
She bought the site on Bell Lane for £3.5m in 2013, when it had planning approval for a scheme that involved demolishing most of the building but keeping two facades, and building a five-storey apartment block.
But her new proposal to demolish the existing building at 66-68 Bell Lane drew stiff local resistance, with nearly 60 objections lodged with the council. One described the design as “ugly, an eyesore and a triumph for money over the preservation of local history, style and local aesthetics”. Emin said conservation officers were supportive of the plans when they were consulted during the design stage, but the planning committee ruled against it in February.
Emin says she has been wounded by the opposition she faced from a community where she has worked since 1993, and where she lives in a listed Georgian house. “It’s not like I’ve just come in and saw it as a financial opportunity … If I knocked it down and built a hotel or flats I could greatly benefit. I could build eight, nine, 10 flats in here. But instead I employ people.”
She has found the tone of the debate hurtful. “I just feel I’ve been pretty bullied by the whole thing and I don’t want to be bullied any more … I don’t get the reaction I get from people,” she said.
Emin, who is currently on a year’s sabbatical, intends to keep her existing studio and offices, and her house, but to move her main base out of the area. “Tower Hamlets says we don’t want you … well, there’s plenty of other places that do. It’s that simple,” she said.
“My mum’s death brought home to me what it is I really need, what it is I want at the moment. I want my mum, and that’s never going to happen again, and I’ve got to find a way of going forward and being able to do my work.”INDIAN WELLS, Calif. – The Koch brothers’ donor network spent close to $400 million last year, and is on its way to spending an unprecedented $889 million supporting right-wing politics and causes during the 2016 cycle.
On Saturday afternoon, the Koch network assembled 500 wealthy conservatives — its largest gathering ever — at a luxury resort near the foothills of Palm Springs’ Coachella Valley.
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About 150 of the donors are first-time attendees, and the rest are paid-up members of the conservative donor network, which requires a minimum annual membership fee of $100,000.
“Everybody, come out and identify yourself because this isn’t some secret cabal,” Charles Koch said in his opening address to the donors on the lawns of the luxury Renaissance Resort and Spa.
“I’ve been identified lately,” Koch said, referring to his recent media appearances to improve the Kochs' public image, “and it’s not so bad, I’m still here. … I’m going stronger than ever.”
While billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have historically kept their political and ideological activities secret, they made a strategic decision last year to “open up” the donor network, which had been portrayed by Democrats including President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, as a sinister force in American politics.
The strategy involved Charles doing a series of media interviews to promote his new book, "Good Profit," and also allowing a small number of journalists into their exclusive retreats.
This Palm Springs retreat is the second time journalists have been allowed to attend. They had to agree not to name any donors in attendance who do not consent to being interviewed.
The Koch network hired out the entire Renaissance Resort and Spa. Koch staff and security guards are stationed throughout the resort and screened cars at the front gate to prevent infiltration. The hotel has a championship golf course, a sand-beach pool, and 100,000 square feet of meeting space. Hung in the hotel lobby is a giant banner announcing the theme of the event, “A Vision to Unleash America’s Potential.”
The donors gather over three days in breakout sessions and larger group settings to discuss their various policy initiatives, which include slashing taxes, government spending and regulations, and other less expected initiatives such as criminal justice reform. They also discuss politics; the rise of billionaire Donald Trump in the 2016 cycle has many Koch donors concerned, given his unreliability on conservative issues.
The network is now the most powerful force in right-wing politics, with a budget and technological infrastructure that rivals that of the Republican Party.
Many of the Koch network members – which include some of the biggest-spending conservative families in America, such as Michigan’s DeVoses and the Adelsons from Las Vegas – spend tens of millions each year advancing their favored politicians and causes.
In his introductory speech, Charles Koch told the donors he had four goals to change the trajectory of American government and society.
The first is to “reverse the policies that are moving us toward a two-tiered society," which include corporate welfare.
The second is to end “irresponsible government spending."
The third is to get governments at all levels to focus on what he sees as government’s “primary responsibility to people,” which is to “keep Americans safe.”
And fourth, protecting free speech, which is “under attack everywhere.”
“Now the tragedy is,” Koch said, “in my view, America is moving further and further away from this type of society. And we’re moving more toward of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty.”It will be illegal to hold an airgun without a licence from 31 December, but BASC says that the “lead in” period is shorter than anticipated and could place an extra burden on the police.
Apply for a certificate from 1 July
The Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Michael Matheson, last month set out new dates for airgun licensing in the Scottish Parliament. Owners will be able to apply for a certificate from 1 July, giving them just six months to comply with the new legislation. The licences were originally expected to be introduced in April and are intended to combat airgun crime.
BASC says that it will help with the transition, but believes that six months may not be long enough. The organisation’s director for Scotland, Colin Shedden, said: “BASC opposed the introduction of airgun licensing in Scotland. Offences involving airguns had been declining significantly over the past seven or eight years and licensing was seen by many as disproportionate.
“But with the legislation now in place, and licences to be made available from July, we will do all that we can to help the many legitimate airgun users in Scotland adapt to the new licensing regime.”
Scottish airgun licences a challenge to Police Scotland staff
He continued: “The six months ‘lead in’ period (before a certificate becomes a legal requirement) is shorter than we had anticipated and may present a challenge to Police Scotland staff, who will administer the new regime.”Busy E. Sixth Street intersection has seen nearly 2 dozen crashes Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved 6th and Waller stop signs [ + - ] Video
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- On weekends and evenings, the area around East Sixth Street and Waller Street is buzzing with people. It's an area known for its nightlife and vibrant walkable community, except some people say it isn't that pedestrian friendly.
Matt Barry works at Via 313, a pizza trailer parked right at the southwest corner of East Sixth Street and Waller Street. He says he's seen a lot of close calls.
"Since there's no pathway, people just cross whenever they want really," he says.
The intersection currently only has two stop signs.
"It seems like for as much foot traffic and car traffic as there is, there should be some sort of regulation over here to help control the flow and movement of everyone."
And it's not just additional stop signs people want. People who live and work in the area are also requesting a crosswalk since right now there is only a crosswalk that crosses Waller Street but not the busy Sixth Street.
In the past year there have been nearly 20 crashes at the intersection alone. Austin 3-1-1 tells us they've received requests to make it safer and a vehicle and pedestrian study is set for this fall to take a closer look at the location.
"There's so much pedestrian traffic over here, it'd be nice to have something where people are forced to stop," says Kristi Lewis who works at nearby Bird's Barbershop.
Carlie Campos also works at Via 313 and she says, "I think that's necessary over here. It needs to happen. It's not an option anymore, it's ridiculous."
City officials say if the intersection meets the criteria for a 4-way stop, funding will need to be identified and a signal will then be installed.
In the past year, the city says there have been more than 160 requests for new stop signs at intersections. If you see an intersection you think needs a stop sign you can file a request by calling 3-1-1.by Martin and Marcia
This post requires some background information to appreciate. We hope you’ll bear with us, because we think it’s some interesting history that you’ll find nowhere else.
We ask that you travel with us back to the time when steam eclipsed sail as the means for moving passengers and cargo over the world’s oceans. It was a great improvement over dependence upon wind and tides, but not, as you will read, without its own set of hazards. And yes, there is a tie in to our theme, even if it is a bit of a stretch!
Our excuse is that this blog is about history and the real people who made it, and it doesn’t get more real than this small slice of the past.
When the steamships City of New York and City of Paris were built, they were the largest vessels ever constructed, except for the Great Eastern. The City of Paris was the first vessel (1889) to cross the Atlantic in less than six days. It is her 1890 voyage that is the topic of this post.
Wikipedia tells us:
City of Paris was launched seven months after City of New York and began her maiden voyage on 3 April 1889. A month later, she won the Blue Riband with an average speed of 19.95 knots on the first westbound voyage under 6 days. However, on March 25, 1890 City of Paris was steaming towards Liverpool when her starboard propeller shaft broke, causing the starboard engine to race and then disintegrate. Fragments pierced the hull and the bulkhead causing both engine rooms to flood. Fortunately, the ship’s extensive subdivision proved successful and she was not in danger of sinking. However, City of Paris was dead in the water and was towed to Queentown by the tramp steamer Aldersgate. It was ultimately determined that the accident was caused by failure to synchronize the engines, a common problem with early twin screw express liners. The City of Paris was out of service for a year undergoing repairs.
A Letter from S.S. City of Paris
Below is a letter from Walter Summers to his mother, Mrs. C. A. Summers of Burlington, Vermont. What makes this letter special is that it was written on board the ship during the events described above. It provides a unique insight into the time and what the passengers experienced.
The envelope in which the letter was sent is very fragile but still shows the embossed print:
INMAN R.M.S.S
“CITY OF PARIS”
It has a $.02 George Washington* stamp postmarked April 8 6am 1890.
The stationery on the inside of the envelope is also embossed, but it is done in a circular pattern which reads:
INMAN AND INTERNATIONAL STEAMSHIP Co. LTD. around the edges of the circle and INMAN LINE in the center of the circle.
S. S. City of Paris
March 22, 1890 My Dear Mother, I wish there was some way by which I could let you know what splendid weather we are having. For then, you wouldn’t worry about me. Thursday there was not much wind, but there was considerable (????) swell as a result of the storm which was a heavy snowstorm in New York City and about 3/4 of the people on board were sick. I was one of them. Although I sat on a deck or in the library where I now am all day. But, I couldn’t eat anything and didn’t try to do so until yesterday (Friday) noon. Since that time I have been gaining very fast and unless we strike a big storm I intend to make up for lost time and get even with the company before we get to Liverpool. Yesterday and especially today have been delightful days with very little wind and what there is is directly behind us and everybody is sitting out on deck with no wraps on and it is as warm as July day at Cedar Branch. This morning we met the first steamer of the voyage and we were so near that we could see the people. Captain Watkins said she was from Antwerp to Philadelphia. Seasick passengers are fed a bark tea. It was the first thing I had yesterday morning and it tasted good. The table is good, though I hear considerable complaints that the variety of things is not so good as on the German steamers. My first breakfast this morning included oatmeal, boiled eggs, very tender steak, fried potatoes, buckwheat cakes and oranges and it was but a small fraction of what was on the bill of fare. I ordered these things because they were about what I get at home. For lunch we have at 1230 o’clock: soups warm and cold, meats, fish, and pastry. At dinner (6:00) there are two kinds of soup, several kinds of roast meat, three or four kinds of game, puddings, pies, ice-cream, fruit etc, etc. The bills of fare are printed on board and I had one of the stewards take me down to the printing office last evening. It is down in the steerage. He prints a small paper and I furnished something for it. I have been down there again this afternoon and shall visit him again Monday when he prints the “City of Paris” gazette. This is a veritable floating palace with library and every convenience imaginable. My stateroom is well ventilated and I have it above two bunks and a sofa, plenty of water, etc. etc. You want to travel by the Inman Line when you come over. You see I am beginning to work out that 25% reduction in my fare already. We have just seen another steamer at a distance but I don’t know what it was. We have taken a very southerly course so as to avoid icebergs. If you will look up on the map on the 40th parallel, you will see where we ran until 7 o’clock this morning. It was a straight line for Madrid Spain. When we reached 50 degrees longitude we turned and are now headed direct for Liverpool. We left Sandy Hook lightship at 6:36 pm Wednesday, and tomorrow, Thursday make 307 miles. Then to noon Friday, 440 miles, and to noon today 448 miles. This is not the 510 that this steamer can do, but it will bring us into Liverpool at Wednesday. Will write you again tomorrow. Tuesday PM The steamer will (??????) that it was almost impossible to write so I didn’t try. Everybody seems to be writing for we are due at Queenstown tomorrow about 8am and Liverpool in the evening. Even now I am writing under difficulties for the tables are all occupied and I am writing on a newspaper in my lap. We have had no storm only a steady roll of the steamer. I can stand that first rate, but I don’t like the pitching of the ship which bothers me. Thursday I am half inclined to think that I shall stop at Queenstown and go through Ireland to Glasgow and Edinborough, Scottland and then down to London without going to Liverpool. A fellow on board who rooms with Walter Catlin a year in Chicago thinks of doing it with me. If so we won’t get to London until the first of next week. Last evening some of us attended a concert given by the second cabin people in their dinning room. Every day has been pleasant and I have been awakened every morning by the sun shining though the porthole in the room which I have alone, being on the south side of a steamer going this way. I have met several very pleasant people on the trip, but I am not fond enough of the sea to wish the journey to continue much longer. In fact I am quite ready to land. I hope you are improving, but I suppose I won’t hear until I get to Paris. I wish now that I had told you to send the first letter to London, but you see I didn’t expect to go through Ireland. One of the weeks I am to be away is gone. I would like to look in on upon you and take you out to ride with Bess. You must go out |
aded and replayed for all the world to see.
Watson, by comparison to refs, rushes in and out of the ring and cage in relative anonymity. He’s someone whose face you might recognize, but aren’t exactly sure why you know it. Within a cage or ring, he’s seen it all – or most of it: a fighter whose big toe is dangling because it got stuck in the canvas; fighters who get knocked unconscious before they even hit the ground and then spontaneously urinate or defecate on themselves; fighters knocked unconscious, and who stay unconscious for two or three minutes.
“Sometimes you will see a (knocked out) fighter twitch a little bit – it’s not actually a seizure; it looks like a seizure but technically it’s not. It’s called post-concusssive myoclonus,” Watson explained.
There has never, in the UFC’s 24-year history, been a fighter death following or linked to an event. The mere mention of this causes the interviewer, and then Watson himself, to repeatedly knock knuckles on a wooden table – part in jest, part hoping for continued good fortune.
“We’ve had three (boxing) deaths in Nevada in the last 15 years or so; one of them died shortly after being in the ring,” said Watson, noting that pro fighters in Nevada must undergo brain and physical exams and testing for diseases such as HIV/Hepatitis B before being approved by the NSAC. “Throughout the world, there are nine to 11 deaths per year for all fights (mostly boxing), so it’s a real enemy and it does happen. And it’s, ironically, not always from trauma suffered inside the ring. You wonder was that trauma suffered before going into the ring? Was there something there first that a brain image didn’t pick up?
Cage crashers
When he darts into the cage following a knockout, TKO or submission, Watson operates on the assumption that every second is vital. One of the first things Watson studies – even if the fighter is still out cold – are the all-important pupils of the eyes. Is one pupil dilated and much bigger than the other? Both pupils being dilated is not necessarily cause for alarm, but assymtrical pupils would be a huge warning sign indicating a possible brain herniation or a brain bleed, meaning the brain might be flowing out of the foramen magnum, which is where the brain and spinal cord meet. Fortunately, such a scenario is extremely rare in the fight game and more commonly seen in traumatic car accidents. But it is incumbent upon ringside physicians to consider such worst-case scenarios.
“You don’t have a blown pupil and you’re wide awake. It just doesn’t work that way,” Watson said. “So that’s a critical thing when you respond to an accident scene – a roll-over car accident at 85 miles per hour. You’re looking for pupils that are assymetrical because it indicates a possible brain bleed.
“So someone gets knocked out and we jump in the ring and take a look at them – and their pupils are usually larger than normal, but not assymetrical. As they come to, their pupils will get smaller and go back to baseline.”
Also paramount following a knockout or TKO is immediately gauging the fighter’s short- and long-term memory. A smattering of the standard questions Watson poses to knocked-out fighters includes:
What year is this? What round is this? Who are your two kids? What are their names? What happened to you? Who is the president? Who are you fighting?
Watson agrees with what many fighters and top coaches will tell you: The jaw line is the jackpot for turning out someone’s lights, the most vulnerable location. A hard kick anywhere near the neck or head, if it lands, can produce incredible amounts of force and knock someone out. But generally speaking, a much weaker force striking the jaw, at just the right angle, can create a massive amount of torque and whip on the head that irritates “the verticular activing system of the brain stem, which is your wake-up center,” Watson said. “If there’s enough torque, you’re out cold.”
Pundits have long theorized why some fighters possess granite chins, others glass jaws. Nearly two decades embedded with the world’s toughest athletes causes Watson to pinpoint a mix of physiology and psychology to explain why some fighters refuse to go down.
“It’s the warrior mindset that enables the person to go farther,” he said. “Some fighters have the mindset, ‘I will not go down.’ That warrior spirit matters a lot, as well as neck strength, torque, the power of the blow and your physiology.”
Returning once more to the wonderous sight of bloody fighters, Watson said the growing popularity of the UFC creates an ever-growing number of educated fans who won’t freak out when the red stuff flows.
“Now again, granted, you could lose enough blood that we would stop the fight,” he said. “But people used to see a few drops of blood and think, ‘Oh my God, stop the fight!’ We are more concerned with the well-being of the fighter. We don’t want someone to have brain trauma. We don’t want a severe concussion or any concussion. We don’t want any long-term injury to the fighter. But a little tiny cut with a lot of blood, in and of itself, is not a risk.”
Like the once-beleaguered sport he has grown with, Watson has survived and defied daunting odds to take the long, grueling road from homeless kid to distinguished doctor. Years ago very few people aspired to be a ringside physician at a UFC event. In the early 2000s, working a UFC event was far from a glorious gig. But now the same colleagues who once turned their noses up at the UFC think Watson’s got a really cool gig and hit him up for tickets.
“I was one of the few doctors on the commission in the early days who were absolutely excited to work the UFC and cagefighting events,” Watson said. “It’s absolutely fascinating. I love the sport. I’ve always loved it.”
Frank Curreri is a Las Vegas-based writer, Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and TEDx speaker who specializes in mindset training. He can be reached at frank@frankcurreri.com.Sep 26, 2015; Tempe, AZ, USA; Southern California Trojans defensive end Greg Townsend Jr. (93) against the Arizona State Sun Devils at Sun Devil Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
USC NFL Draft Recap 2016: Who Got Drafted, Who Went Undrafted
USC NFL Draft Recap 2016: Who Got Drafted, Who Went Undrafted by Michael Castillo
When USC Players Return to Coliseum vs. LA Rams in 2016
When USC Players Return to Coliseum vs. LA Rams in 2016 by Alicia de Artola
USC defensive lineman Greg Townsend Jr. signed with the Oakland Raiders after he went unpicked in the 2016 NFL Draft.
UPDATE 5/11: The Raiders officially announced the signing of Greg Townsend Jr. on Wednesday afternoon, a day after the initial class of signees was revealed.
UPDATE 5/10 : The Raiders announced their 2016 undrafted free agent signings Tuesday, but Greg Townsend Jr. was not among their signees.
Greg Townsend Jr. is a Raider.
The Oakland Raiders signed Townsend as an undrafted free agent following the conclusion of the 2016 NFL Draft, according to Mike Loyko of NEPatriotsDraft.com.
Greg Townsend Jr. DE USC to #Oakland #Raiders former big time recruit. — Mike Loyko (@NEPD_Loyko) May 1, 2016
Townsend’s father, Greg Townsend Sr. was a four-time All-Pro with the Raiders from 1983 through 1993.
He now joins former Trojan linebacker Malcolm Smith as well as USC great Jack Del Rio, who is the Raider head coach, in Oakland.
Townsend came to USC in 2011 as a four-star recruit and redshirted his first year.
As a redshirt freshman Townsend served as a back up while developing as a defensive end but then missed the entirety of the 2013 season due to injury.
In 2014 Townsend returned as a back up defensive end but once again missed time with an ankle injury and illness. When he did see the field, his impact was underwhelming, logging just nine tackles with two sacks.
Finally as a redshirt senior Townsend secured a starting job up front. In 14 games, including 13 as a starter, he had 44 tackles with 6.5 tackles for loss including 3 sacks.
Kevon Seymour became USC’s first and only pick of Day 3 on Saturday when the Buffalo Bills picked him in the sixth round.
On Friday, Su’a Cravens was picked by the Washington Redskins in the second round while Max Tuerk went to the San Diego Chargers and Cody Kessler was unexpectedly selected by the Cleveland Browns in the third round.
All told, the Trojans had four draft picks in 2016, bringing USC’s total to 496 all-time.THIRUVANANTHPURAM: Cracking down on tight jeans, short tops and leggings, a north Kerala women's college has decided to introduce uniforms for its students from this academic year which also gives the go-by to the 'naqab' for Muslim students.The dress code will be implemented from July 8 when the academic session begins for the first-year students at the women's college run by the Muslim Educational Society (MES) at Nadakkavu in Kozhikode.According to the new scheme, students will have to wear salwar, churidar bottom, and an overcoat. Muslim students have been permitted to wear a dark grey'mafta' or head scarf.College Principal Prof B Seethalakshmi said that the decision to have a dress code came after some students were seen coming to college wearing tight jeans, short tops and leggings."We cannot allow this," she told PTI. However, for the senior students, the uniform will not be insisted upon, although they would have to wear the same items of clothing as included in the dress code, she said.Instead of a shawl, the students will have to wear an overcoat, she said, adding that 50 per cent of the students do favour uniforms.The parents of the students, nearly 40 per cent of whom come from very poor families, have lauded the college's decision to introduce the uniform.Meanwhile, MES state President Fasal Gaffoor said that once the uniform is introduced, it is applicable to all.Gaffoor had last year courted a controversy when he said that the 'Naqab', or veil, used by Muslim women to cover their faces, is "un-Islamic".The 'Naqab', part of the 'purdah', was a western import and its prolonged use blocks sunlight, resulting in Vitamin D deficiency in many Muslim women, he had said.Photograph by Thomas Hannich A delicious blend of sugar, wax, and condom lube.
Water
It's the main ingredient. But like any whipped product, Cool Whip contains a high percentage of air. At 41 cents per ounce, you're buying mostly water and air for just over twice what it would cost to whip real cream yourself.
Natural and Artificial Flavorings
Cool Whip doesn't really taste like much, but Kraft's recipe for blandness is a trade secret. That means the company doesn't have to disclose the specific flavorings.
Corn Syrup and High-Fructose Corn Syrup
Sugar by other names. Corn syrup is mostly glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is corn syrup treated with amylase and other enzymes, which together help convert glucose into fructose. A diet high in fructose is known to make lab mice fatter than other diets, so keep your research animals away from Cool Whip.
Hydrogenated Coconut and Palm Kernel Oil
Cool Whip needs to feel like whipped cream in the mouth without actually being, you know, made with cream. One cheap, reliable way to replicate the texture is by using semi- solidified plant oils. The best method of solidifying plant oils: Bubble high- pressure hydrogen through them. Of course, if not done completely, the result is trans fat. These days, Kraft avoids that.
Polysorbate 60
Polysorbates are made by polymerizing ethylene oxide (a precursor to antifreeze) with a sugar alcohol derivative. The result can be a detergent, an emulsifier, or, in the case of polysorbate 60, a major ingredient in some sexual lubricants.
Sodium Caseinate
Also common in powdered non-dairy creamer, this protein derived from cow milk helps oil and water mix.
Sorbitan Monostearate
Chemists call this stuff synthetic wax, and it's sometimes used as a hemorrhoid cream. It's one of the magical substances that keep Cool Whip from turning to liquid over time in the fridge.
Xanthan and Guar Gums
These are natural thickeners, and together they provide more viscosity than either does alone. Guar also helps retard the formation of ice crystals, another key to preserving fluffiness.
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Best Asheville Breweries: A Journey on the Ale Trail
“In a study, scientists report that drinking beer can be good for the liver. I’m sorry, did I say ‘scientists’? I meant Irish people.” -Tina Fey
What Portland is for beer on the West coast- Asheville is IT for the East Coast. Within the Asheville and surrounding areas there is magic called the ALE TRAIL! The ale trail boasts 20+ breweries on it and 13+ are in Asheville. The other breweries are scattered throughout Waynesville, Hendersonville, Franklin, and Black Mountain.
List of Breweries in Asheville NC
Wicked Weed -They specialize in Sour and bitter beers which are really picking up in NC. (91 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
-They specialize in Sour and bitter beers which are really picking up in NC. (91 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Asheville Brewery -great porters and an outdoor-covered area for watching sports (77 Coxe Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
-great porters and an outdoor-covered area for watching sports (77 Coxe Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Highland Brewing Co. -widely recognized as the godfather of craft beer and brewing culture in Western North Carolina. Founded in 1994, it is the first legal brewery in town since Prohibition, and is still family-owned. (12 Old Charlotte Hwy, Asheville, NC 28803)
-widely recognized as the godfather of craft beer and brewing culture in Western North Carolina. Founded in 1994, it is the first legal brewery in town since Prohibition, and is still family-owned. (12 Old Charlotte Hwy, Asheville, NC 28803) Catawba Brewing -Great games + food trucks (63 Brook St, Asheville, NC 28803)
-Great games + food trucks (63 Brook St, Asheville, NC 28803) Hi-Wire brewing -yummy stouts and great atmosphere! (197 Hilliard Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
-yummy stouts and great atmosphere! (197 Hilliard Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Lexington Ave Brewery (LAB) -great food spot in the heart of downtown. (39 N Lexington Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
-great food spot in the heart of downtown. (39 N Lexington Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Lazy hiker brewing -for the name alone of course+ great outdoor deck (188 W Main St, Franklin, NC 28734)
-for the name alone of course+ great outdoor deck (188 W Main St, Franklin, NC 28734) Burial brewing –traditional German lagers & Belgian ales styles (40 Collier Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
–traditional German lagers & Belgian ales styles (40 Collier Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Wedge brewing company -food trucks+ outdoor cinemas (37 Paynes Way, Asheville, NC 28801)
-food trucks+ outdoor cinemas (37 Paynes Way, Asheville, NC 28801) Twin leaf brewery – supporters of hikers and most of their staff are very active outdoors. (144 Coxe Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
– supporters of hikers and most of their staff are very active outdoors. (144 Coxe Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Oyster house brewing – moonstone stout-YUM! (625 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC 28806)
– moonstone stout-YUM! (625 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC 28806) Green man brewery -The legendary Green Man has existed for centuries but it’s no myth that he’s been brewing great beer in Asheville since 1997-one of Asheville’s oldest breweries (27 Buxton Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
-The legendary Green Man has existed for centuries but it’s no myth that he’s been brewing great beer in Asheville since 1997-one of Asheville’s oldest breweries (27 Buxton Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) French Broad Brewing Co -European style ales (101 Fairview Rd # D, Asheville, NC 28803)
-European style ales (101 Fairview Rd # D, Asheville, NC 28803) One world brewing -Our personal favorite for the porters and old world-style games; it also has a cool back alley entrance that makes it feel like a speakeasy (10 Patton Ave #002, Asheville, NC 28801)
-Our personal favorite for the porters and old world-style games; it also has a cool back alley entrance that makes it feel like a speakeasy (10 Patton Ave #002, Asheville, NC 28801) Bhramari Brewing Company -Asheville’s newest “hot spot” for beer. They have a gastro pub complete with beer pairings, games, outdoor seating+dog-friendly patios, and a kombucha-inspired beer. (101 S Lexington Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
-Asheville’s newest “hot spot” for beer. They have a gastro pub complete with beer pairings, games, outdoor seating+dog-friendly patios, and a kombucha-inspired beer. (101 S Lexington Ave, Asheville, NC 28801) Thirsty Monk brewery- was not as impressed with the beer and it was cramped; I would try again though (92 Patton Ave, Asheville, NC 28801)
Breweries Outside of Asheville :
Blue mountain pizza and brew pub -located in Weaverville 15 min from Asheville (55 N Main St, Weaverville, NC 28787)
-located in 15 min from Asheville (55 N Main St, Weaverville, NC 28787) Pisgah brewing– actually located in Black mountain, NC with a great live music scene (150 Eastside Drive, Black Mountain, NC 28711)
Did you know I have a book out?
Other Fun Facts About Beer:
THE HISTORY:
Native Americans made beer from corn WAY before Europeans found their way to America. The “modern era” of American beer began in the 19th century. In 1810, about 132 breweries were in operation. German immigrants brought with them malt lagers and the knowledge to brew them. By 1873 the country had 4,131 breweries.
The 1950-1960s saw a decline in breweries. In 2016, EVERYTHING changed! By the end of the century, more breweries operated in the United States than anywhere in the world, the number climbing past 5,000 in 2016. Americans brew a wider variety of beer than anywhere else and often blend tastes or techniques from other countries. (I am sure Michael and I helped to play a small role in the increased beer consumption.)
THE HEALTH BENEFITS:
1. Beer contains nutrients.
Beer is 90 percent water and consists of soluble fiber and trace amounts of calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, zinc, copper, manganese, selenium, fluoride and silicon. The nutrient composition depends on the ingredients in the beer. Malty beers have more electrolyte compounds.
2. Beer may boost bone health.
Dietary silicon, found in beer, is important for the growth and development of bone and connective tissues. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “moderate drinkers were 38 percent less likely to have osteoporosis than non-drinkers”.
3. Beer may improve cholesterol.
A 2016 study, presented at the American Heart Association’s conference, looked at “80,000 healthy Chinese adults and found that moderate drinking was associated with a slower decrease in good cholesterol over time”.
4. Beer may boost cognitive and psychological health.
Studies have found that beer can “help reduce stress and tension, and increase feelings of well-being”, when consumed in moderation.
COOKING WITH BEER: You don’t have to drink beer to enjoy it; you can cook with it too. We love the sweet and subtle flavors of hops and malt. Also, the alcohol evaporates when cooked so no worries about getting tanked! Here are several ways to use beer in cooking:
Use darker beers like Guinness in stews, chili, and brownies
Add beer to sauteed vegetables, such as green beans or onions, while cooking on the stovetop.
Add beer to marinades for beef, pork and chicken
and our favorite…BEER CAN CHICKEN (buy a pale ale or light wheat beer, place a whole chicken on top of the can, rub said chicken with spices, and bake/roast it in the oven! Holy Yum Yum! *mouth is watering*
Our final thoughts on beer is best summed up by this author and poet:
“Instead of water we got here a draught of beer…a lumberer’s drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man (or woman) at once—which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among the pines.” -Henry David Thoreau
Be Well and Travel Often!
(HOVER OVER) & PIN IT!
RESOURCES:
craftbeer.com
ashevillealetrail.com
https://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/articles/2016-12-30/5-surprising-health-benefits-of-beerCranbourne South Primary School Principal Joe Kelly. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones Joe Kelly has been principal of Cranbourne South Primary School for 15 years, and acknowledged that until two years ago he had been "blindly supporting" Access Ministries' presence. That was until he took a closer look at the actual classes and curriculum. "It is not education," Mr Kelly said. "It has no value whatsoever. It is rubbish - hollow and empty rhetoric … My school teachers are committed to teaching children, not indoctrinating them." In early 2012, Mr Kelly sent Access Ministries a two-page letter explaining why they would not be allowed back in his school. He subsequently spoke to a representative of the evangelical organisation. "We did meet, and we agreed in the end," Mr Kelly said. "His words: 'If the school does not want Access Ministries, we will not force our way in'."
Ross and Michelle Clennett and their son James at home in Mornington. Credit:Eddie Jim Mr Kelly said his actions created no backlash from within the school community, and nor was there any reprimand from the Education Department for his defiant stance - something he hoped would give heart to other principals considering exercising discretion. "A lot of principals feel as strongly as I do, but they are not comfortable being as provocative as I am,'' he said. Education Minister Martin Dixon said he had "full confidence in school principals making decisions in the interests of their parent body and the school community". Despite the decline in numbers, Dr Evonne Paddison, chief executive of Access Ministries, said CRE was a "choice" that the parents of nearly 90,000 Victorian children still make.
"Some areas are seeing growth and others not so," she said. ''This is not an unusual pattern. CRE happens because parents want it." Not all parents, of course. Members of the grassroots group Fairness in Religions in Schools have long agitated for change on this issue, and with some success. Prior to August 2011, the SRI enrolment forms used by schools were "opt-out", meaning parents had to fill in the form or their child would automatically end up being taught religion, enrolled by default. In the past two years, however, the forms became "opt-in", meaning parents have to make a conscious choice to enrol their child in religious education. This simple change had a massive impact on the popularity of SRI. Namely, far fewer kids are enrolled. Emerald Primary School principal Mark Carver said before the form was changed, perhaps 75 per cent of students in a class of 24 would receive instruction.
"Last year that was dropping close to 50 per cent," Mr Carver said. "And once it gets below that, it becomes a difficult thing in terms of supervision." Dr David Zyngier, a senior lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy at Monash University, said his biggest concern remained for parents who opt-in but did not understand what lessons were being taught, or that they were being taught by volunteers - not teachers. "I have reviewed all six booklets produced by Access Ministries, and it's basically low order, unintelligent, busy work and rote learning," Dr Zyngier said. ''It horrified me. There's nothing educational about it. It's all about becoming a disciple of Jesus." Dr Paddison said the trained volunteers implement a curriculum designed with four levels of primary schooling in mind, as outlined in the Victorian Essential Learning Standards.
"As any adult interacting with young children will have some impact, we aim to make sure it is a positive one," Dr Paddison said. Religion shouldn’t be the fourth ‘R’ Mornington father Ross Clennett did everything right. He filled out the correct form, indicating he did not want his son, James, to receive religious instruction. The 6-year-old never made mention of God, or Jesus Christ, so it came as a surprise to flick through his son’s workbooks and discover that he had been learning about both for all of 2013, due to a manual coding error. The school apologised for the mistake, but Mr Clennett said the real fault is in allowing religious instruction in public schools in the first place.
“This kind of mix-up was bound to happen,” he said. “I believe there is simply no place in a government-funded school for that kind of education.” St Kilda mother Mel Mackintosh only realised halfway through 2013 that her daughter received religious instruction for 18 months, after a similar error. “My daughter has been told many times that God created her and the world and all that’s in it,” she said. “This wasn’t taught as a Christian idea or belief, but as a fact.”
Professor Marion Maddox of Macquarie University, an expert on the intersection of religion and politics, is a member of the Uniting Church but agrees with Mr Clennett and Ms Mackintosh. One major problem, she said, is that most religious instruction offers only one view, and no context. Often lessons end by asking students to pray, or make personal expressions of faith. Such activity enters the realm of proselytising, which is not allowed in public schools. “We expect kids to learn a fully rounded maths curriculum taught by trained professionals,” Professor Maddox said. “Why does religion deserve anything less?” Correction: This story has been altered. The original story said there was a legal obligation to run religion classes where a teacher was available, but it is only an Education Department guideline.
konrad.marshall@fairfaxmedia.com.auRussell Wilson, like a long line of nationally recognized professional athletes before him, has redefined boring when it comes to public comments on any topic, sports-related or otherwise. So it's with some surprise (OK, we were floored) that Wilson fired up Facebook Live to talk about the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump.
That's right: The man who avoids controversy like Brock Osweiler avoids completions has some thoughts on the first few days of Trump's presidency, which included a controversial executive order related to immigration and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries. The order sparked protests at airports across the country, and presumably prompted Wilson to speak up.
The video, which is titled "Barbershop Talk Season 2," is below. Wilson's political commentary starts around the 9:40 mark:
"...Just so you know, I voted for Hillary [Clinton]," Wilson said in the video. "But, when you think about it's only been, what, two weeks... We've got to attack this issue here. Basically, I think that when you think about all the negativity that's happened within a 10-day period, or however many days it's been, it's already too much. It's already crazy, it's already affecting people's hearts and souls and lives in such a negative way, in my opinion.
"Now you kind of recognize that people's feelings are getting hurt, people's lives getting changed, people are getting sent back or not let in back home to see their families for reasons that may not be worthy. Just because you believe in something or you're from a certain place doesn't mean that you're a bad person."
"We go to the LAX airport and there's people all over the place fighting for their lives and protesting and all the protests that have gone on... through the African-American community, through obviously the Muslim community, too. We're gonna be a nation that says we're equal, we have to be equal. Obviously being smart of all that kind of stuff, but you also have to be able to treat people fairly, you have to be able to love everyone. I know even from my own faith, my Christian faith, we still have to love everybody."
Wilson continued: "I don't even know if he's going to be able to last four years, in my opinion. You don't want to wish bad upon anybody because if he doesn't last four years, that means that something went wrong, so hopefully nothing goes wrong, anymore that it's already doing. But it's just been a crazy 10 days already. And, you know, Barack! Comeback. Come back, Barack! Come back, Barack!"
Earlier this week, Steelers offensive lineman Ryan Harris, who is Muslim, called Trump's immigration ban "from the playbook of hatred and divisiveness."Peter Beinart gave a very good talk – at once eloquent and morally and intellectually serious – at UCLA Hillel last night. The talk explored the complexity of loving Israel and yet disapproving of the pattern of ethnic subordination that characterizes Israeli rule over the West Bank. Beinart mentioned the fact that settler violence against Palestinians sometimes fits any plausible definition of “terrorism” – attacks on innocents to make a political point – and that very few of those attacks ever lead to law enforcement action against the perpetrators.
The response from part of the audience left me sick to my stomach. The basic theme – stated in so many words by one participant – was “they brought it on themselves.” To hear Jews talking about collective ethnic guilt in tones worthy of Der Sturmer was really more than I could handle. I left after being personally accused of indifference to the Shoah because I refused to profess indifference to the suffering of Arabs.
And today I learn that Tony Kushner – whose views about Israel seem roughly to track mine – has been denied an honorary degree by a minority of the trustees of the City University of New York, based on a typical cowardly wingnut smear job, launched without warning in a way that gave Kushner no chance to defend himself.
I know most Israelis don’t deserve their worst American defenders, but if the result of having to defend Israel is that Jews start acting like bullies and sounding like Nazis, at some point the price gets to be too high.
Like Beinart, I support the continued existence of a democratic and Jewish Israel within, roughly, its 1967 boundaries; unlike him, I can no longer count myself a Zionist.* In the immortal words of Sam Goldwyn, “Include me out.”
* Footnote: That won’t keep me from completing the fairly major task I accepted on behalf of the Israeli Education Ministry; I’m on the committee doing a review of all of the public-policy degree programs in Israeli universities. As it happens, an earlier version of the committee was dissolved over accusations that someone on it was “anti-Zionist.” Beinart reports an attempt by an NGO, egged on by the current Education Minister, to purge “anti-Zionist” faculty from Israeli universities; our committee ran into no evidence that the effort had dented any of the departments we reviewed, but it’s another bad sign.
[Cross-posted at Same Facts]EU Commissioner Reveals He Will Simply Ignore Any Rejection Of ACTA By European Parliament Next Week
from the democracy,-what's-that? dept
The day before the EU's International Trade committee (INTA) recommended that the European Parliament should reject ACTA, the EU commissioner with responsibility for the treaty, Karel De Gucht, had given a speech to its members, trying to win them over. Although it was short, it turns out to be highly revealing about the European Commission's future ACTA strategy. Here's what he said: If you decide for a negative vote before the European Court rules, let me tell you that the Commission will nonetheless continue to pursue the current procedure before the Court, as we are entitled to do. A negative vote will not stop the proceedings before the Court of Justice. That is, whatever happens next week, the European Commission will wait for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to rule on whether ACTA is compatible with EU law. If it is found to be incompatible, De Gucht admits that rather than accept this ruling, the European Commission will try to find some trick to circumvent it: If the Court questions the conformity of the agreement with the Treaties we will assess at that stage how this can be addressed. This implicitly confirms that the referral was simply a way to buy time, rather than an honest question about ACTA's legality.
Even assuming the ECJ rules eventually that ACTA is compatible, there could still be a problem if, in the meantime, the European Parliament has voted not to ratify it. Here's what De Gucht says he would do in that case: First, I would consider proposing some clarifications to ACTA. For example on enforcement in the digital environment. We could look at this in the light of the discussions you will have had on legislative proposals which the European Commission is set to put before the Parliament and the Council. Or for example, we could seek to clarify further the meaning of 'commercial scale'. Remember that ACTA is now signed, and cannot be altered; so De Gucht is instead trying to fob off European politicians with this vague idea of "clarifications" -- as if more vagueness could somehow rectify the underlying problems of an already dangerously-vague treaty. That's clearly just a sop; here's the real plan: Second, once we will have identified and discussed these possible clarifications, I would intend to make a second request for consent to the European Parliament. Whether the Parliament will consider it under this legislature or the subsequent one, will be for you to decide. This is an extraordinary admission. De Gucht says that even if the European Parliament unequivocally refuses to ratify ACTA next week, he will simply ignore that result, and re-submit it at a later date.
In other words, De Gucht won't accept the idea that the European electorate, through their representatives in the European Parliament, might possibly want to reject something they were not allowed to know about until late in the negotiating process, and to which they were unable to provide any meaningful input. In his view, ACTA must be passed, and ACTA will be passed -- whatever anyone else thinks about it.
Let's hope that the members of the European Parliament bear in mind this undisguised contempt for the democratic process in Europe -- and for them -- when it comes to voting on ACTA next week, and any time thereafter it might be re-presented to them under De Gucht's shameful plans.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: acta, ecj, european commission, european union, karel de guchtUefa has moved to increase the financial rewards from playing in the Europa League by announcing prize money for the tournament will increase by 65 per cent.
An increase in television money for Uefa will also see prize money for the Champions League go up but the disparity with the Europa League will not be so great from 2015-18.
At the moment, clubs in the Champions League earn an average of four and half times as much as those playing in the Europa League, but in the future Uefa will fix the ratio at 3.3 to one. Solidarity payments to those clubs who fail to qualify for the group stages will also rise significantly.
The prize money for the winner of the Champions League final will rise from €10.5m to €15million, and the winner of the competition could earn a maximum of €54.5m in prize money plus TV cash from their share of the market pool.
SSE Airtricity League champions Dundalk will now receive atleast €550,000 from their participation in next year’s Champions League, nearly double the amount that St Pat’s received last season, and that’s even if they do not win any game.
Cork City, St Pat’s and Shamrock Rovers will also benefit from the increased prize money for the Europa League.
All three will enter the competition’s first qualifying round automatically receiving €200,000 which will of course rise depending on their progression.
The move comes following a new agreement with the European Clubs’ Association (ECA), which is also to have two representatives co-opted onto Uefa’s executive committee — one of whom is expected to be ECA president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge.
Uefa general secretary Gianni Infantino said: “Uefa is really pleased that the new distribution system not only provides for a substantial rise in monies received by clubs participating in the Champions League and Europa League, but also strengthens Uefa’s solidarity principle, namely ensuring an even more substantial increase in solidarity payments to clubs.
“In this way, the new system provides a better deal for everyone, especially those clubs which did not qualify to the group stage of either of the two Uefa |
United defender Ritchie De Laet and Tottenham full back Kyle Naughton.
"Lambert has publicly stated in recent weeks he wants funds in reserve to give him the option to bolster the City squad during the January transfer window depending on where City find themselves by then."
QPR
Players in: (Cardiff, free), Kieron Dyer (unattached), Danny Gabbidon (unattached), Bruno Perone (unattached), DJ Campbell (Blackpool, £1.2m*), Brian Murphy (unattached), Joey Barton (Newcastle, free), Luke Young (Aston Villa, undisclosed), Armand Traore (Arsenal, undisclosed), Tommaso Trani (unattached), Shaun Wright-Phillips (Manchester City, undisclosed).
Players out: Mikele Leigertwood (Reading, undisclosed), Angelo Balanta (MK Dons, five-month loan), Kaspars Gorkss (Reading, undisclosed), Antonio German(released).
BBC London 94.9's Phil Parry:
"QPR didn't do much business early on as the change of ownership was quite restrictive, but I think overall they've done quite well.
"In forward DJ Campbell, winger Shaun Wright-Phillips and midfielder Joey Barton, Neil Warnock has added players with Premier League experience to a fairly tight squad.
"Barton is in the prime of his career while Wright-Phillips should give them pace in midfield so on paper, Warnock has filled the holes he needed to. The question is whether or not he can get those players to gel. Based on his experience you'd have to say he can.
"Warnock is a man of experience and his new acquisitions will allow him to drop players in and out of the team to keep them fresh."
STOKE CITY
Players in: Jonathan Woodgate (unattached), Matthew Upson (unattached), Wilson Palacios (Tottenham, £6m*), Cameron Jerome (Birmingham, undisclosed), Peter Crouch (Tottenham, £12m).
Players out: Abdoulaye Faye (West Ham, free), Eidur Gudjohnsen (released), Ibrahima Sonko (Ipswich, free), Carl Dickinson (Watford, undisclosed), (Crystal Palace, loan)
Nigel Johnson, BBC Stoke commentator:
"They've been very active in the transfer window. Boss Tony Pulis hasn't got the money to waste so what he's done is spent cleverly. He's brought in Jonathan Woodgate and Matthew Upson for free, two central defenders who have been brought into to consolidate the back four.
"I don't think any City supporter would have thought striker Peter Crouch would have crossed the threshold at the Britannia Stadium but he'll be important as Pulis has been desperate for strikers. I'm not quite sure about Cameron Jerome, but at least he's got the chance.
"Midfield has been a problem but if Wilson Palacios can strike the form he's capable of, Pulis has performed a stroke of brilliance there.
"There was a need Stoke to increase its squad as the Europa League will take its toll but the most important thing is to retain their Premier League status. I think he's been shrewd and I'd be surprised if they don't finish mid-table."
SUNDERLAND
Players in: (ENPPI, £2m*), Kieren Westwood (Coventry, free), Sebastian Larsson (Birmingham, free), Conor Wickham (Ipswich, £8million), Ji Dong-won (Chunnam Dragons, £2.1m*), Craig Gardner (Birmingham, £6m*), Wes Brown (Manchester United, £1m*), John O'Shea (Manchester United, £5m*), David Vaughan (unattached), James McClean (Derry City, £350,000), Nicklas Bendtner (Arsenal, season loan).
Players out: Jordan Henderson (Liverpool, £16m*), Boudewijn Zenden (released), Cristian Riveros (Kayserispor, season loan), David Healy (Rangers, free), Steed Malbranque (St Etienne, undisclosed), George McCartney (West Ham, season loan).
Chris Young, Sunderland reporter at the Sunderland Echo:
"Results from the opening four games of the season have hardly provided a glowing endorsement of boss Steve Bruce's extensive summer recruitment.
"But the fresh faces - totalling 11 after the deadline day capture of striker Nicklas Bendtner - have boosted what was a worryingly thin squad and should ultimately come good to ensure Sunderland maintain their top 10 status.
"The experience of former Manchester United duo Wes Brown and John O'Shea has already tightened the backline, while the likes of Seb Larsson, Craig Gardner and David Vaughan are proven top flight performers.
"Bruce has taken a gamble in splashing out £8million on the potential of 18-year-old Connor Wickham, particularly as Sunderland's striking options were light. But the capture of Bendtner should provide the firepower which Sunderland have been missing."
SWANSEA CITY
Players in: Danny Graham (Watford, £3.5million), Steven Caulker (Tottenham, season loan), Jose Moreira (Benfica, £750,000*), Leroy Lita (Middlesbrough, £1.75m), Wayne Routledge (Newcastle, undisclosed), Michael Vorm (FC Utrecht, £1.5m), Gerhard Tremmel (free), Fede Bessone (Leeds, free), Darnel Situ (Lens, initial £250,000).
Players out: Darren Pratley (Bolton, free), Dorus de Vries (Wolves, free) Gorka Pintado, Cedric van der Gun, Albert Serran (all released), Ryan Harley (Brighton, undisclosed).
Chris Wathan, football correspondent at The Western Mail:
"Swansea City may be financially healthy, but they're far from wealthy and that was always going to be highlighted at a time like deadline day when so much money is being thrown around.
"Brendan Rodgers had made sure he completed his significant business before the start of the season, goalkeeper Michel Vorm looking the pick of the bunch and already seeming like a steal at £1.5m.
"Spurs loanee Steven Caulker, Wayne Routledge and Danny Graham - despite his lack of goals to date - look like they could make a mark but hopes of extra defensive and midfield cover to excite coming in on Wednesday were dashed.
"Swansea were always up against it in the Premier League but the style in which Swansea play has always been more reliant on the collective rather than the individual and the success will depend upon that."
TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR
Players in: Brad Friedel (Aston Villa, free), Cristian Ceballos (unattached), Emmanuel Adebayor (Manchester City, season loan), Yago Falque (Juventus, season loan), Soleymane Coulibaly (Siena, undisclosed), Scott Parker (West Ham, undisclosed).
Players out: Jonathan Woodgate (released), Jamie O'Hara (Wolves, £5million), Robbie Keane (LA Galaxy, £3.5million), Steven Caulker (Swansea, season loan), Paul-Jose M'Poku (Standard Liege, undisclosed), (Norwich, season loan), Bongani Khumalo (Reading, season loan), Ryan Mason (Doncaster, season loan), David Bentley (West Ham, season loan), Callum Tapping (Hearts, nominal), Wilson Palacios (Stoke, £6m*), Alan Hutton (Aston Villa, undisclosed), Jermaine Jenas (Aston Villa, season loan), Peter Crouch (Stoke, £12m).
BBC London 94.9's Phil Parry:
"There's always the danger that you can carry too many players and I think that was the case at Tottenham so it's a good thing that they've got a fair few out the door.
"Striker Peter Crouch, winger David Bentley and midfielder Wilson Palacios wouldn't have got into the team and you can't keep everyone happy so it's no surprise to see them leave.
"Brad Friedel is an excellent keeper. At 40, he's not young but he's kept himself in trim and is still very agile. There's no doubt he's still got it and I think he's a terrific signing.
"Spurs have done an acute bit of business to get striker Emmanuel Adebayor in on loan. They're not overly committed as it's only a one-year deal and they only have to pay a portion of his wages. Adebayor has the ability so it's a case of getting the best out of him but I think boss Harry Redknapp can do that."
WEST BROMWICH ALBION
Players in: Gareth McAuley (Ipswich, free), Billy Jones (Preston, free), (Birmingham, season loan), (unattached), Marton Fulop (Ipswich, free), Shane Long (Reading, undisclosed).
Players out: Abdoulaye Meite (Dijon, free), Giles Barnes, Dean Kiely (both released), Borja Valero (Villarreal, undisclosed) (Bursaspor, £2m*), Gianni Zuiverloon (Real Mallorca, free), (Birmingham, season loan), Chris Wood (Birmingham, loan), Ishmael Miller (Nottingham Forest, £1.2m), James Hurst (Blackpool, season loan), Marek Cech (Trabzonspor, undisclosed), Pablo Ibanez (Birmingham, undisclosed).
Bill Howell, football correspondent for the Birmingham Mail:
"Overall, it's been a good window. West Brom have done extremely well in bringing in striker Shane Long for around £4.5m. He looks like a fine player and hasn't taken long to get going this season.
"They desperately needed to bring in support for winger Peter Odemwingie and they've done reasonably well in signing defenders Gareth McAuley from Ipswich and Billy Jones from Preston. It's also nice to see Zoltan Gera back as he's a popular play among the Albion fans.
"I think they'll be disappointed with the way the Owen Hargreaves situation ended but in Ben Foster, they've got a terrific goalkeeper. He made that error against Stoke but I'm sure he'll be fine.
"Albion play some wonderful football and their additions should help them hover around mid-table come the end of the season."
WIGAN ATHLETIC
Players in: Ali Al-Habsi (Bolton, £4m*), David Jones (unattached), Nouha Dicko (unattached), Albert Crusat (Almeria, undisclosed), Shaun Maloney (Celtic, £1m*), Patrick van Aanholt (Chelsea, season loan).
Players out: Steven Caldwell, Daniel de Ridder, Jason Koumas, Mike Pollitt (all released), Antonio Amaya (Real Betis, undisclosed), Charles N'Zogbia (Aston Villa, £9.5m*), Mauro Boselli (Estudiantes, loan)
Paul Kendrick, football correspondent at the Wigan Observer:
"Latics have come out of the window in good health.
"Obviously we lost Tom Cleverley and Charles N'Zogbia from last year's squad but Roberto Martinez has strengthened across the board.
"Goalkeeper Ali Al Habsi was done early on and Shaun Maloney could prove a masterstroke.
"Patrick van Aanholt is also highly rated and if his loan deal is anywhere near as fruitful as Cleverley's last year then we will all be happy."
WOLVES
Players in: Dorus de Vries (Swansea, free), Jamie O'Hara (Tottenham, £5m), Roger Johnson (Birmingham, £7m*).
Players out: Marcus Hahnemann, David Jones (both released), Steven Mouyokolo (Sochaux, season loan), Andy Keogh (Leeds, loan), Greg Halford (Portsmouth, undisclosed), (Middlesbrough, loan), Stefan Maierhofer (Red Bull Salzburg, undisclosed).
Bill Howell, football correspondent for the Birmingham Mail:
"Wolves have done very well indeed because they got their number one target Roger Johnson for a reasonable price and reasonably quickly. Not a lot happened after that and I think a lot of supporters will be frustrated at the lack of additional signings but the team have got up and running really quickly.
"Crucially, Mick McCarthy has kept the two players he needed to keep - Kevin Doyle and Matt Jarvis - plus Nenad Milijas has decided to stay and he'll provide good competition for Jamie O'Hara who is focused on pushing to make his England international breakthrough.
"They've now got strength and depth which gives them the opportunity to bring players off the bench and change games.
"There's no doubt they'll lose a lot of games, but I think they should retain their Premier League status. It'll be difficult, but I see them finishing mid-table - no lower."
* - Transfer fee officially undisclosed
Compiled by Lawrence Barretto, Tom Rostance and Mike PeterRecent research into the psychology of conspiracy belief has highlighted the importance of belief systems in the acceptance or rejection of conspiracy theories. We examined a large sample of conspiracist (pro-conspiracy-theory) and conventionalist (anti-conspiracy-theory) comments on news websites in order to investigate the relative importance of promoting alternative explanations vs. rejecting conventional explanations for events. In accordance with our hypotheses, we found that conspiracist commenters were more likely to argue against the opposing interpretation and less likely to argue in favor of their own interpretation, while the opposite was true of conventionalist commenters. However, conspiracist comments were more likely to explicitly put forward an account than conventionalist comments were. In addition, conspiracists were more likely to express mistrust and made more positive and fewer negative references to other conspiracy theories. The data also indicate that conspiracists were largely unwilling to apply the “conspiracy theory” label to their own beliefs and objected when others did so, lending support to the long-held suggestion that conspiracy belief carries a social stigma. Finally, conventionalist arguments tended to have a more hostile tone. These tendencies in persuasive communication can be understood as a reflection of an underlying conspiracist worldview in which the details of individual conspiracy theories are less important than a generalized rejection of official explanations.
“The Internet was made for conspiracy theory: it is a conspiracy theory: one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place.”
(Stewart, 1999, p. 18).
Conspiracy theories, defined as allegations that powerful people or organizations are plotting together in secret to achieve sinister ends through deception of the public (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; Wood et al., 2012), have long been an important element of popular discourse. With the advent of the Internet, they have become more visible than ever. Although the psychological literature on conspiracy belief has a relatively short history, with most of the relevant research having been conducted only within the past twenty years, it has revealed a great deal regarding individual differences between those who generally believe conspiracy theories (whom we call “conspiracists”) and those who prefer conventional explanations (whom we call “conventionalists”). Conspiracy beliefs have been shown to be positively correlated with mistrust of other people (Goertzel, 1994) and authorities (Swami et al., 2010); feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999); superstition, beliefs in the paranormal, and schizotypy (Darwin et al., 2011); a perceived lack of control (Hamsher et al., 1968; Whitson and Galinsky, 2008); a Machiavellian approach to social interaction (Douglas and Sutton, 2011); and openness to experience (Swami et al., 2010; but see Swami et al., 2011).
At the present time, questionnaire-based investigations of individual differences make up the bulk of the existing research, although experimental approaches are emerging (e.g., Douglas and Sutton, 2008; Jolley and Douglas, 2013). A fairly recent development in the field has been an acknowledgement that in addition to trait-like variables and transient psychological states, ideologies and broad belief systems play a substantial role in conspiracy theory belief. For example, in an examination of conspiracy theories regarding an alleged cover-up of the divinity of Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Christ, Newheiser et al. (2011) demonstrated that the plausibility of these theories hinged largely on broader beliefs about the world. People with traditional Christian beliefs were likely to reject such theories out of hand, while those with a more New Age approach were much more receptive. In a similar vein, Lewandowsky et al. (2013b) demonstrated that rejection of climate science (though not explicitly conspiracist) is determined in part by ideological concerns, with libertarian free-market ideology, apparently predisposing people to believe that anthropogenic global warming is an unscientific hoax. It is clear, then, that individual conspiracy theories or related counter-normative explanations can seem more or less likely depending on how they comport with other beliefs held by the audience.
Some researchers have gone further, proposing the existence of a conspiracist worldview—a belief system conducive to conspiracy beliefs in general (e.g., Goertzel, 1994; Swami et al., 2010; Wood et al., 2012). This proposal stems primarily from the finding that beliefs in unrelated conspiracy theories tend to intercorrelate: for example, someone who believes that Princess Diana was deliberately assassinated is also more likely to believe that the moon landing was a hoax. Indeed, Wood et al. (2012) demonstrated that even beliefs in directly contradictory conspiracy theories were positively correlated with one another, indicating that conspiracy beliefs may be held together not by direct agreement with one another, but by mutual agreement with higher-order beliefs about the world. One particularly important element of the conspiracist worldview is thought to be a generalized opposition to official or received narratives. In this view, conspiracy belief is not about believing in particular alternative theories, but in disbelieving in whatever the official story is. This tendency has been informally noted by Dean (2002), who described most conspiracy theories as “bits and pieces without a plot… [that] fail to delineate any conspiracy at all. They simply counter conventional narratives with suspicions and allegations that, more often than not, resist coherent emplotment” (p. 92). Likewise, Clarke (2007) observed that conspiracy theories are often extremely vague, particularly in the Internet age.
If this is the case, then for people who hold a conspiracist worldview, the specifics of a conspiracy theory are less important than its identity as a conspiracy and its opposition to the official explanation. The important element is that those in power are lying and cannot be trusted, and that they are covering up something sinister. Opposition to officialdom, in this sense, parallels the generalized prejudice that Adorno et al. (1950) found to be strong enough to overcome contradictions between different anti-Jewish stereotypes. More than being a specific belief that Jews are overly secretive or overly intrusive, anti-Semitism appears to be more of a general belief that Jews are generally unpleasant people. Likewise, conspiracy theory belief appears to be more of a negative belief than a positive one—it is more concerned with saying what the cause of a condition or event was not (i.e., whatever the official explanation is) than with putting forward a specific alternative account.
An opportunity to test this idea presents itself in the form of observation of online discourse. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the lack of mainstream public acceptance for their theories, many conspiracists, both prominent and otherwise, appear to see themselves as having a duty to spread their views to the public at large. They often exhort the unthinking masses to “wake up” (e.g., Crane, 2008; Byers, 2009; Icke, 2012). This is a reasonable reaction: given a belief that people's lives are being manipulated by malevolent forces beyond their control, most would probably agree that trying to spread the word about that fact is a good idea. Outspoken conventionalists, such as those in the “skeptic” movement (e.g., Randi, 1982; Sagan, 1995; Shermer, 1997; Novella, 2009), find most conspiracy theories to be misguided at best and destructive at worst, and so make a point of arguing against them in the public sphere.
This discussion is voluminous and highly visible in many arenas, perhaps none more so than news website comment sections. Articles about topics for which popular conspiracy theories exist, such as 9/11, the moon landing, and vaccines, can have tens of thousands of comments, most of which are devoted to advancing or refuting allegations of conspiracy. These comments are often archived along with the associated articles for months or years afterward, which provides an excellent opportunity for archival research to give some insight into the thoughts and beliefs of those writing them (e.g., Fat et al., 2012; Loke, 2012; Sisask et al., 2012).
The present study consists of an examination of a large number of conspiracy theory-related persuasive comments on news stories. Such analysis of online discourse as a method of examining psychological states has increased in prominence as the Internet has become a more popular place to discuss one's ideas. The subject and pace of online discussion has been shown to be a more or less reliable barometer of public concern over social issues (Roberts et al., 2002; Scharkow and Vogelgesang, 2011), and emotional reactions expressed online can be used to consistently predict political approval ratings (Gonzalez-Bailon et al., 2012). Quantitative analysis of online discussion has also been used to gain insight into the social psychology of groups with fringe views (Douglas et al., 2005), attitudes toward Tourette's Syndrome (Fat et al., 2012), and racial views (Loke, 2012). Qualitative research on online discourse has been more common, including a study demonstrating the evolution of conspiracy theories over time in response to evidence (Lewandowsky et al., 2013a). In the context of conspiracy theories in particular, there are several advantages to content analysis of online commentary. The self-selective nature of online communication allows for the collection of a great deal of data regarding opinions that may be held by only a minority of people; moreover, the degree of anonymity facilitates the honest expression of opinions that might not be held in high social esteem elsewhere (e.g., Douglas et al., 2005; Loke, 2012).
There are some caveats associated with analyzing persuasive comments in particular. While external validity may benefit from observing behavior in a naturalistic setting, there is some degree of uncertainty regarding the internal validity of any conclusions drawn from such methods. Most obviously, there is the issue of to what degree the content of persuasive communications reflects the properties of the author rather than the demands of the situation. Rather than faithful representations of internal psychological processes, commenters' methods of argumentation might instead reflect strategic considerations regarding the audience, the venue, and the subject matter. While self-presentation is very often a concern in psychological research, even in laboratory settings, such demands may be especially salient in a situation where one's goal is implicitly (or even explicitly) to persuade others rather than to provide an honest and straightforward account of one's beliefs. Indeed, some research has shown that people do adapt their persuasive techniques according to their knowledge of the audience and the subject (Friestad and Wright, 1999; Douglas et al., 2010; Vogel et al., 2010).
The question of whether we can expect persuasive communication to accurately reflect inner psychological processes is not easily answerable, as the effect of lay persuasive knowledge on generation of persuasive arguments is fairly sparse. While there is a substantial body of research on lay persuasive knowledge, the vast majority of it focuses instead on how such knowledge affects susceptibility to the persuasive messages of others. However, it is well-established that people tend to rely heavily on projection for predicting others' behavior—that is, they use themselves as a model for prediction. This effect is especially strong when relatively little is known about the target [for a review, see Robbins and Krueger (2005)]. In general, then, it is likely that persuaders use the self as a model for argument generation: in other words, they argue in a way that they would themselves find convincing. This, in turn, suggests that the types of arguments used by persuaders can contain information relevant to understanding how they think about the issue at hand.
The tendency to use social projection is especially relevant in online settings. Much online discussion is either fully anonymous or conducted under pseudonyms, greatly limiting the amount of information available about the other party in a discussion. As such, we assume for the purposes of the present study that people will generally tend to use arguments that they themselves would find most convincing were they the audience rather than the persuader. This, in turn, should reflect the structure of their belief systems—the arguments that people find most convincing are those that match up with how they view the world (Darwin et al., 2011; Newheiser et al., 2011; Wood et al., 2012; Lewandowsky et al., 2013b). To that end, we systematically coded and analyzed conspiracist and conventionalist persuasive comments from four major news websites on articles relating to 9/11 from the period of July 1st through December 31st, 2011, encompassing the months surrounding the tenth anniversary of the attacks.
9/11 conspiracy theories provide an excellent research subject for several reasons. First, the community associated with these theories, known as the 9/11 Truth Movement, is noted for its substantial online presence and focus on Internet proselytizing. Bartlett and Miller (2011) observed that the movement's “mass membership backbone” (p. 45) devotes a substantial amount of time to producing large numbers of online comments, and Clarke (2007) saw the Truth Movement as a paradigmatic example of Internet conspiracy culture. Second, the timing was fortuitous, with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, sure to herald a number of stories on the subject and therefore many relevant comments, having occurred shortly before data collection commenced. The recency of the materials lowered the probability of comments having been expunged from archives or lost as an unintended consequence of comment software upgrades. Third, just as the Truth Movement has a substantial online presence, so too do its conventionalist opponents in the skeptic movement. We therefore expected that there would be a good deal of debate between the two sides, providing further raw materials for analysis. Finally, the Truth Movement is a well-established community with a substantial intellectual output, including popular books (e.g., Griffin, 2004), conference circuits, several sub-organizations such as Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and at least one peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of 9/11 Studies. There is substantial debate within the Truth Movement regarding whether 9/11 was a controlled demolition, a deliberate intelligence failure, or even the result of exotic space-based weaponry (Barber, 2008). In short, its body of work is varied, voluminous, and well-developed, and should therefore be able to provide a wide range of different arguments for analysis.
If our reasoning regarding the influence of projection on persuasive tactics holds, we should see systematic differences in the characteristics of conspiracist and conventionalist arguments. Specifically, we should be able to replicate earlier results demonstrating that unrelated conspiracy beliefs are intercorrelated (e.g., Goertzel, 1994; Swami et al., 2010; Wood et al., 2012)—in this case, conspiracist comments should contain more positive (and fewer negative) references to unrelated conspiracy theories compared with conventionalist comments. Examining a long-standing correlate of conspiracy belief, we also investigated the degree to which comments contained explicit expressions of mistrust, predicting that conspiracist comments would be more likely to express mistrust of authorities or other targets than conventionalist comments (e.g., Wright and Arbuthnot, 1974; Simmons and Parsons, 2005). Further, we examined expressions of powerlessness, and predicted that conspiracist comments would express more concerns about power, as feelings of powerlessness have been shown to correlate reliably with conspiracy theory belief (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999). Replicating the previously established relationships between conspiracy beliefs, trust, and power would increase confidence in the present study's methods and help to justify any novel results derived therefrom.
In addition to verifying the utility of this archival approach by replicating previous results, we made several novel predictions. First, if we are correct in our contention that much of the conspiracist worldview is based on a generalized rejection of official explanations rather than on positing particular alternative narratives, conspiracist comments should focus on refuting conventional explanations more than on presenting or supporting specific conspiracy theories. Therefore, conspiracist comments, relative to conventionalist comments, should be more likely to derogate rival explanations and less likely to promote their own. Second, we elected to examine the veracity of the long-held contention that “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” carry an intellectual stigma (e.g., Bratich, 2002, 2008; Coady, 2006). If this is true, people should be unwilling to apply the term to themselves and should object when others do so. As such, we predicted that conspiracists would avoid applying the term “conspiracy theory” to their own beliefs (or “conspiracy theorists” to themselves), and would attempt to dispute others' usage of the term. While this might seem an obvious prediction—and indeed many authors take it as a given that the term is stigmatized—to our knowledge there have not yet been any empirical investigations of this contention.
Finally, another possible avenue by which the spread of conspiracy theories could be fruitfully understood is social influence theory (Latané, 1981). Since 9/11 conspiracy theories are (at least in the West) an opinion held by a vocal minority attempting to effect change, social influence theory (Latané, 1981) would predict that conventionalists, if they are good majority influencers, are more likely to show patterns consistent with normative social influence. In particular, Bratich (2008) has highlighted the hostility of intellectual orthodoxy toward conspiracist explanations for events and the labelling of conspiracists as paranoid or otherwise mentally ill (c.f. Hofstadter, 1964; Kalichman et al., 2010). At the same time, conspiracists are often hostile in a different way, dismissing conventionalists as naïve, gullible, and either unwitting dupes or willing stooges of the conspiracy (Crane, 2008; Byford, 2011). Therefore, we examined the hostility of each persuasive comment, whether characterized by outright insults, threats, dismissive sarcasm, accusations of complicity, or other hostile or insulting content.
Materials and Methods
Articles
The raw data consisted of the comment sections of various online news articles. Samples were taken from news articles posted between July 1st and December 31st, 2011, on four mainstream news websites: ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News, CNN, the Independent, and the Daily Mail. This date range was chosen because of the large number of 9/11-related articles around the time of the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and these four news sites were selected on the reasoning that an ideal sample would not be restricted to a single country, journalistic style, or ideological position, as well as for more practical reasons such as search capabilities, comment archiving, and unpaid access.
Relevant articles were selected by searching for a series of terms within the specified date range: “9/11,” “11/9,” “September 11th,” “11th September,” “world trade center,” “world trade centre,” “wtc,” “al-qaeda,” “shanksville,” and “building 7.” Where possible (i.e., the Mail and Independent) the websites' own advanced search functions were used; on the remaining sites, we conducted the required searches using Google News.
Comments
For each article that resulted from these searches, the public comment sections were read, and from these, we extracted verbatim all relevant comments regarding the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Specifically, since only persuasive comments were of interest, only comments containing original content that could be considered persuasive, or written with the intent to persuade, were extracted. Our analyses, for the most part, are predicated upon the idea that people will tend to project in order to construct persuasive arguments; non-persuasive comments, therefore, are written without regard to their perceived efficacy in convincing the other party (or neutral parties), as that is not their aim. To operationalize this constraint we adhered to four criteria.
The comment must not consist solely of insults, ridicule, or threats (e.g., “u stupid sheeple need 2 wake up lol,” “Let me know what your home address is, and we can have a frank “discussion” about your idiotic conspiracy theories”). This criterion was adopted because insults on their own are not persuasive, and while insults may be relevant to the hostility and stigma variables, they are irrelevant to the majority of the analyses we wished to conduct. The comment must not consist solely of “meta” discussion (e.g., “I see the government disinfo machine is working overtime with all the shills posting here,” “can't believe CNN is letting these tinfoil hat nutjobs hijack a story about the 9/11 memorial”). As with insults, “meta” comments do not make persuasive arguments, and are in fact about entirely different subject matter—they are concerned with the minutia of discussion rather than with the conspiracy theories and conventional explanations in question. The comment must not consist solely of a link to an external website, YouTube video, or similar, or a link with minimal description that adds no meaningful content (e.g., “go to ae911truth.org for some informed discussion about 9/11,” “google Popular Mechanics 9/11 debunking”). While it would be in principle possible to code the contents of such videos, websites, and other bodies of Web content, they are usually prohibitively large (particularly in the case of exhortations to conduct a Web search for a particular phrase, such as “Building 7,” that returns millions of results) and would require an entirely different set of coding criteria. Moreover, the linked content was uniformly the work of others rather than the commenter's own reasoning, as would be necessary for our reasoning concerning the link between argument generation, projection, and internal psychological representations to hold. The comment must not be copied verbatim from an external source. This was determined by conducting web searches when a comment was extremely long, contained unusual formatting such as inappropriate line breaks, or was out of character in terms of word choice or grammatical ability for a previously recognized commenter. As with external links, these passages were not generated by the commenters and the projection line of reasoning therefore cannot be assumed to apply in this case as it would in the case of original arguments. As such, when an otherwise original post contained a passage quoted from an external source, only the original content was coded.
The author of each comment was recorded, along with the Web address of the parent news article and whether the comment was a direct reply to another, previously posted comment.
Coding
Once the comments were collected, they were coded according to the hypotheses of interest. The tone of the comment (conspiracist or conventionalist) was of interest to all analyses, so this was the first content variable coded. Conspiracist comments were identified as any that either directly put forward a conspiratorial account of the events of 9/11, in whole or in part; that challenged the official account in a manner implying conspiracy or complicity among governments, intelligence services, corporations, occult associations, or secret societies; that otherwise favorably referenced common tropes of the 9/11 Truth Movement and its associated body of arguments, such as cryptic allusions to the fate of World Trade Center (WTC) Building 7, popular quotations from conspiracy websites or prominent theorists, and so on; that responded to conventionalist comments in a manner implying that the original commenter had the wrong impression in thinking that the attacks were perpetrated by agents of Al-Qaeda; or that was somewhat ambiguous in isolation but was written by a commenter previously observed to make conspiracist arguments or in the context of an argument or point made in the parent article that otherwise made the commenter's intent clear. Therefore, a comment on an article about a new book on 9/11 reading “Does the book explain how WTC7 imploded from fire, how a single passport was found intact within hours, how Bin Laden was in the American hospital in Dubai weeks before, how fighter jets were diverted 1000s of miles away, how NORAD was ordered to stand down… ” was coded as conspiracist. While this comment does not directly allege conspiracy, it refers obliquely to many common 9/11 conspiracist arguments and seems clearly intended to raise doubt regarding conventional explanations of 9/11.
Conversely, comments were coded as conventionalist if they explicitly endorsed or provided evidence in support of the mainstream account of 9/11 or another unofficial yet non-conspiracist explanation (such as Al-Qaeda independently planting bombs in the Twin Towers or bringing explosives onto the hijacked aircraft); if they argued against specific 9/11 conspiracy theories or conspiracist arguments such as those shown in the sample comment above; or, as in the case of conspiracist comments, if they were ambiguous in isolation but were written by a previously established conventionalist or in the context of a discussion thread or point made in the parent article that otherwise made clear the commenter's intent. For instance, the comment “LOL! Wow! What a conspiracy. Man, that tin foil hat has got to be tight today. Thousands of conspirators would be needed to pull off even a fraction of what you claim. And every one of them has been silent for almost 10 years now. Incredible…” was coded as conventionalist due to its argument that the conspiracy explanations of 9/11 are implausible and general mockery of conspiracists.
Since the first hypothesis concerned the number of unrelated conspiracy theories mentioned favorably and unfavorably in the comment, we coded two separate variables for each comment: one comprised the number of other conspiracy theories mentioned favorably, and the other comprised the number of other conspiracy theories mentioned unfavorably. Importantly, these counts did not include “superconspiracies,” or conspiracies that orchestrate other conspiracies (Barkun, 2006), of which 9/11 was thought to be a part. For instance, if a commenter accused the Bilderberg Group or the Illuminati of masterminding the 9/11 attacks, this would be considered part of the 9/11 conspiracy theory rather than a separate conspiracy theory entirely. However, if the commenter expressed the opinion |
the ruin places Freud in a curiously detached position to the ruin. The ruin beckons itself as a raw matter to be transformed under the gaze of the analyst’s watchful eye, thus coalescing the past into the present. This act of returning the past to the present — so central to the work of Freudian analysis generally — eliminates the anxious quality of the ruin by housing it in time. Thus, if Freud cites his method as restoring the past to the present, then it is as much an attempt at restoring the past to the past: in other words, of re-burying it. Only now, ensuring it remains buried.
It is precisely for these reasons that Freud’s disorientation at the Acropolis is so telling. With it, the past returns to the past in unbound fashion, decentering the static place of the analyst’s ego and revealing the fragile hold psychoanalysis has on the past. Anxiety ensues. But it is a special kind of anxiety. Freud’s admission that “What I am seeing there is not real” gestures toward a type of anxiety that mirrors the contingency of ascribing a definite role to the ruin. What he sees in the Acropolis is not so much unreal as marking another reality. The ruin ceases to reflect Freud’s own gaze, penetrating the veil of appearances with the gaze of a reality that cannot be assimilated by the ego. The ruin puts Freud out of joint, spatially and temporally. None of this can be considered a failure in the experience of attending to a ruin, but instead is to be regarded as an opening that carries with it the germ of insight.
All of this takes place — importantly — at the birthplace of Reason, Athens. This pilgrimage for Freud turns out to be an encounter with the beyond of Reason. The conditions are in place for an eruption of anxiety. Anxiety unmasks the featureless face of an appearance — that of an egocentric and rationalised concept of the past — and restores it to a state of dizzying contingency. The dizzying anxiety is not peculiar to Freud, but in one way or another haunts all instances of ruination. From Athens to Detroit, time cannot be contained except as a caricature of what it means to confront the past. How, after all, does the past belong to the ruin if not through the experience of anxiety?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dylan Trigg is a postdoctoral researcher at UCD, Dublin. He is also a visiting researcher at Les Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure, Paris working on the intersection of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He earned his PhD at the University of Sussex. Trigg is the author of three books: Body Parts (Paris: 3AM Press, 2012); The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); and The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). He is working on two more books, one on agoraphobia and another on the origins of life. The images of Shoreham Cement Works in this piece were captured by Dylan. For more of his photos, see his Tumblr.A music producer and DJ who uploaded a Beyonce album to the Internet in advance of its official release has been found guilty of copyright infringement. The 48-year-old, who initially put his neighbor in the frame by using her wi-fi connection, had a potential two-year jail sentence looming and Sony snapping on his heels demanding $233,000 in damages. Would this be victory for the IFPI and an example to all, or something rather different?
Difficulties associated with gathering evidence against BitTorrent users have led authorities in Sweden to concentrate on file-sharing cases where large-scale infringement can be more easily shown. That has been achieved by going after users of systems such as DirectConnect, where proving the distribution of thousands of tracks is a much easier prospect.
However, while going after individuals sharing an album or two on BitTorrent usually amounts to an endless and expensive task, music labels are very happy to make exceptions. One of the industry’s pet hates are album pre-releases, and for those they are prepared to commit significant resources.
One such case concluded yesterday dates back to early June 2011 when a copy of Beyonce’s album ‘4’ appeared online more than two weeks ahead of its official launch. An investigation carried out by the IFPI and anti-piracy company DtecNet (now MarkMonitor) led them to an IP address registered to a woman in Gothenburg. It was later established, however, that she was not the only one with access to her Internet account.
Also using her wireless connection was a neighbor, a then 47-year-old man. IFPI and Sony Music Entertainment said he uploaded the album to the Internet during June 8 2011, 16 days before the album’s June 24 launch.
Revelations that the man worked in the industry as a DJ and music producer added interest to the case, however it later became clear that he was not the source of the original leak. Torrent site records show the album was uploaded at least the day before but that didn’t matter to prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson, who stated that a pre-release is still a pre-release, no matter who released it first.
In interviews with the police the man protested his innocence, stating that he only believed he had been downloading the album for personal use, something he believed was permissible in Sweden.
“I had no idea when the Beyoncé album would be released, these days it’s almost impossible to know when the release takes place,” he explained. “If I downloaded the album illegally from a site such as The Pirate Bay, I would not have had a clue that it was a pre-release of the record or not.”
Of course, since BitTorrent is a two-way protocol he necessarily became an uploader too, something which exposed him as a pre-releaser of the album, despite his protests.
Earlier this month the man went to court for a two-day trial, with the now 48-year-old standing accused of breaches of copyright law. Hanging in the background was a huge $233,000 damages claim from Sony Entertainment, who said that the leak had not only damaged its marketing strategy and sales revenues, but had also hurt its relationship with Beyonce whose reputation had been damaged.
After much drama and deliberation, yesterday the sentence was handed down. The man was found guilty of copyright infringement but the verdict was hardly the scary affair the IFPI and Sony had hoped for.
In the event the court rejected imprisonment and handed down punishment based on the ‘day-fine’ system, which ranks the severity of the offense (in this case 80) and then multiplying that by the defendant’s daily income minus certain expenses.
Grand total – $1,200.
“They tried to make an example of me to intimidate both Swedish and foreign citizens,” said the 30 year veteran of the music industry. “Given that Swedish taxpayers have had to pay for this it smells a little bad.”
De-escalating matters further, it’s also believed that Sony has withdrawn its claim for damages. If true, that suggests that the music industry’s switch to chasing down BitTorrent users has proven just as time-consuming, costly and ineffective as observers believed it would.A Tour of Go Posted on Thursday, June 21, 2012.
Last week, I gave a talk about Go at the Boston Google Developers Group meeting. There were some problems with the recording, so I have rerecorded the talk as a screencast and posted it on YouTube.
Here are the answers to questions asked at the end of the talk.
Q. How does Go work with debuggers?
To start, both Go toolchains include debugging information that gdb can read in the final binaries, so basic gdb functionality works on Go programs just as it does on C programs.
We’ve talked for a while about a custom Go debugger, but there isn’t one yet.
Many of the programs we want to debug are live, running programs. The net/http/pprof package provides debugging information like goroutine stacks, memory profiling, and cpu profiling in response to special HTTP requests.
Q. If a goroutine is stuck reading from a channel with no other references, does the goroutine get garbage collected?
No. From the garbage collection point of view, both sides of the channel are represented by the same pointer, so it can’t distinguish the receive and send sides. Even if we could detect this situation, we’ve found that it’s very useful to keep these goroutines around, because the program is probably heading for a deadlock. When a Go program deadlocks, it prints all its goroutine stacks and then exits. If we garbage collected the goroutines as they got stuck, the deadlock handler wouldn’t have anything useful to print except "your entire program has been garbage collected".
Q. Can a C++ program call into Go?
We wrote a tool called cgo so that Go programs can call into C, and we’ve implemented support for Go in SWIG, so that Go programs can call into C++. In those programs, the C or C++ can in turn call back into Go. But we don’t have support for a C or C++ program—one that starts execution in the C or C++ world instead of the Go world—to call into Go.
The hardest part of the cross-language calls is converting between the C calling convention and the Go calling convention, specifically with the regard to the implementation of segmented stacks. But that’s been done and works.
Making the assumption that these mixed-language binaries start in Go has simplified a number of parts of the implementation. I don’t anticipate any technical surprises involved in removing these assumptions. It’s just work.
Q. What are the areas that you specifically are trying to improve the language?
For the most part, I’m not trying to improve the language itself. Part of the effort in preparing Go 1 was to identify what we wanted to improve and do it. Many of the big changes were based on two or three years of experience writing Go programs, and they were changes we’d been putting off because we knew that they’d be disruptive. But now that Go 1 is out, we want to stop changing things and spend another few years using the language as it exists today. At this point we don’t have enough experience with Go 1 to know what really needs improvement.
My Go work is a small amount of fixing bugs in the libraries or in the compiler and a little bit more work trying to improve the performance of what’s already there.
Q. What about talking to databases and web services?
For databases, one of the packages we added in Go 1 is a standard database/sql package. That package defines a standard API for interacting with SQL databases, and then people can implement drivers that connect the API to specific database implementations like SQLite or MySQL or Postgres.
For web services, you’ve seen the support for JSON and XML encodings. Those are typically good enough for ad hoc REST services. I recently wrote a package for connecting to the SmugMug photo hosting API, and there’s one generic call that unmarshals the response into a struct of the appropriate type, using json.Unmarshal. I expect that XML-based web services like SOAP could be framed this way too, but I’m not aware of anyone who’s done that.
Inside Google, of course, we have plenty of services, but they’re based on protocol buffers, so of course there’s a good protocol buffer library for Go.
Q. What about generics? How far off are they?
People have asked us about generics from day 1. The answer has always been, and still is, that it’s something we’ve put a lot of thought into, but we haven’t yet found an approach that we think is a good fit for Go. We’ve talked to people who have been involved in the design of generics in other languages, and they’ve almost universally cautioned us not to rush into something unless we understand it very well and are comfortable with the implications. We don’t want to do something that we’ll be stuck with forever and regret.
Also, speaking for myself, I don’t miss generics when I write Go programs. What’s there, having built-in support for arrays, slices, and maps, seems to work very well.
Finally, we just made this promise about backwards compatibility with the release of Go 1. If we did add some form of generics, my guess is that some of the existing APIs would need to change, which can’t happen until Go 2, which I think is probably years away.
Q. What types of projects does Google use Go for?
Most of the things we use Go for I can’t talk about. One notable exception is that Go is an App Engine language, which we announced at I/O last year. Another is vtocc, a MySQL load balancer used to manage database lookups in YouTube’s core infrastructure.
Q. How does the Plan 9 toolchain differ from other compilers?
It’s a completely incompatible toolchain in every way. The main difference is that object files don’t contain machine code in the sense of having the actual instruction bytes that will be used in the final binary. Instead they contain a custom encoding of the assembly listings, and the linker is in charge of turning those into actual machine instructions. This means that the assembler, C compiler, and Go compiler don’t all duplicate this logic. The main change for Go is the support for segmented stacks.
I should add that we love the fact that we have two completely different compilers, because it keeps us honest about really implementing the spec.
Q. What are segmented stacks?
One of the problems in threaded C programs is deciding how big a stack each thread should have. If the stack is too small, then the thread might run out of stack and cause a crash or silent memory corruption, and if the stack is too big, then you’re wasting memory. In Go, each goroutine starts with a small stack, typically 4 kB, and then each function checks if it is about to run out of stack and if so allocates a new stack segment that gets recycled once it’s not needed anymore.
Gccgo supports segmented stacks, but it requires support added recently to the new GNU linker, gold, and that support is only implemented for x86-32 and x86-64.
Segmented stacks are something that lots of people have done before in experimental or research systems, but they have never made it into the C toolchains.
Q. What is the overhead of segmented stacks?
It’s a few instructions per function call. It’s been a long time since I tried to measure the precise overhead, but in most programs I expect it to be not more than 1-2%. There are definitely things we could do to try to reduce that, but it hasn’t been a concern.
Q. Do goroutine stacks adapt in size?
The initial stack allocated for a goroutine does not adapt. It’s always 4k right now. It has been other values in the past but always a constant. One of the things I’d like to do is to look at what the goroutine will be running and adjust the stack accordingly, but I haven’t.
Q. Are there any short-term plans for dynamic loading of modules?
No. I don’t think there are any technical surprises, but assuming that everything is statically linked simplified some of the implementation. Like with calling Go from C++ programs, I believe it’s just work.
Gccgo might be closer to support for this, but I don’t believe that it supports dynamic loading right now either.
Q. How much does the language spec say about reflection?
The spec is intentionally vague about reflection, but package reflect’s API is definitely part of the Go 1 definition. Any conforming implementation would need to implement that API. In fact, gc and gccgo do have different implementations of that package reflect API, but then the packages that use reflect like fmt and json can be shared.
Q. Do you have a release schedule?
We don’t have any fixed release schedule. We’re not keeping things secret, but we’re also not making commitments to specific timelines.
Go 1 was in progress publicly for months, and if you watched you could see the bug count go down and the release candidates announced, and so on.
Right now we’re trying to slow down. We want people to write things using Go, which means we need to make it a stable foundation to build on. Go 1.0.1, the first bug release, was released four weeks after Go 1, and Go 1.0.2 was seven weeks after Go 1.0.1.
Q. Where do you see Go in five years? What languages will it replace?
I hope that it will still be at golang.org, that the Go project will still be thriving and relevant. We built it to write the kinds of programs we’ve been writing in C++, Java, and Python, but we’re not trying to go head-to-head with those languages. Each of those has definite strengths that make them the right choice for certain situations. We think that there are plenty of situations, though, where Go is a better choice.
If Go doesn’t work out, and for some reason in five years we’re programming in something else, I hope the something else would have the features I talked about, specifically the Go way of doing interfaces and the Go way of handling concurrency.
If Go fails but some other language with those two features has taken over the programming landscape, if we can move the computing world to a language with those two features, then I’d be sad about Go but happy to have gotten to that situation.
Q. What are the limits to scalability with building a system with many goroutines?
The primary limit is the memory for the goroutines. Each goroutine starts with a 4kB stack and a little more per-goroutine data, so the overhead is between 4kB and 5kB. That means on this laptop I can easily run 100,000 goroutines, in 500 MB of memory, but a million goroutines is probably too much.
For a lot of simple goroutines, the 4 kB stack is probably more than necessary. If we worked on getting that down we might be able to handle even more goroutines. But remember that this is in contrast to C threads, where 64 kB is a tiny stack and 1-4MB is more common.
Q. How would you build a traditional barrier using channels?
It’s important to note that channels don’t attempt to be a concurrency Swiss army knife. Sometimes you do need other concepts, and the standard sync package has some helpers. I’d probably use a sync.WaitGroup.
If I had to use channels, I would do it like in the web crawler example, with a channel that all the goroutines write to, and a coordinator that knows how many responses it expects.
Q. What is an example of the kind of application you’re working on performance for? How will you beat C++?
I haven’t been focusing on specific applications. Go is still young enough that if you run some microbenchmarks you can usually find something to optimize. For example, I just sped up floating point computation by about 25% a few weeks ago. I’m also working on more sophisticated analyses for things like escape analysis and bounds check elimination, which address problems that are unique to Go, or at least not problems that C++ faces.
Our goal is definitely not to beat C++ on performance. The goal for Go is to be near C++ in terms of performance but at the same time be a much more productive environment and language, so that you’d rather program in Go.
Q. What are the security features of Go?
Go is a type-safe and memory-safe language. There are no dangling pointers, no pointer arithmetic, no use-after-free errors, and so on.
You can break the rules by importing package unsafe, which gives you a special type unsafe.Pointer. You can convert any pointer or integer to an unsafe.Pointer and back. That’s the escape hatch, which you need sometimes, like for extracting the bits of a float64 as a uint64. But putting it in its own package means that unsafe code is explicitly marked as unsafe. If your program breaks in a strange way, you know where to look.
Isolating this power also means that you can restrict it. On App Engine you can’t import package unsafe in the code you upload for your app.
I should point out that the current Go implementation does have data races, but they are not fundamental to the language. It would be possible to eliminate the races at some cost in efficiency, and for now we’ve decided not to do that. There are also tools such as Thread Sanitizer that help find these kinds of data races in Go programs.
Q. What language do you think Go is trying to displace?
I don’t think of Go that way. We were writing C++ code before we did Go, so we definitely wanted not to write C++ code anymore. But we’re not trying to displace all C++ code, or all Python code, or all Java code, except maybe in our own day-to-day work.
One of the surprises for me has been the variety of languages that new Go programmers used to use. When we launched, we were trying to explain Go to C++ programmers, but many of the programmers Go has attracted have come from more dynamic languages like Python or Ruby.
Q. How does Go make it possible to use multiple cores?
Go lets you tell the runtime how many operating system threads to use for executing goroutines, and then it muxes the goroutines onto those threads. So if you’ve written a program that has four or more goroutines executing simultaneously, you can tell the runtime to use four OS threads and then you’re running on four cores.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy people find it to write these kinds of programs. People who have not written parallel or concurrent programs before write concurrent Go programs using channels that can take advantage of multiple cores, and they enjoy the experience. That’s more than you can usually say for C threads. Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, makes the point that thinking about concurrency in terms of communication might be more natural for people, since communication is something we’ve done for a long time. I agree.
Q. How does the muxing of goroutines work?
It’s not very smart. It’s the simplest thing that isn’t completely stupid: all the scheduling operations are O(1), and so on, but there’s a shared run queue that the various threads pull from. There’s no affinity between goroutines and threads, there’s no attempt to make sophisticated scheduling decisions, and there’s not even preemption.
The goroutine scheduler was the first thing I wrote when I started working on Go, even before I was working full time on it, so it’s just about four years old. It has served us surprisingly well, but we’ll probably want to replace it in the next year or so. We’ve been having some discussions recently about what we’d want to try in a new scheduler.
Q. Is there any plan to bootstrap Go in Go, to write the Go compiler in Go?
There’s no immediate plan. Go does ship with a Go program parser written in Go, so the first piece is already done, and there’s an experimental type checker in the works, but those are mainly for writing program analysis tools. I think that Go would be a great language to write a compiler in, but there’s no immediate plan. The current compiler, written in C, works well.
I’ve worked on bootstrapped languages in the past, and I found that bootstrapping is not necessarily a good fit for languages that are changing frequently. It reminded me of climbing a cliff and screwing hooks into the cliff once in a while to catch you if you fall. Once or twice I got into situations where I had identified a bug in the compiler, but then trying to write the code to fix the bug tickled the bug, so it couldn’t be compiled. And then you have to think hard about how to write the fix in a way that avoids the bug, or else go back through your version control history to find a way to replay history without introducing the bug. It’s not fun.
The fact that Go wasn’t written in itself also made it much easier to make significant language changes. Before the initial release we went through a handful of wholesale syntax upheavals, and I’m glad we didn’t have to worry about how we were going to rebootstrap the compiler or ensure some kind of backwards compatibility during those changes.
Finally, I hope you’ve read Ken Thompson’s Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. When we were planning the initial open source release, we liked to joke that no one in their right mind would accept a bootstrapped compiler binary written by Ken.
Q. What does Go do to compile efficiently at scale?
This is something that we talked about a lot in early talks about Go. The main thing is that it cuts off transitive dependencies when compiling a single module. In most languages, if package A imports B, and package B imports C, then the compilation of A reads not just the compiled form of B but also the compiled form of C. In large systems, this gets out of hand quickly. For example, in C++ on my Mac, including <iostream> reads 25,326 lines from 131 files. (C and C++ headers aren't “compiled form,” but the problem is the same.) Go promises that each import reads a single compiled package file. If you need to know something about other packages to understand that package’s API, then the compiled file includes the extra information you need, but only that.
Of course, if you are building from scratch and package A imports B which imports C, then of course C has to be compiled first, and then B, and then A. The import point is that when you go to compile A, you don’t reload C’s object file. In a real program, the dependencies are usually not a chain like this. We might have A1, A2, A3, and so on all importing B. It’s a significant win if none of them need to reread C.
Q. How do you identify a good project for Go?
I think a good project for Go is one that you’re excited about writing in Go. Go really is a general purpose programming language, and except for the compiler work, it’s the only language I’ve written significant programs in for the past four years.
Most of the people I know who are using Go are using it for networked servers, where the concurrency features have something contribute, but it’s great for other contexts too. I’ve used it to write a simple mail reader, file system implementations to read old disks, and a variety of other unnetworked programs.
Q. What is the current and future IDE support for Go?
I’m not an IDE user in the modern sense, so really I don’t know. We think that it would be possible to write a really nice IDE specifically for Go, but it’s not something we’ve had time to explore. The Go distribution has a misc directory that contains basic Go support for common editors, and there is a Goclipse project to write an Eclipse-based IDE, but I don’t know much about those.
The development environment I use, acme, is great for writing Go code, but not because of any custom Go support.
If you have more questions, please consult these resources.The ending of the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia is celebrated across the globe as a major royal gift to the women in the kingdom. Following King Salman’s decree, women will no longer need permission from a legal guardian to get a licence and will not need a guardian in the car when they drive. While many women will no doubt benefit from driving to work and taking children to school, the decision must be assessed in the context of an absolute monarchy championing women’s causes while only last week it detained more than 30 professionals, clerics, and activists for no reason other than to spread terror and intimidate.
Saudi Arabia to allow women to obtain driving licences Read more
Although freedom of movement is a universal right, Saudi women are still constrained. They cannot marry, work, study, travel or seek healthcare without the consent of their male guardians.
A Saudi woman cannot marry a foreigner without the consent of the interior ministry. She can never pass her nationality to her children, who need a visa to enter the kingdom. When a woman is abused by family members, she cannot rely on the government to seek justice, as official agencies hesitate to interfere in “family matters”. When they do, it is often on the side of the abusers.
In the last year, Saudi embassies abroad worked to return girls defined as “runaways”. These are abused girls who leave without the consent of their guardian. In Istanbul and Manila, authorities cooperated with Saudi agents who kidnapped so-called runaways and returned them to Saudi Arabia, where they faced detention. They cannot be freed until their guardian turns up to sign their release documents. Her guardian may have also been her abuser.
The Saudi state is one of the most male-dominated in the world. Now it is compelled to look as if it is treating women better to win over critics in the west. As a result, it has embarked on a series of cosmetic reforms. Increasing women’s employment is part of that package. Recently, women have been allowed to work as cashiers in supermarkets or as cooks. But there are also plans to appoint them to high-ranking positions. Yet we know from other countries that when such appointments have been made without serious political change, women have found it doesn’t lead to their empowerment. Women can never become equal citizens without real democratisation, but none of the Saudi reforms offer this.
History is littered with dictators who have promoted women, from Turkey’s Atatürk, the Iranian shah, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Appearing to support women has won dictators applause, especially in the west, where women’s rights have become an axis against which to measure nations and evaluate regimes.
Today’s authoritarian regimes will win extra praise when they appear to be liberating Muslim women from the oppression of Islam. Saudi Arabia is no exception. Here, Muslim women are depicted either as survivors of their patriarchal religion or as heroes who are challenging such a dominant and primitive culture. Like their counterparts in Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere, Saudi women had been framed in this binary image. Dictators conveniently depict themselves as liberators of these downtrodden women while society is shown to be the oppressor. In particular, in recent times, Islam and sharia law are portrayed as the cause of women’s suffering.
How cycling is keeping the fight for women’s rights moving in Saudi Arabia Read more
Such a narrative is appealing to both Arab dictators and certain constituencies in the west. But allowing women to obtain a driving licence is little more than a public relations stunt designed to cement this notion of the Saudi regime as the liberator of women.
Over the years, gender issues have become an important battleground across the Middle East. They have been cited as reasons for international intervention in the Muslim world, and have helped to sustain authoritarian regimes. Saudi women will soon find that while driving is very helpful, their full rights as citizens can only ever be achieved if they join with men to call for full inclusion in a regime that indefinitely detains its critics and activists, has no political representation, no elected national assembly, and no government.
• Madawi al-Rasheed is visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and author of A Most Masculine State: Gender, Religion and Politics in Saudi ArabiaAccording to tumblrblogger Justin Taylor, who first posted the photo, this is Emma Watson with gay porn actor Cameron Adams, who played a version of her Harry Potter character in one of his sodomy films. (No offense to gays, I just enjoy the term “sodomy film”). They met at the MTV Movie Awards, where the crowd is always at least 50% gay porn star*. (*made-up statistic).
This is a picture of Emma Watson with gay porn star Cameron Adams, who plays Hermione Granger’s spoof character, Himmione Grainghim, in Whorrey Potter and the Sorcerer’s Balls. When she found out this tidbit of information, she said it made her night.
Get it? It’s Hermione Granger, but with the “hers” changed to “hims.” (The extra ‘I’ stands for ‘I work in porn because I can’t spell.”) I imagine Himmione teams up with Schlong Weasely to battle the evil, tacky wizard, Vulvamort. See, I should be writing porn. They’re the only ones who appreciate the caliber of jokes I enjoy making.OTTAWA — Make that five in a row.
Canada’s economy continued to shrink in May, declining 0.2 per cent — well below analysts’ expectations — as output in the energy sector fell along with manufacturing activity, adding to concerns the country is headed for another recession.
[np_storybar title=”‘The quarter is looking ugly’: What economists are saying about Canada’s shrinking economy” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/the-quarter-is-looking-ugly-what-economists-are-saying-about-canadas-shrinking-economy”%5D
Economists, expecting no change in growth in May, were already gloomy about Canada’s chances of skirting a technical recession. Now they are really gloomy.
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“The Canadian economy isn’t out of the woods just yet,” said Nick Exarhos an economist at CIBC World Markets.
“Canadian manufacturing output is on a clear downtrend, and is now at levels that were last seen over a year ago. Factories took off roughly two ticks from monthly GDP, which was an even bigger hit than the energy sector provided,” he said after the release.
The consensus of economists was for a flat reading for gross domestic product in May, following a 0.1-per-cent decline the previous month. As well, GDP was down 0.2 per cent in March after losing 0.1 per cent in February and dropping 0.2 per cent the month before that, Statistics Canada said Friday.
Put another way, GDP overall has declined 0.8 per cent since December of last year, when the economy grew 0.4 per cent.
The five-month decline marks the longest slump since the 2008-2009 recession.
Beginning in 2015, the Canadian economy — and that of the United States — was hit by harsh winter conditions and the global collapse in oil prices, impacting output and investment in crude and depressing economic output, particularly in Alberta.
[np_storybar title=”How short sellers are building up a new front in their war on Canadian stocks” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/investing/how-short-sellers-are-building-up-a-new-front-in-their-war-on-canadian-stocks”%5D
The TSX has been weighed down the past year by commodities. But now it faces a new threat: foreign investors piling in to bet against Canada. Read on
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In Friday’s report, the federal data agency said May output fell 0.7 per cent in mining, and oil and gas extraction, while manufacturing lost 1.7 per cent. Wholesale trade was down one per cent.
The construction sector, which has swung between gains and losses, increased one per cent during the month. Declines were also widely spread among other sectors.
The Bank of Canada has cut its key lending rate twice this year, as the fallout from the collapse of energy prices was much bigger than predicted. The trendsetting rate is now at 0.5 per cent, but analysts have not ruled out additional cuts in the oil sector does not begin recovering.
The Canadian economy’s now five-month contraction puts it on course for a technical recession — generally seen a two consecutive quarterly declines. The last time the country was in recession was in 2008-09.
“All told another disappointing reading on the Canadian economy, though not enough to create the chance of a material downside miss versus the BoC’s already weak projection for the second quarter,” said CIBC’s Exarhos.
gisfeld@nationalpost.com
Twitter: gisfeldIrish universities have rejected claims by a business lobby that third-level education here was delivering graduates ill-prepared to enter business.
The Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme) yesterday said the universities were “failing industry” and called on the third-level sector to stop paying “lip-service” to entrepreneurship education. It should be part of their “core identity”.
It criticised the universities for their large classes, poor teaching methods, dry academic content and a lack of relevance for real business life. “The result is a graduate unfit for work, ill-prepared for business life and error prone,” it said.
Dublin City University president Prof Brian Mac Craith dismissed the claims yesterday saying entrepreneurship training was spreading through all faculties at graduate and post-graduate level.
The university had launched UStart in January, a programme that offered undergraduates an accelerated scheme to help them set-up and launch business ideas. This had the financial support of the J P Morgan Chase Foundation, Prof MacCraith said. Eight student teams were already working on the programme.
Last March the university became the first in Ireland to be designated an Ashoka Changemaker Campus, joining a network of colleges and universities supporting the field of social entrepreneurship in education, he said. The university now styled itself the “university of enterprise”.
The DCU Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship provided direct training but entrepreneurship was becoming a part of all degree programmes at the university, Prof MacCraith added.
University College Dublin also rejected Isme’s contention, saying that entrepreneurship was already a core part of education at the university. This type of training first became part of the postgraduate programme but had gradually been pulled back into the graduate and undergraduate curriculum, a UCD spokeswoman said. It was automatically provided as part of its business courses but also in science programmes at UCD, the idea being to help science students recognise the potential for the commercialisation of discoveries and the possibility of forming a business based on them.
Nova UCD, the university’s technology transfer centre, provided a range of courses and training in entrepreneurship, and UCD had joined with Trinity College Dublin to form the Innovation Alliance. This type of training was spreading across all faculties and into undergraduate programmes, the spokeswoman said.
Graduates reaching the jobs market were ill prepared, however, according to Isme chief executive Mark Fielding. “The number of complaints we get from members about the abilities of the young people coming out who just don’t have it,” he said, they were not “job ready. A little more interaction with industry would help”.
He recommended there should be more structured training, mentoring and on the job experience.Cameron's spokesman said the resolution will be put to the U.N. in New York later on Wednesday. Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
British diplomats consulted with the representatives of the four other veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, hoping to gain support for a draft resolution authorizing "all necessary measures" to protect Syrian civilians from chemical weapons. But Russia insisted that U.N. inspectors be allowed to complete their report into last week's suspected chemical weapons attack near Damascus before discussing any resolution.
The meeting coincided with growing urgency in calls in Western capitals for military action, although the Russian response underscores the expectation that Security Council authorization for imminent action is |
any time on black voters; there are no votes there under any conditions. Rand Paul went to Ferguson and Baltimore to talk racial healing: no one cared or even noticed.
The progressive approach has left American racial inequality intractable: a permanent, institutionalized, chronic, insoluble condition. And the electoral process has left black people without any political leverage.
This year's election is as racially polarized as any since 1860. This is one of many reasons why the two-party system needs cracking open. Say Hillary Clinton gets eight years; at the end we'll be just where we are now on race in America, or worse. I'd look for similar results if Trump wins. Perhaps the nightmare of race in America is still in its early phases.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on Twitter: @CrispinSartwellIt's official: Community is returning for a sixth season — on Yahoo Screen.
Studio Sony Pictures Television has revived Dan Harmon's cult comedy series for 13 new episodes to launch in the fall on Yahoo Screen, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Showrunner Harmon as well as stars Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Yvette Nicole Brown, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Ken Jeong and Jim Rash will return. Exec producers Russ Krasnoff, Gary Foster and Chris McKenna also will be back.
STORY NBC Cancels 'Community' After Five Seasons
The news comes after NBC canceled the ratings-challenged cult comedy in May, with Hulu said to be among the early suitors to revive the series.
"I am very pleased that Community will be returning for its predestined sixth season on Yahoo,” Harmon said in a statement Monday. “I look forward to bringing our beloved NBC sitcom to a larger audience by moving it online. I vow to dominate our new competition. Rest easy, Big Bang Theory. Look out, Bang Bus!”
Adds Mc Hale, " 'The reports of our cancelation have been greatly exaggerated.' — Mark Twain (The other version of this quote has been wrong for years). #SixSeasonsAndaMovie is real. Thank you Sony. Thank you Yahoo. Thank you Dan Harmon. And thank you to the greatest f%$#ing fans in the history of the human race. It’s the internet. We can swear now."
“Yahoo is all about connecting the best creators to the audiences who love their work. Community has an incredibly passionate and loyal fan base who have fought hard to keep this amazing show alive. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Dan, Joel and the entire cast, as well as Sony, to deliver a great season six,” said Kathy Savitt, CMO of Yahoo.
COVER STORY 'Community's' Dan Harmon Reveals the Wild Story Behind His Firing and Rehiring
"The fans spoke and we listened. Thanks to Yahoo, and the amazing team that makes Community great, we've avoided the Darkest Timeline yet again and plan to deliver a fantastic season," said Zack Van Amburg, president of programming and production at SPT.
The series hails from Krasnoff-Foster Entertainment and Harmonious Claptrap production in association with Universal Television and Sony Pictures Television.
SPT has a history of fighting for its original programming. The studio packaged Community with The Blacklist last year. SPT co-president Jamie Erlicht told THR on May 14 — a week after NBC canceled Community — that the studio had received phone calls from multiple outlets looking to revive the series. "If there's any show that should have a future or could have a future, it really feels like Community is the one."
Community already has a big online presence. Hulu has been the exclusive streaming home for the first five seasons of the series — ranking as one of the streaming service's most-watched originals. The service aired episodes the day after their original broadcast. Comedy Central airs syndicated repeats.
Meanwhile, outspoken showrunner Harmon — who was replaced for Community's fourth season — admitted to feeling "eh" at first when studio SPT floated the idea about the show living on elsewhere: "For a million reasons, some selfish, some creative, one logistic, five sexual, three racist (in a good way) and, oddly, nine isometric." But after several days, Harmon promised that he "won’t be lukewarm" about a revival should it become a serious conversation. "I said ‘eh’ on a Friday afternoon, I will change it to a ‘sure, let’s talk’ on Monday morning and Sony can do their thing,” he wrote. “I’m not going to be the guy that re-cancels canceled Community.”
PHOTOS Summer TV Preview
Harmon was careful to temper fan expectations about a Community return. "I’m scared to tell you how little a difference I think my enthusiasm will make," he wrote. "I know fandom, when it gets this deep for this long, becomes almost religious, including the urge to stone the less than faithful. But there are lots of reasons a Community resurrection could be difficult. So be prepared for that."
Community has been a perennial bubble series during the course of its five-season run. It was one of only two comedies to return to NBC's schedule for the 2014-15 season (Parks and Recreation was the other). NBC's decision to cancel Community left Parks as its longest-running comedy heading into the 2014-15 season. (That series, like Community, was held back for midseason, where the series will bow out with a 13-episode final run.)
For their part, Harmon and the cast have been vocal about the possibility of a sixth-season pickup. Speaking at PaleyFest in March, star McHale joked: "We know there's going to be a sixth season or else you'll probably show up with pitchforks and torches," with Harmon saying the only thing weirder than getting a sixth season "would be not getting a sixth season."
Yahoo — which found shortform success in 2012 with The Bachelor spoof Burning Love — unveiled its first two longform projects at April’s Digital Content NewFronts in New York. Other Space, from exec producer Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), follows a ragtag group of space explorers who find an alternate universe, and Sin City Saints, from director Bryan Gordon (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and exec producer Mike Tollin (Smallville), tells the story of a Las Vegas professional basketball team. The half-hour comedies, which both have eight episode orders, build on Yahoo’s plan to build a hub for comedy content, which began in August with the announcement that it would develop eight shortform comedy series to complement its library of Saturday Night Live clips.
“This is just the beginning,” Yahoo head of strategic video programs Bonnie Pan told THR during NewFronts. “Other Space and Sin City Saints are the first two original comedies in Yahoo’s new lineup of longform shows with more to come this year.”
Natalie Jarvey contributed to this report.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
Twitter: @SnooditCIA document details cover-up of drug trafficking by Contras
By Thomas Gaist
2 October 2014
An analysis written for the CIA's internal journal Studies in Intelligence, “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” attributed to Nicholas Dujmovic, reviews the efforts of the agency to contain a series of articles by journalist Gary Webb documenting relationships between the CIA and US-backed Contra rebels.
The article is part of a trove of CIA documents released on September 18 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
As shock troops in a US-backed war against the Nicaraguan government, the Contras carried out a reign of terror against Nicaragua's civilian population, killing tens of thousands. Support for the Contras by US intelligence was authorized by President Ronald Reagan, who instructed CIA head William Casey to “support and conduct … paramilitary operations” in Nicaragua in 1981.
The CIA began operations aimed at expanding the ranks of the Contra forces, which were recruited from elite military units of the Somoza regime and from layers of the peasantry. Arms shipments to the Contras were overseen by a secret cabal headed by Lt. Colonel Oliver North, despite a congressional prohibition.
Gary Webb in 1998
Webb's articles revealed that the US government continued to support Contra elements even with the knowledge that the latter were engaged in trafficking cocaine into major US cities and using the proceeds to finance their war against the Sandinista (FSLN) government of Nicaragua. Webb's investigation showed that representatives of the US-backed right-wing militias worked with gangs in Los Angeles to sell tons of cocaine, leading to speculation from other commentators that the CIA directed the flow of drugs to target black neighborhoods.
Reagan with cabinet members in the White House, 1986
“Managing a Nightmare” makes clear that the CIA utilized its extensive network of relations with the US media to discredit Webb's reporting by promoting the publication of stories in major news outlets attacking Webb's research. The paper's author, a CIA employee, concluded that the media relations campaign by the agency succeeded in containing the fallout from Webb's revelations.
“A review of the CIA drug conspiracy story—from its inception in August 1996 with the San Jose Mercury-News stories—shows that a ground base of already productive relations with journalists and an effective response by the Director of Central Intelligence's DCI Public Affairs Staff (PAS) helped prevent this story from becoming an unmitigated disaster,” Dujmovic wrote.
“By the end of September, the number of observed stories in the print media that indicated skepticism of the Mercury News series surpassed that of the negative coverage, which had already peaked. In fact, for three weeks the number of skeptical or positive pieces observed in the media constantly exceeded the number of negative treatments of the CIA,” Dujmovic found.
In some cases it is even possible, he noted, “to change the mind of a reporter whose initial inclinations toward CIA were negative but who is willing to listen to the other side of the story.”
Describing the methods used by the agency, Dujmovic explained that it was possible to spread the agency's carefully tailored perspective in the US media without even needing to directly plant stories in newspapers.
“Public Affairs cannot dictate stories to the media … What CIA media spokesmen can do, as this case demonstrates, is to work with journalists who are already disposed toward writing a balanced story … CIA Public Affairs can help the journalist with information he might not have or a perspective that might not have crossed his mind,” Dujmovic wrote.
Dujmovic went on to predict that the CIA would face an upsurge of public distrust in the coming decades, calling for greater moves to build the public relations capacities of the agency.
“There will be other public relations crises with which CIA will have to contend … If historians such as Samuel Huntington are correct …we can expect periodic displays of public distrust in government roughly every 20 to 30 years—and we are just beginning such as phase. In such times, even fantastic allegations about CIA … will resonate with, and even appeal to, much of American society. At those times, it is especially important to have a professional public affairs staff help limit the damage and facilitate more balanced coverage of CIA.”
Written under the heading “Societal Shortcomings,” one of Dujmovic's concluding paragraphs revealed the intellectual degeneration and contempt for democratic principles that rules within the power centers of the US government.
“Ultimately the CIA-drug story says a lot more about American society on the eve of the millennium that [sic] it does about either the CIA or the media. We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community,” Dujmovic wrote.
In reality, the story revealed the US media as eager attack dogs on behalf of the CIA's efforts to destroy Webb and bury the material he was bringing to light.
As the WSWS noted in its review of Webb's 1998 book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, “Dark Alliance is as much an exposure of the American media as of the American intelligence apparatus and the Nicaraguan Contras. It is no discredit to Webb's enterprise and intelligence to say that any serious and competent reporter, given the leads he was given, could have produced a similar exposé. That no other reporter did what Webb did demonstrates the largely controlled character of the American media.”
In a number of pieces aimed at burying the story, the major US newspapers reproduced CIA-concocted distortions of Webb's reporting, attributing to him more extreme claims made by talk radio hosts and others about the extent of direct CIA involvement, and dismissing his claims on this basis.
In its review of Webb's book, the New York Times proclaimed, “It is laughable to suggest that today's CIA has the imagination or the courage to manage a cover-up on the scale” suggested by Webb. In fact, as the newly released document clearly shows, the CIA mobilized a systematic public affairs campaign precisely to “manage” the “nightmare” caused by exposures of agency collaboration with drug traffickers to provide funds for an illegal dirty war
The Los Angeles Times responded to the Contra-cocaine story by forming a “get Gary Webb team” of some 17 journalists, who worked systematically to produce material discrediting Webb, according to comments made by Times reporter Jesse Katz during a 2013 radio interview.
Katz said that the Times reporters were instructed to search Webb's findings with a “microscope.” He added, “It was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the LA Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
The Washington Post joined the media counterattack against Webb, with an article which, as the WSWS wrote in its review of Webb's 1998 book, “parroted distortions of the series originally voiced by the US intelligence agencies (alleging, for instance, that Webb claimed the CIA had deliberately targeted black communities in promoting Contra cocaine trafficking).”
Reacting to the wave of attacks against Webb's series, the editor at Webb's employer, the Mercury News, published a repudiation of the articles, saying the paper had “fallen short” in its editorial responsibilities. Webb was never able to find employment again as a journalist, and died from an apparent suicide on December 9, 2004.
The practices described in the Dujmovic document were developed by the agency over decades. Operation MOCKINGBIRD, launched in the 1950s to disseminate CIA propaganda and overseen by Allen Dulles and later by Frank Wisner, cultivated a network of CIA-friendly journalists and developed cultural and student organizations to serve as fronts for the agency's ideological warfare operations.
In a 1977 expose for Rolling Stone, Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Bernstein reported that numerous leading news outlets including CBS, Time, Life Magazine, the Washington Post, the Washington Star and the Christian Science Monitor published reports passed directly to them from the CIA.
The report of the 1976 Church Committee acknowledged the use of such methods by the agency overseas, stating, “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”
Despite the CIA suppression of investigative reporting on the matter, many of the US government's own reports have confirmed significant involvement of the CIA with cocaine trafficking during the war.
The 1985 National Intelligence Estimate reported that top Contra leader Eden Pastora had links to traffickers. The Reagan administration acknowledged the existence of connections between the US-backed Contras and cocaine smuggling between 1985 and 86.
A CIA internal investigation acknowledged that the agency had worked with Contra elements involved in drug smuggling and that CIA agents “looked the other way” in order to further the political aims of the war.
“During the Contra era, CIA worked with a variety of people to support the Contra program,” CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz wrote in a report based on the internal investigation which he headed. “These included CIA assets, pilots who ferried supplies to the Contras, as well as Contra officials and others. Let me be frank about what we are finding. There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”
A report issued from a Senate hearing co-sponsored by John Kerry and Christopher Dodd acknowledged that at least $800,000 in State Department funds went to known drug traffickers, supposedly as payment for their services in shipping aid to the Contras.
“There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking,” said then Senator Kerry.
Circumstantial evidence abounds that the counter-revolutionary militias raised funds through drug sales inside the US. An investigation of the seizure of 430 pounds of cocaine in San Francisco led the San Francisco Examiner to report in 1986 that a “cocaine ring in the San Francisco Bay area helped finance Nicaragua's Contra rebels.” The Examiner quoted convicted cocaine smuggler Carlos Cabezas saying that his drug money went to support “the Contra revolution” and that he “just wanted to get the Communists out of my country.”
Former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Celerino Castillo stated that cocaine traffickers shipped drugs to the US with the knowledge of the CIA in planes departing from El Salvador's Ilopango Airport. Oscar Danilo Blandon testified to a grand jury that he smuggled cocaine into the US while working for the Contras and sold the drugs to dealers in Los Angeles.
In a strong indication of knowledge of the drug operations at the highest levels of the political and intelligence establishments, CIA director William Casey sought and Attorney General William French Smith signed a special exemption in February 1982 freeing the agency from legal requirements to report about the drug trafficking operations of its assets.
The Contra-cocaine story was only the latest in an extended pattern of collaboration between US covert operations and drug trafficking syndicates in South East Asia and Afghanistan. Writing about CIA involvement in the heroin trade in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, historian Alfred McCoy noted that “the CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”
“American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity, McCoy wrote in his work The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. “[E]mbassies had covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic. As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased.”
Relations between the US ruling elite and organized crime have flourished in the decades since the Contra war. In April 2006, the capture of a cocaine-laden DC9 owned by the Sinaloa cartel exposed money laundering operations by Wachovia bank on behalf of the massive cartel, which operates across more than 40 countries. The cartel, responsible for 25 percent of illegal drugs sold in the US, passed some $370 billion to Wachovia, investigators found.
Large infusions of drug money played a key role in stabilizing the finances of the big banks during the 2008 financial crisis, according to top UN official for drugs and crime Antonio Maria Costa. During a 2012 Al Jazeera interview, an official spokesman for the government of Mexico's Chihuahua province accused the CIA of “managing the drug trade.”
CIA crimes against Nicaragua went far beyond collaboration with drug traffickers, of course. The agency was directly involved in organizing death squads, subversion, murder and intimidation against the population of Nicaragua and Honduras as part of its war against the Sandinistas. US intervention included the creation of Honduras’ “Battalion 3-16,” which carried out extra-judicial killings and torture to suppress opposition to the US-backed Honduran regime and Contras, while under the leadership of the US-trained General Luis Elvir.
Webb's research was suppressed because it began to tear away the veil from this underworld of covert operations in which America's government, media and major banks function as a permanent conspiracy against the working class in all countries.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he has mixed feelings about the rise of third party, U.S.-style political action committees and the impact they could have on Canada’s political system.
Speaking in an interview with Quebec City radio station FM93, Harper was asked if he was concerned by the appearance of these groups, including HarperPAC, a political action group that includes a number of former Conservative government staffers.
“My attitude is a bit divided,” Harper told his interviewers, former Quebec cabinet minister Nathalie Normandeau and former Canadian Alliance aide Eric Duhaime.
“There is freedom of speech…but at the same time we limited donations to political parties to protect the integrity of the political system and now these groups can collect donations that are larger than that to do partisan things.”
“It is a difficulty but it is the law and it is the law that was determined by our predecessors and we have to live with that.”
At the same time, Harper suggested that the NDP and its leader, Tom Mulcair, are working with unions, which have begun running ads critical of his Conservative government.
“We have a law before Parliament to assure the transparency of union members’ money and Mr. Mulcair and the NDP oppose transparency in these unions because I am quite sure that the NDP is working very closely with those unions and their ads.”
That law, Bill C-377, is currently before the Senate, where Liberal senators have been trying to delay passage.
For years, Canada’s elections laws have capped the amount that individuals can donate to political parties or candidates and that political parties or third parties can spend during election campaigns. However, there is no limit on how much political parties or third parties can spend before the writ is dropped and the campaign officially begins.
That loophole in Canada’s elections laws has grown wider with the advent of Canada’s first fixed-date election. Whereas before, most parties and interest groups could only guess at when a prime minister would trigger an election, this time the date is known in advance.
The result has been the growth of interest groups on both sides of the political spectrum stepping up their spending in a bid to influence Canadians before the election campaign actually begins – leading to concerns on the part of experts like former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley that Canada could be headed towards the kinds of high spending elections seen in the United States.
Unions have banded together and plan to campaign against the Conservative government. The Canadian Labour Congress, for example, has launched its Better Choice campaign focusing on retirement security, jobs, health care and child care.
Lined up against the union effort is Working Canadians – a group that has launched ads attacking Justin Trudeau.
Conservative Voice is seeking donations, pointing out to businesses who are barred from donating directly to political parties that a donation can be considered a tax deductible expense for advocacy.
Engage Canada, launched by former Liberal and NDP staffers, is also seeking donations to fund ads and fact checks while HarperPAC launched this week with an anti-Trudeau attack ad.
None of the emerging groups will have to disclose how much they spend unless they choose to spend money during the actual election campaign period.
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Says Legal Action “Frivolous”, Plaintiff Hasn’t Suffered Loss.
On January 15, 2015 the $1 trillion lawsuit brought by New London Connecticut William Shanley was dismissed by United States District Judge Jeffrey Alker Meyer.
In December 2014 Shanley, an author and documentary filmmaker, filed two lawsuits against the Newtown Bee newspaper and several dozen major news media corporations for what he alleged was misleading and fraudulent coverage of the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre in Newtown Connecticut.
MHB readers suggested upon news of the suit being filed that Shanley would be hindered in bringing such an action because plaintiff did not suffer any loss and does not have standing to seek relief in court. When asked about the questionable grounds for such a suit in a December 29, 2014 interview Shanley responded that he was not seeking personal but rather punitive damages.
Punitive damages are halfway between civil and criminal. They’re basically designed in cases like O.J. Simpson, where they couldn’t get a conviction at criminal trial, where the bar of evidence is lower at a civil case … The court has standing because it is a violation of federal laws. I am a citizen of Connecticut and of the United States. I have standing just on that basis. Any citizen can do this.
In fact, Judge Meyer’s dismissal order asserts that Shanley sought to use federal criminal statues “that are without a civil enforcement provision and that … may not serve as the basis for a civil lawsuit.”
“In short, plaintiff’s claims are frivolous and furnish no plausible or conceivable grounds for relief,” Meyer’s order reads. “Accordingly, the complaint is DISMISSED pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B). Plaintiff’s motion to proceed in forma pauperis (Doc. #2) and motion to participate in electronic filing (Doc. #5) are DENIED as moot in light of the dismissal of this action.”
On December 31, 2014 Shanley was arrested on one felony and two misdemeanor counts. He has pleaded not guilty. Mr. Shanley is presently being held in the Corrigan-Radgowski correctional facility in Connecticut in lieu of a $50,000 bond, with a pre-trial court date is February 4, 2015.
via:
thesleuthjournal.comWith homelessness continuing to rise, Seattle and King County need to employ both patience and innovation.
THIS is now a bleak annual ritual. King County learned this week what residents already know: Homelessness is getting worse. There are more than 11,600 homeless people in tents, cars and shelters on any given night.
For the sixth year in a row, the federally mandated point-in-time count of the homeless came in higher than the previous year’s. However, a change to a more comprehensive counting methodology by All Home King County, the countywide homeless coordinating board, renders comparisons to the past tenuous.
Nevertheless, by every measure, homelessness is worse.
It’s getting worse in other West Coast cities too. Los Angeles’s point-in-time count, also released last week, found a 23 percent jump despite a massive surge in spending on homeless interventions.
Patience is painful when it comes to homelessness strategies. As election season nears, candidates for Seattle mayor and City Council should embrace the plan and give it a chance to work before tossing it out...”
However, a silver lining in the King County count suggests that focused strategies can work. Homeless families rightly became a target of intense work, with high-profile philanthropic donations by Amazon and others supplementing reforms in government resources. The result: the count found 2,752 people in families in shelters versus just 81 living in tents, cars or the street. At least the parents with kids are mostly inside.
Other reforms are still underway, but it may take a few more bleak annual rituals to see if those are really going to work. Those reforms began last year when King County, Seattle, All Home and United Way funded consultants to pick apart current spending and to find a better plan.
The new plan emphasizes strategies based on data, not just on good intentions. It calls for emergency shelters with more social workers and less of “a hot and a cot” approach, and for using more cost-effective rental vouchers to get people quickly off the street. But those new strategies are just getting underway, aided by Seattle’s massive surge in spending.
Patience is painful when it comes to homelessness strategies. As election season nears, candidates for Seattle mayor and City Council should embrace the plan and give it a chance to work before tossing it out, especially in favor of an ever-larger surge in spending on strategies that have not made a dent.
The point-in-time count does spotlight a few areas that could use more attention.
First, more than 40 percent of the 5,484 people counted as unsheltered — not under a roof — were living in vehicles, by far the most common method of camping. Yet neither the new plan nor the old ones have a comprehensive strategy for getting them inside. Without a plan, they are left to drift among neighborhoods, in limbo, perpetuating the status quo.
Second, the new plan’s reliance on rental vouchers is struggling. Nearly 40 percent of the “Rapid Rehousing” vouchers issued to homeless people are not fulfilled. The superheated rental market certainly does not help, but Seattle is failing in its role of connecting the homeless and landlords. An open bid for a “landlord liaison” with private-market experience fizzled — leaving a disappointing gap in a critical component of the new plan. The Seattle City Council’s demonization of landlords undoubtedly doesn’t help.
Third, cities throughout the region need to treat this as a regional problem — not a Seattle problem. Citizen opposition to a new shelter in Bellevue, which that council approved, and to other treatment and mental-health facilities countywide, ignores the data from the point-in-time count: homelessness is everywhere in King County.
We can and must do better by our neighbors who fall into homelessness.If you’re a comics loving feminist on the Internet, then you probably have a passing familiarity with Escher Girls and the sometimes snarky, oftentimes insightful work they do. If you’re a comic book artist who doesn’t understand the difference between defamation and constructive criticism (or copyright infringement and fair use, for that matter), Escher Girls is the bane of your existence. And, unfortunately, now the site is facing unfounded legal action from one particularly upset artist.
Named after the graphic artist known for his impossibly angled staircases, Escher Girls analyzes the accuracy (and, more often, inaccuracy) of the illustrated women of comic books, advertisements, video games, and other fictional representations. Topics discussed include to women who all have the exact same face, spines that appear to be broken, and our favorite, the boobs and butt pose.
However, Randy Queen of Darkchylde apparently took issue with the way his art was being scrutinized, filed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests with Tumblr and got every single post Escher Girls had ever put up about his comics removed, including reblogged “redrawings” of scenes from the comic—though there are some still up now which don’t include the original image.
When blog admin Ami Angelwings was informed of Tumblr’s decision (in an e-mail, above), she announced his actions on Tumblr to warn other blogs who might have criticized his work, and advised fans not to harass him on the blog’s behalf. That post was also briefly taken down by another DMCA request—despite having no images in it which fall under Queen’s copyright—and all reblogs of it up to that point were removed as well. When reached for comment, a representative from Tumblr informed us at The Mary Sue that this post was removed “in error,” and has now been completely restored. The reblogs which occurred prior to its removal, however, are still missing.
But that’s not all: Queen also privately threatened to sue Ami for defamation, sending her an email which invoked the “right to protect the perception of my IP” (which, as Techdirt notes, is not a right copyright holders have).
In the past few days he’s also sent more emails accusing Angelwings of instigating harassment towards him, threatening to sue her for content found in the Escher Girls comments section and for even talking about him publicly in the first place.
[Updated clarification: while Queen has sent more emails to Ami, the below tweets only reflect the statements made in his original e-mail, above. “Kim,” who is listed alongside “Eschergirls,” is a disqus commenter on the site.]
Hmm, Randy Queen has now sent me an email threatening me with legal action if I don’t stop talking about him period. — Ami Angelwings (@ami_angelwings) August 4, 2014
He’s also threatened me with a defamation lawsuit if my commenters continue to talk about him. — Ami Angelwings (@ami_angelwings) August 4, 2014
After these series of events, it should be abundantly clear that Queen’s goal is not to protect his copyright: rather, he appears committed to manipulate copyright law into removing any and all possible criticisms against his art. The analysis that Escher Girls does falls squarely into fair use, which holds that any reproductions of a copyrighted piece of material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research,” are not considered an “infringement of copyright.” Using the DMCA to remove fair use content in this way amounts to censorship, and has done more to hurt Queen’s reputation than his original drawings ever could.
When we reached out, Angelwings declined to comment on the situation on the advice of her current legal council, but is on record as saying she would have happily taken down the posts herself if she had received notice from the artist. On the about me page, she stresses the goal of Escher Girls is not to shame individual artists for problems in their work: it’s to shame the art community at large for prioritizing sexual attractiveness over basic concepts like anatomy and physics. She writes:
Just because something shows up on Escher Girls doesn’t mean I think the series is terrible, or I hate the character, or that nobody should buy/play/watch/read it. Often I’m just noting something I find ridiculous or amusing in an image, and I’m not making a comment on the rest of the series. I’ve said this a lot before. A thing can contribute to an overall way that women are portrayed in media, (and collecting them to show how often they occur is part of the point of this blog) but it doesn’t mean I’m condemning the show/comic/toy series/etc, saying that it’s inherently broken and must be ignored, or that fans of it are bad people.
In fact, Escher Girls spends a large amount of time providing drawing resources to budding artists, and has a lot of support from industry insiders and other notable geeks:
I have had books I worked hard on featured on @escher_girls and the response I had was, “Well, they were right on that one.” — Gail Simone (@GailSimone) August 5, 2014
@GailSimone @escher_girls hey, my piece was there once, and i laughed my ass off and wholeheartedly agreed XD i drew some crazy ass anatomy — stjepan sejic (@stjepansejic) August 5, 2014
I see today that two of the top five Google listings for “Randy Queen” are about him being a jerk. Streisand Effect: Still in effect. — John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 5, 2014
We also reached out to Queen for comment, but have yet to hear back. We will update if we do.
Update: Speaking of industry insiders speaking out, we’re, uh just gonna leave this here.
Not a response I would recommend RT @Robot6: Randy Queen responds to critics with takedown notices, legal threat http://t.co/DYRMumi5om — robertliefeld (@robertliefeld) August 5, 2014
Previously in Censorship
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, & Google +?Producer calls it the most important archaeological finding in the history of mankind.
MEXICO CITY -- An underwater Maya city, a millennia-old landing pad once used for spacecraft, and human contact with extraterrestrials. These may sound like the makings of a blockbuster Hollywood film, but they're actually the alleged discoveries behind the documentary Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond.
Los Angeles-based producer Raul Julia-Levy, the son of late actor Raul Julia, is billing the movie as a game-changer.
"It is the most important archaeological finding in the history of mankind," he says. "It's going to open the eyes of humanity and elevate the consciousness of every human being on the planet. I guarantee it."
Revelations is set to begin production next month deep in the jungles of Mexico's Gulf coast state of Campeche, at the Maya ruins of Calakmul. Julia-Levy, who is producing alongside Ed Elbert (Paraiso Travel), says the mother of all secrets will be revealed at the Calakmul archaeological site, though he declined to specify what could possibly trump the aforementioned findings.
The underwater Maya city, which Julia-Levy describes as "a city that was built under water, and not a sunken city," was found at the bottom of a lake in Guatemala, according to the producer. He says audiences will see underwater shots of the city.
Further stretching the mind, the actor-turned-producer claims the documentary also unveils a 3,000-year-old spacecraft landing pad that was allegedly built atop a rock structure capable of holding electromagnetic energy.
Julia-Levy won't divulge the production company and distributor backing the 3D documentary, though he says they are "major" Hollywood players. An official announcement of the project is expected in the coming weeks, and a tentative release date has been set for August.
A collaboration between archaeologists, scientists and the governments of Mexico and Guatemala, Revelations is the fruit of a decade of research that purportedly draws on classified information.
Initially, acclaimed Mexican documentarian Juan Carlos Rulfo (Those Who Remain) was attached to the project, but he recently exited the venture due to conflicting schedules with his other films. Producers have yet to announce his replacement.
The documentary comes at a time when the Yucatan Peninsula has seen a flurry of Maya-themed productions. Some depict apocalyptic scenarios tied in to alleged prophecies that hinge on the end of the Maya calendar.
Experts have dismissed such notions. They point out that Dec. 21, 2012, the exact date when the 5,126-year calendar cycle comes to an end, in no way signals Armageddon. In fact, they argue that the calendar resets with each new cycle. But that hasn't stopped many TV producers from focusing on the doomsday aspect.
In recent years, TV crews from Mexico and the world over have flocked to Maya turf to explore the matter first-hand. Nat Geo, Discovery Channel and History are just some of the production companies that have filmed on location in the region.
Even the Mexican government is seizing the moment to make a strong push to promote tourism with an ambitious cultural program dubbed Mundo Maya.
"It's exploding in all directions," says Rene Blanco, head of production at Cancun-based production services company Riviera Maya Films. "It's going to be a huge year because everybody is working to exploit the end of the world theory."
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174%) 12 hours after large intakes of ethanol [72]. That being said, another study using 0.675 g/kg of ethanol noted that testosterone increased and was more sensitive to being increased by gonadotropin releasing hormone, suggesting multiple pathways may be at play [73]. Red Wine may also confer additional benefits through its phenolic content, as Quercetin (A plant-derived antioxidant flavonoid found in red wine, green tea, onions, apples and leaf vegetables [74]. It has been reported that decreases oxidative DNA damage induced by reactive oxygen species, such as H2O2 and tert-butylhydroperoxide. Thus, dietary consumption of quercetin can reduce the risk of multiple diseases associated with oxidative stress [75]. It has been also been reported to possess unique anti-apoptotic proprieties in male germ cells [76]) appears to be glucuronidated by the enzyme UGT2B17 in place of testosterone (sacrificial substrate) and may indirectly increase testosterone [77]. Though, this study was in vitro and Quercetin has low bioavailability. Higher doses of ethanol, 1.5 g/kg (average dose of 120 g), have been demonstrated to suppress testosterone by 23% when measured between 10–16 hours after acute ingestion with no statistical significant difference between 3 and 9 hours of measurement. It appeared that ethanol suppressed a rise of testosterone that occurred in the control group which may have been based on the circadian rhythm [78]. Another study using higher dosages (1.75 g/kg over 3 hours) noted that after 48 hours a small short-lived dip occurred, but a higher statistically significant drop was seen at 12 hours which was mostly corrected after 24 hours from ingestion (still significantly less than control) and completely normalized at 36 hours. By 12 hours, the overall reduction in testosterone was measured at 27% while the overall decrease in testosterone at 24 hours was 16% [72]. A third study using vodka at a dose of 2.4 ml/kg bodyweight in 15 minutes (to spike BAC up to 109+/−4.5 mg/100 mL, similar to the aforementioned 1.75 g/kg study) noted suppressed testosterone levels correlating with the BAC peak, observed 84 minutes after ingestion [79]. This time delay seen in some studies, when put in social context, correlates with the observed lower serum testosterone levels seen with hangovers [80]. Finally, an intervention in which ethanol was supplied intravenously (via catheter) to keep a breath ethanol level of 50 mg%, noted that free testosterone was suppressed at this level of intake in young (23+/−1) men only, with young women experiencing an increase in testosterone and older (59+/−1) men and women having no significant influences [81]. Around the 1.5 g/kg or higher ethanol intake, it appears that a dose-dependent decrease of testosterone occurs and appears to occur with some degree of time delay up to 10 hours after consumption. However, the acute intake of ethanol of about 1.5 g/kg suppresses the production of testosterone within one hour through a decrease in Luteinizing hormone (LH) release [82]. The study of Cicero et al. used shots of vodka and noted this suppression of testosterone occurring within 90 minutes though. In ethanol abusers, the chronic high intake of ethanol appears to be negatively correlated with circulating testosterone at rest; with longer duration and higher intakes of ethanol leading to less testosterone [83]. As suggested by Heikkonen and Barnes [67, 84] the decreased testosterone levels might have been due to differences in ethanol administration (dosage/timing). Hormonal levels of testosterone have also been measured after heavy resistance exercise [85]. Participants consumed either 1.09 g/kg of grain ethanol per kilogram lean mass (EtOH group) or no ethanol post exercise (placebo group). Peak blood ethanol concentration (0.09 ± 0.02 g · dL) was reached within 60–90 min post exercise. Total testosterone and free testosterone were elevated significantly immediately after exercise in both groups. At 140–300 min post exercise, total testosterone and free testosterone levels as well as free androgen index were significantly higher only in the EtOH group. The study demonstrated that during the recovery period from heavy resistance exercise, post exercise ethanol ingestion affects the hormonal profile including testosterone concentrations and bioavailability [85]. A number of studies have highlighted the decrease in testosterone levels after ethanol consumption by synthesis inhibition and release of testosterone by the testes [13, 14, 84, 86]. The mechanism of ethanol suppressing testosterone levels sub-chronically is via its actions as a testicular toxin, where it can reduce testosterone synthesis rates with no negative influence on the hypothalamus signals to the testes [83, 87]. Ethanol locks the functionality of Leydig cells [88] and it has been shown that necrotic Leydig cells were evident after chronic ethanol consumption [88–90]. Although, in females, the production and release of androgens occurs outside the gonads. Therfore the action of ethanol on LH levels on Leydig cells is irrelevant. Testosterone production occurs in the adrenal glands as an intermediate in the synthesis of cortisol. Ethanol stimulates adrenal gland activity [91] and increased levels of ethanol consequently results in an increase in androgen hormones in females [92, 93].
Main findings There appears to be a dose dependency in the hormonal response. All the studies that analyzed testosterone using a dose lower than 1.5 g/kg show an increase in the circulating levels of the hormone. Conversely all those using higher dosages (1.5 g/kg ) show a decrease. It also seems that the decrease can only be seen in men while an increase is evident in women.
Estrogen A three week intervention in middle aged men and post-menopausal women drinking 30-40 g of alcohol daily noted that in both genders there was no significant influence of this dose of ethanol on circulating estrogen levels [94]. Another study measuring serum levels during hangover (induced by 1.5 g/kg ethanol the night prior) noted less circulating estrogen levels associated with hangover [80] yet another study using similarly high levels of 1.75 g/kg ethanol noted no significant influence of ethanol on estrogens for the next 48 hours measured, if anything a slight trend to decrease estrogens was noted [72]. There is a strong possibility though that ethanol increases the aromatization of androgens [95]. Ginsburg and collegues have shown that ethanol consumption can increase estradiol levels by up to 300% [96] as changes in hepatic redox states associated with the catabolism of ethanol [96] and so lead to hormonal imbalances with further decreases in anabolic hormones [97, 98].
Main findings Two studies show no difference between estrogen levels before and after alcohol consumption. Although at higher doses than those used in the previous mentioned studies contradictive results show an increase in women and a decrease in men.
Cortisol 72 2 72 99 After consumption of 1.75 g/kg ethanol, a spike in cortisol is seen at 4 hours and persists for up to 24 hours after consumption, normalizing at 36 hours []. At 4 hours, the greatest spike of cortisol seen, was measured to be 152% higher than control and this increase in cortisol does not appear to correlate to the decrease in testosterone as shown in Figure]. Ethanol furthermore increases the level of cortisol through the release of ACTH [15, 100, 101]. Murphy et al. [102] analyzed the influence of ethanol consumption during competitive rugby league matches recovery. The researchers found a significant increase in cortisol levels with no changes in the level of testosterone [102].
Main findings Studies show an increase in the level of cortisol. It is not clear if this increase is due to the stress that the organism undergoes as a consequence of alcoholic ingestion or to an increase in the level of ACTH.
Growth and Luteinizing hormones Physiological and sport induced alterations are well documented in the literature regarding GH and LH [103, 104], but little is known about their kinetics after ethanol consumption. Ylikahri et al. [105] found that ethanol had no significant effects on basal concentrations of GH after administration of a large dose of ethanol (1.5 g/kg BW). Contrary to Ylikahri, Tentler et al. [106] identified that ethanol caused prolonged and severe decrease in serum GH, possibly mediated at secretion level. Another study indicates that GH does not appear to have its pulse amplitude influenced by ethanol for up to 20 hours after ingestion of a large dose (1.5 g/kg) of ethanol acutely in otherwise healthy men. However, pulse frequency during these 20 hours was slightly but significantly reduced (from 4.7+/−0.2 to 3.8+/−0.3) [78]. Ethanol inhibits the release of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) at an hypothalamic level. With a signaling role on the pituitary gland of GnRH to release LH, an increase in BAC consequently leads to a decrease in LH levels which in turn partially results in lower testosterone production in adults and adolescents [13, 84, 100, 101].A number of militants involved in those earlier attacks had roots in Morocco, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a ringleader of the Paris attacks; the brothers Salah and Ibrahim Abdeslam, who were among the Paris attackers; Mohamed Abrini, who accompanied two suicide bombers in the airport attack; Najim Laachraoui, a bomb maker who blew himself up at the airport; and the brothers Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, who died in the Brussels bombings. Salah Abdeslam and Mr. Abrini are being held while awaiting trial.
In addition, two of the three men who carried out the attack on and around London Bridge in June were Moroccan.
About 100,000 people with Moroccan citizenship live in Belgium, which has a population of 11 million. Moroccan-Belgians are the country’s largest minority group with roots outside the European Union.
Many Moroccan men were recruited in the 1960s to work in Belgium’s mines and factories on temporary contracts but stayed on, eventually joined by their families. Many then became Belgian citizens, and it is their children or grandchildren — albeit only a tiny fraction of the population — who have sometimes been drawn to jihadist ideology.
Often, according to experts who have studied the phenomenon, future militants start with petty crime and then search for an identity as a way to frame their illicit activity, or to atone for past misdeeds.
Islamic State supporters come from many backgrounds: The man who attacked police officers outside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on June 6 was an Algerian, and the man who rammed into a police convoy on the Champs-Élysées on Monday was a French citizen.
Oussama Z., born in 1981, had lived for several years in Molenbeek, which was also the home of some of those connected to other attacks in the city and in Paris.We’ve done seemingly countless stories in which the only reason a company paid attention to a wronged consumer was the involvement of the media. And in most cases where this happens, the customer’s problem is finally resolved, never to crop up again. But that’s not always true.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff Gelles has not one, but two tales of Comcast customers who thought their problems were behind them only to have the issues come back from the dead.
The first horror story involved a man who, after 25 years as a loyal Comcast customer, moved and was unable to get anyone from Comcast to actually come out and install service at his new home. If that weren’t bad enough, Comcast billed him $215 for the non-existent service.
After the Inquirer got Comcast HQ on the phone, the customer was led to believe that his account had been squared and he could move on with his Comcast-free life.
But then he got a $292 debt collection notice from a Texas-based agency. Again, the Inquirer had to call up Comcast HQ where a rep now says the collection has been canceled and won’t affect his credit report.
“His collection was being processed simultaneously with the resolution,” a rep told Gelles about how the customer ended up in collections.
A second Comcast customer wrote Gelles in January saying she cancelled her Comcast service two months earlier and returned all her equipment, but was still being billed for more than $600.
Gelles forwarded her issue on to Comcast HQ, which initially seemed to resolve things. She says her $600 bill was changed to a $48 credit. But now she says Comcast is coming after her for $50.
And once again the Inquirer had to become involved, contacting Comcast to nudge the company to look into why no one could possibly do basic math.
At this point, it appeared as if Comcast is just wiping the slate clean on this account, saying the customer didn’t owe them anything and she wasn’t owed anything. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was better than nothing.
But even after receiving multiple calls from Comcast reps confirming that her account had been zeroed out, the customer got a bill earlier this month for around $1.50.
Calls to Comcast resulted in no explanation and unfulfilled promises for calls back.
Finally, after a third intervention by Gelles, a Comcast rep swears that the account is now clear of any debt.Sunrun has assumed ownership of some or all of bankrupt Sungevity's solar financing agreements, according to an email obtained by GTM.
You'll recall Sungevity as the richly funded startup that promised an "awesome" solar sales experience, but ended up declaring bankruptcy in March of this year.
Here's an excerpt from the email.
As you may have heard, your original solar service provider, Sungevity, has filed for bankruptcy and will no longer be servicing your solar electric system.
No need to worry, the agreement you originally signed with Sungevity has been transferred to Sunrun. Now, Sunrun will be your solar service provider and will take care of you by offering you the same worry-free service -- we will own the solar system and be responsible for monitoring and maintaining the solar system for the full duration of your 20-year agreement.
And the email itself.
Sungevity spent a decade searching for a residential solar business plan, losing almost half a billion dollars in the process. The company filed for Chapter 11 protection in March and entered into a $50 million court-ordered "asset purchase agreement" led by Northern Pacific Group. The sale followed several rounds of staff reductions that mistreated employees with ambush layoffs, no severance and bounced paychecks.
Sungevity's market share peaked at 2.5 percent in 2014 and fell to 1.6 percent in Q3 2016. Total capacity installed peaked in Q1 2016, according to GTM Research data.
During the bankruptcy proceedings, a Sungevity leasing customer wrote in a court document: "My concern is that the assets I have leased from the company will be sold and my rights negatively impacted from such a transfer. I entered into my lease agreement in good faith that both parties would honor the terms of said agreement. I paid upfront all my lease costs for the entire term. I would expect any buyer to honor that payment and all other terms of my agreement. I contacted Sungevity immediately upon receiving the court notice of the proposed sale."
The customer wrote that Sungevity "responded quickly, stating that the sale should have no effect on my lease," according to a letter (PDF) in a court docket.
And so Sunrun, as well as Mosaic, are going to be the caretakers of those rooftops. (Sunrun CEO Lynn Jurich talks about the future of the residential solar market here.)
Solar loan provider Mosaic posted this on its website in May.
Q: I had a signed contract with Sungevity. What’s going to happen with my project?
A: One of our core values at Mosaic is to be a steward of our planet and customers. To that end, we’ve advocated fiercely on your behalf for Solar Spectrum (the company that acquired Sungevity’s assets) to support the warranties that you signed up for. The good news is we have been successful in most cases. Solar Spectrum has stepped up and agreed to honor at least part of the Sungevity warranties, and the specific details of coverage will depend on your individual situation:
Contracts signed prior to the formal bankruptcy date of March 13, system has reached PTO, Mosaic loan is fully funded. Borrower gets a 7 year warranty as a direct result of negotiation by Mosaic.
Partially funded loan, pre-PTO. The full Sungevity agreement will be honored by Solar Spectrum.
Signed agreement, installation has not commenced. Solar Spectrum will either honor the existing agreement or sign a new one with new terms.
Whatever is left of Sungevity has been renamed Solar Spectrum and will no longer be offering third-party financing.In the 13 years since 9/11, Americans have grown accustomed to the ambiguity of U.S. efforts to deter, disrupt, and preempt the threats posed by a shape-shifting cast of terrorist groups. The ebbs and flows of America's inexorable counterterrorism campaigns have produced a tangled web of terminology. For evidence, take a look at the many ways the New York Times homepage referred to Obama's intervention on Thursday:
New York Times
What Obama didn't quite foresee at National Defense University in 2013 was a group like ISIS, which had yet to split with al-Qaeda and seize vast tracts of territory. Instead, his vision of terrorism's future included "lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates; threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad; [and] homegrown extremists." The United States, he said, could not combat these actors with force alone:
We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war—through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments—will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.
Obama also called for the repeal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against "those responsible" for the 9/11 attacks—language often interpreted as referring to al-Qaeda and its "associated forces." If America had adopted a perpetual war footing, he argued, the AUMF was the foundation on which it stood.
This week, however, perpetual war appeared to get the best of Obama. Administration officials are reportedly invoking the AUMF as a legal justification for the U.S. campaign against ISIS. As The Daily Beast's Eli Lake explains, that means, incredibly, that a resolution designed to justify attacks on al Qaeda-linked groups "would also apply to a terrorist organization that is itself at war with al Qaeda." The definition of "those responsible" for 9/11 expands and explodes. The perpetual war continues. What Obama might have called "war footing" in 2013, he described Wednesday as a "comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy."
The question of whether the AUMF applies to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Syria is part of a larger debate over whether the campaign is lawful, and whether it requires congressional authorization. But that debate, in turn, is partially a reflection of the merging of peacetime and wartime, and the resulting confusion about which legal frameworks apply to which actions.
The boundary between peace and war was already dissolving in 2002, when The West Wing aired an episode on this very phenomenon. In the scene below, Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, the joint chiefs chairman, makes the case for killing the defense minister of the fictional Middle Eastern country of Qumar, who is believed to be plotting terrorist attacks against the United States.The Gandhis and the Congress definitely look ugly when they mix up a rather private court matter with matters of Parliament. They have been getting a bad press, political parties, even friendly ones, are wary of their tactic and well-wishers of the economy are unhappy at their stalling tactic in the Upper House. Yet you can trust them not to stop their disruptive ways, GST, economic reforms and critics be damned.
They have many excuses for stalling Parliament, some stated, others not, some unreasonable, others downright illogical. They did it when we were in power, didn’t they? Isn't the government hounding us? Isn’t Subramanian Swamy a BJP member? We have heard it all, and in the final analysis nothing justifies stalling of Parliament. If the BJP was being irresponsible during UPA II, that's all the more reason for the Congress to show restraint and maturity in its conduct; the National Herald case began when the Congress-led government was in power and it’s a matter of the court now; and the likes of Swamy and Ram Jethmalani have minds independent of the parties they belong to.
It is understandable that the Congress would be prickly about the Gandhis - the family name has stopped getting the votes or raise expectations among the masses, but it still serves as the glue that holds the faction-ridden party together. Neither Sonia nor Rahul has proved to be a mass leader with a vision, yet if the party has to survive in the states where it is still alive it has to bank on their appeal. But what about the Gandhis themselves?
They have decided to make the National Herald case a high-stakes personal battle. Obviously, some thinking has gone into that. They are either too sure that they would come unscathed in the case, in which case they have to milk it to the maximum for positive perception building or they are aware that things are dicey, in which case they have to prepare ground for public sympathy. Playing the victim card works well for our leaders.
If drawing attention was the primary intention, it would have served them better had they made a public show of anger through rallies and meetings. That has not been the case. They want Parliament to be disrupted and all its proceedings to halt. There could be a reason behind this. It’s not a normal case of witch-hunting, it’s a case of cheating and fraud. It’s difficult to find public support for it. Why would they support the Gandhis if they were involved in something corrupt? Again, party workers would be uncomfortable seen to be siding with something apparently wrong and immoral.
The truth may be somewhere else entirely. They want the whole reform agenda of the government halted or sufficiently delayed so that it has no impact on the ground till the next election is around. The Congress knows the Union government has to deliver quickly before it gets into the election mode at least one year before 2019. Reforms delayed by one year means it would be easier to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who still remains a hugely popular leader despite a couple of electoral failures. For the Gandhis a personality battle against Modi is difficult to win, they have to target his performance. That means they would have stalled Parliament in any case, with or without the National Herald case.
Whatever the truth, the Gandhis have chosen a wrong issue to wage a battle against the government. It’s neither winning them popularity points nor respect of any kind. The prime minister, who has shown incredible flexibility in approach to several issues in recent times, looks to be the victim now. He should be playing the vendetta card.
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.CLOSE The White House is promising a vigorous defense when the Supreme Court hears a new case involving the health care law. (Nov. 7) AP
President Obama signs the health care law in March 2010. (Photo11: Win McNamee, Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider a major new challenge to President Obama's health care law.
The decision to hear the case without waiting for a split among federal appeals courts represents a major victory for opponents, who had lost a unanimous verdict at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
The justices agreed without comment to reconsider that ruling, which upheld the law's system of subsidizing the insurance coverage it requires. That's a setback for the administration and proponents of Obamacare, but it is not the final word.
The controversial program faces four separate lawsuits charging that billions of dollars in subsidies can only be offered in health care exchanges run by states. The federal government operates more than two-thirds of the exchanges.
Opponents mounted the challenges based on the specific language of the law, which states that subsidies, offered in the form of tax credits, will be offered in exchanges "established by the state." They contend that nullifies the subsidies offered since the program began in 36 states that did not set up their own exchanges, relying instead on the federal exchange — a form of online marketplace.
Any ultimate ruling against the system of subsidies would blow a major hole in the law. Those subsidies make the private health insurance policies offered on the exchanges affordable to most Americans without employer-sponsored insurance plans.
If the subsidies are invalidated in 36 states, then many of the tax penalties imposed on employers and individuals for non-compliance with the law also would be eliminated. Employers pay a penalty when their workers get subsidized on the exchange. Individuals get penalized if they don't buy affordable insurance, but the subsidies often are what make it affordable.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said officials still believe the law will be upheld, just as it was in 2012, when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's 5-4 decision upholding the insurance requirement as a form of taxation.
"This will work its way through the legal process," Earnest said. "We continue to have high confidence in the legal argument, as a legal matter but also from a common-sense perspective."
Other proponents of the law were not nearly so sanguine. Ron Pollack, executive director of the consumer health group Families USA, said the court's willingness to hear the case so soon "is a clear indication that at least some of the justices are determined to enter the political fray about the Affordable Care Act."
But Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who helped conceive of the challenge, said it gives the court a chance to reaffirm that "the law is what Congress enacts, not what the administration or others wish Congress had enacted with the benefit of hindsight."
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond ruled unanimously against opponents in July, hours after a similar appeals court panel in Washington, D.C., ruled 2-1 in their favor.
That latter ruling has been appealed by the administration to the full appeals court, which will hear the case next month. While the panel that ruled against the law contained two judges nominated by Republican presidents, the full D.C. appeals court tilts the other way. Two similar cases remain pending in Indiana and Oklahoma.
The justices' decision Friday shows that they saw no reason to wait for the other rulings before deciding the subsidy issue on their own — and in that sense, it came as a surprise. The justices also may decide to hear a major case on same-sex marriage by spring, making this one of the most consequential Supreme Court terms in decades.
More than 5 million Americans would be affected if the subsidies are struck down. They have reduced monthly insurance premiums by 76% for those who qualify, federal health officials say. The average monthly premium dropped from $346 to $82.
In 2016, an estimated 7.3 million people in the 36 states with federal exchanges would receive subsidies totaling $36 billion, according to the Urban Institute. To qualify for subsidies, participants must have incomes below 400% of the federal poverty line, or $95,400 for a family of four.
The D.C. appeals panel ruled in July that as written, the health care law allows tax credits to be offered only in state-run exchanges. The administration had expected most if not all states to create their own exchanges, but only 14 states did so. A majority of states purposely did not set up health exchanges because their governors and legislatures objected to the law.
The court said the IRS went too far in allowing participants in other states served by the federal exchange to qualify for billions of dollars in government assistance. The aid has helped boost enrollment figures to more than 8 million.
"We reach this conclusion, frankly, with reluctance," Judge Thomas Griffith, a Republican appointee, said. "At least until states that wish to can set up exchanges, our ruling will likely have significant consequences both for the millions of individuals receiving tax credits through federal exchanges and for health insurance markets more broadly."
Judge Harry Edwards, the lone Democratic appointee on the panel, dissented, calling the challenge "a not-so-veiled attempt to gut the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" and warning that the panel's ruling "portends disastrous consequences."
The only states, along with D.C., not affected by the case are those that created their own health exchanges: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Contributing: Gregory Korte
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1u6WLqAIt’s no secret that Hillary is loving her role as grandma almost as much as her years on the board of Walmart.
She’s always happy to talk about her “beautiful, perfect” granddaughter, especially since she took time out last week from her busy business, foundation and political schedule and learned she was also her own abuela to Charlotte born in 2014.
Here are seven more ways Hillary is just like your grandmother.
(Original story was here, but the story needed major corrections. All fixed now.)
She worries about children everywhere …
“You shouldn’t have to be the granddaughter of a former president to be able to live up to God-given potential, right Madeleine?”
She knows what’s best …
“The science is clear: The earth is round, money is green,
and I am a woman.”
She reacts this way when people le faltan el respeto …
She reads to you before bedtime …
She isn’t afraid to talk about the importance of el respeto
(especially when it comes to women) …
“Mr. Trump insults and dismisses women … When I vote in the Republican primary in New York, where I was the Senator during 9-11, I will be supporting someone who el respeto’s women: Jeb Bush.”
Everybody loves abuela–even these guys.
Hillary Clinton 2016: More of the Dame™
Editor’s note: This story was originally published here before we corrected it.MC. AQ20. Molten Core and AQ20 start on Monday, October 26, at 9PM server time. This will most likely be our weekly scheduled raid time, but I’ll try to talk to everyone to see which times work best. I may try to get another day scheduled next week. Let’s do it up.
<Rust> Retail Vanilla Guild! My friends and I are starting this guild to create a fun community around progressing through old content. We hope to spend around 5+ months on each expansion. Right now we’re in the leveling and recruiting phase for classic. Expected progress order: Molten Core / AQ 20 –> Blackwing Lair –> AQ40 We’re recruiting every race/class combination on Arthas(US) Horde except for monks and DKs (Paladins are 100% allowed). If this interests you just send us an ask or send “Wanawakuna” some mail in game! You don’t even have to commit 100% to our core team, we plan to be very alt friendly.Wife found guilty of killing San Antonio trucking tycoon
Frances Hall, 53, was convicted Sept. 8 on murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charges in San Antonio. Frances Hall, 53, was convicted Sept. 8 on murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charges in San Antonio. Photo: Bexar County Sheriff's Office Photo: Bexar County Sheriff's Office Image 1 of / 28 Caption Close Wife found guilty of killing San Antonio trucking tycoon 1 / 28 Back to Gallery
A jury found Frances Hall guilty of murder and aggravated assault Thursday night after all-day deliberations, agreeing with prosecutors who said she wanted to kill her husband's longtime lover for ruining her marriage but ended up killing her husband instead.
The courtroom erupted in gasps and sobs as the judge said she was guilty on both counts.
When Bexar County Judge Jefferson Moore remanded her to be held without bond over the weekend, Frances Hall had to be led out of the courtroom in sobs.
“Please, I want to see my babies!” she said.
Hall was accused of killing Bill Hall Jr., by knocking his motorcycle off the road with her Cadillac Escalade, then hitting another SUV driven by Bonnie Contreras — all in a single highway chase on Oct. 10, 2013 on South Loop 1604.
At least 50 relatives from both sides of the family hugged and cried after Frances Hall was taken into custody and led from the courtroom.
Relatives filled each side each day for the past two weeks. Attorneys from both sides said they were all there in support of Hall.
“We're very surprised by the verdict, shocked and disappointed,” Brown said after the verdict was read. “This is a tragedy. They lost the patriarch, and now they've lost the matriarch.”
When asked if they would appeal the conviction, Brown said, “There’s plenty of error that gives us grounds for appeal.”
Bill Hall, 50, a San Antonio trucking tycoon, was flung from the motorcycle and died the same night at a hospital. Frances Hall, now 53, also was found guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, accused of hitting the Halls’ Range Rover driven by Contreras, who was not in court for the verdict.
Contreras testified Frances Hall chased her and hit the back of the Range Rover up to 16 times, and when Bill Hall Jr. got between the vehicles, she rear-ended his bike. Prosecution witnesses said the physical evidence shows the Escalade struck the motorcycle from the side. Experts hired by the defense said it was the other way around — that the motorcycle hit the SUV before it left the road.
Contreras testified the affair lasted three years, with the much-older Bill Hall paying for her residence and upkeep and for cosmetic surgery. Contreras said Frances Hall “never stopped” after her husband fell off his bike, but continued to chase her.
“As a result of her rage, a man is dead,” Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Paulissen said in closing arguments earlier Thursday after five days of testimony in the murder trial that started last week. “Of course the defendant hated Bonnie Contreras, any wife would. She didn't need to intend to kill Bill. But her actions caused it.”
Defense attorneys had called the death an accident and Bill Hall drove beside his wife’s SUV, hit it, lost control of his blue custom Harley Davidson motorcycle and crashed into a grassy field just off the highway.
In closing arguments, Paulissen attempted to discredit the defense’s experts, who had criticized the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office for what they called a botched investigation.
Defense attorney Leigh Cutter said in her closing arguments that the state had three years to get the one witness who said he saw the motorcycle hit the SUV.
“Edward Botello was a 911 caller, and they told him to leave the scene twice,” she said. “They knew Bonnie was wrong. Why didn't they want him? Because what he had to say did not fit their theory.”
The defense did not call Botello and prosecutors said they tried to compel him to testify but he ignored a subpoena.
The Halls, who married at 18, had owned Bill Hall Jr. Trucking Ltd., a business they started with one truck in 1989. A third-generation trucker, Bill Hall grew the business to deliver road-building materials with more than 100 trucks.
An affiliated company, Bill Hall Jr. Trucking GP LLC, which owned a fleet of trucks and trailers used by Bill Hall Jr. Trucking Ltd., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June after creditors threatened to repossess various assets, the company’s bankruptcy lawyer said at the time.
The punishment phase is expected to begin at 9 a.m., Monday in the 186th state District Court.
Frances Hall faces five to 99 years or life in prison.
ezavala@express-news.net
Twitter: @elizabeth2863Army Says It Is Expediting Review Of Dakota Access Pipeline Route
Enlarge this image toggle caption Michael Owen Baker/AP Michael Owen Baker/AP
Updated at 12:15 p.m. ET on Feb. 1
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said Tuesday that the acting secretary of the Army had directed the Corps of Engineers to "proceed with the easement" necessary for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
If it's granted, the easement under review would allow the pipeline to cross under a federally controlled section of the Missouri River just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.
On Wednesday, the Department of the Army said in a statement that it had been directed to expedite its review of the easement request, but that "these initial steps do not mean the easement has been approved."
The directive is in line with President Trump's Jan. 24 memorandum encouraging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process.
"The Assistant Secretary for the Army Civil Works will make a decision on the pipeline once a full review and analysis is completed in accordance with the directive," according the Army statement.
On Jan. 18 the Army announced it was gathering information for an environmental impact assessment, and that it would accept public comments through Feb. 20, according to a notice published in the Federal Register. It was unclear what, if any, effect the presidential directive will have on that process.
The project, which is slated to carry North Dakota crude to Midwestern refineries, has drawn protesters who say oil might leak from the structure and contaminate water supplies, and that construction is disturbing lands sacred to the Sioux tribe.
In December, the Obama administration ordered a pause for an environmental study, but President Trump moved soon after his inauguration to support the pipeline, along with the Keystone XL pipeline for Canadian crude.
Hoeven said he had spoken with both acting Secretary of the Army Robert Speer and Vice President Pence about the easement:
"This will enable the company to complete the project, which can and will be built with the necessary safety features to protect the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and others downstream. "Building new energy infrastructure with the latest safeguards and technology is the safest and most environmentally sound way to move energy from where it is produced to where people need it."
Hoeven also said he is working to get additional funds for law enforcement at the site.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has fought against construction of the pipeline for months, with members and supporters living on the site, trying to block construction. The tribe said it will continue its battle:
"[The announcement] is... not a formal issuance of the easement—it is notification that |
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The number of Americans imprisoned for drug offenses has jumped from 41,000 in 1980 to half a million in 2011. The “war on drugs” has left ravaged inner cities in its’ wake, and destroyed the lives of countless families. Millions of lives have been destroyed by myopic thinking and unjust policies.
Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist has stated that these mandatory minimum statutes are “perhaps a good example of the law of unintended consequences.” Reforms are desperately needed to direct our efforts toward treatment and not unfairly punitive sentencing.
The steady increase in incarceration rates in the United States is threatening to tear apart the social fabric of our communities. Approximately 2.2 million people currently reside in our nation's prisons or jails, a 500% increase over the last forty years.
Ineffective public policies and unsuccessful attempts to rein in criminal activity have only escalated the problem. The result has been a damaging social trend of hereditary criminality, a perpetual cycle of incarceration and recidivism.
The human element of this problem is too powerful to ignore, too tragic to imagine. It is a civil rights issue, a human rights issue. But for those unmoved by the separation of families, or the disproportionate arrests of young black men, there are also devastating economic repercussions tied to this issue.
The imprisonment of more than 2 million U.S. citizens impacts the economy directly, stripping workforce participation and consumer spending. Long-term effects are also felt with the social stigma of arrest, which creates limited access to employment and credit.
Another significant consequence is the irresolvable strain on budget priorities caused by prison expenditures. The exorbitant costs of incarceration have begun to exhaust federal and state budgets respectively, draining investments in our future.
At the state level, costs for running corrections facilities have roughly tripled in the last three decades, making it the second fastest rising expense after Medicaid.
At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) comprises one-third of the Justice Department’s budget. Federal prison costs are expected to rise to 30 percent of the Department of Justice's budget by 2020. In 1980, Congress appropriated $330 million for the BOP. By 2013, the total appropriation for the BOP reached $6.445 billion.
In a climate of divided government, ideological polarization, and general intransigence, true reform on any major policy platform is seemingly quixotic. However, criminal justice reform has shown considerable promise in our current toxic political environment. Support has been noted from the White House, Justice Department, congressional leadership, and members on both sides of the aisle.
Criminal justice reform seems to be a public policy concern that is ripe for government action. We may be at a tipping point, where the realities of this systemic problem may be too overwhelming to ignore.
America is a country of compassion and second chances, a country that knows the difference between a dangerous criminal and an addict in need. We must find a way to preach treatment over prison, rehabilitation over recidivism.
We must implore this Congress to end a war that has taken more lives than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Wars are won one battle at a time. Withdrawal from the mire of the war on drugs starts with one crucial battle, it starts with sentencing reform.
Garland is a graduate student at American University’s School of Public Affairs, a Capitol Hill intern, and political commentator.Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Israel today for a two-day visit that publicly emphasizes the dramatic reconciliation and galloping economic cooperation between Moscow and Jerusalem. In private, it likely featured some harsh words between Mr. Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Kremlin's political support for Syria and Iran.
Experts say that the geopolitical differences between Russia and Israel are not as deep as many people believe. With the exception of sharp disagreement over what to do about Iran's alleged drive for nuclear weapons, differences are greatly overshadowed by a growing array of commonalities.
Topping that list is a shared sense that Russia and Israel alone fully understand the menace of Islamist extremism. Israel believes it confronts extremism on a daily basis, and Putin sees it as a serious threat to Russia's territorial integrity emanating from the restive northern Caucasus region, whose population is mainly Sunni Muslim. Both feel increasingly isolated in the Middle East, with Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood president hinting that he might revise his country's treaty with Israel, and Russia facing unprecedented hostility from Turkey and the Arab world over its continued support of Syria's strongman Bashar al-Assad.
"The worse Russia's relations with the Arab world, the better they will be with Israel," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy journal.
"Russia now finds itself at odds with almost all the Arab countries over Syria, and this could be a long-term trend. Syria is the last Russian client state inherited from the Soviet Union, and it's probably not going to last. New rulers will be far more mistrustful of Russia, and if they are Islamists the feelings will be mutual. At least when they're talking about the threat of radical Islam, Putin will feel mentally very close with Netanyahu," he says.
Tourism, trade boost relationship
Putin's first stop after arriving in Israel today was the dedication of a monument to Soviet Red Army forces killed in World War II in Netanya. Putin told a crowd of about 600 people that the double-winged white dove erected by Israel "symbolizes the triumph of good and peace. May these values always serve as the basis for friendship between our nations."
Since the collapse of the USSR, the Russian narrative about World War II – that the Red Army liberated eastern Europe from Naziism – has been painfully challenged by many former allies whose new version of history sees the arrival of Soviet forces as the beginning of a new occupation.
"Israel is one of the few countries in the world that fully backs the Russian view on World War II, so for Putin the symbolism here is very important," says Dmitry Maryasis, an expert with the Israeli Studies Department of the official Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. "The role of the Red Army in liberating Europe is not often celebrated these days, so Russians will receive this signal very warmly."
During the cold war, the USSR supported rejectionist Arab states and the Palestinians against Israel, a position that had ideological roots in the competition between Zionism and Communism in 20th century Europe. But the ideological dimension disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emigration of more than 1 million Russian speakers to Israel in the 1990s, even before Russia's ties with authoritarian Arab states were moderated by improving economic and political ties with Israel and the West.
"Everything has changed since the end of the USSR, and the relationship with Israel is totally transformed," says Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the independent Institute for Middle Eastern Studies in Moscow. "In Israel, one in seven citizens is Russian-speaking. There are now many prominent Russian-speakers, even at high levels of power, who have feelings of closeness toward Russia. In Moscow, there is no more official anti-Semitism and leaders are pragmatic. In some ways, such as the attitude toward the threat from radical Islamism, we are even closer in our views than Israel is with the US."
Trade has burgeoned; Israeli exports to Russia grew almost fourfold between 2003 and 2008, reaching $3 billion. That may not sound like much, but the areas of economic cooperation under consideration include nanotechnology, energy, and joint military projects, including the production of unmanned drone warplanes. Russia's natural gas monopoly Gazprom is eyeing offshore gas deposits in Israel, while the state-owned Russian Railroads is hoping to participate in a new Tel Aviv-Eilat high speed rail link.
Supporting the 'devil they know'
Putin later met with Netanyahu for a full discussion about Syria and Iran that both leaders characterized as detailed and friendly. Experts say that on Syria, at least, the two sides may not be all that far apart.
"Israel supports the Western position that Assad must go, while Russia has been backing Assad," says Mr. Maryasis. "But they're probably much closer than you would think. Israel is not keen to see a big mess break out on its border with Syria – along the Golan Heights – which has been relatively stable for years. Israel might actually prefer the devil it knows, Assad, to what might follow him. There is a very palpable fear in Israel that radical Islamists might follow Assad, and everything will get worse."
Likewise, experts say, Russia's occasional contacts with Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as its efforts to advocate for the Palestinian cause, are no longer viewed in Jerusalem as Soviet-style mischief, but merely the same sort of pragmatism practiced by other powers.
"Russia has always said that its participation is central to any future Middle East settlement, but in reality there's not much Moscow can do," says Georgy Mirsky, an expert at the Institute for World Economy and International relations, Moscow's most important official research center. "At the same time, relations with Israel are moving forward, powered by growing numbers of Russian businessmen and a flow of tourists – Russia is the second biggest source of tourists to Israel these days – and much improved dialogue on the official level."
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Iran remains the single major sticking point. Experts say that Netanyahu will probably have given Putin an earful on the need for tougher sanctions and perhaps military measures to stop Iran's nuclear program, while Putin will have urged caution.
"Russia is deeply skeptical that military measures against Iran can have any lasting effect, and is very worried that a war could spread into Russia's own northern Caucasus," says Mr. Satanovsky. "Russia worries that it will cause regional disruption, refugee flows, and no one knows what else might come in the wake of an attack on Iran. This is the one big point on which Russia and Israel are doomed to disagree, and go on disagreeing."Police believe 6-year-old Ja’Mecca Smith found a loaded gun tucked between the cushions of a sofa inside her family’s southeast Atlanta apartment Saturday morning and, one way or another, shot herself in the head.
Her death came with at least four other children and two adults present in the home — and makes at least four Georgia children killed in accidental shootings in less than six weeks.
Atlanta police responded to the apartment at 1041 Martin St. SE, about a mile southeast of Turner Field, just before 11 a.m. Saturday. Young Ja’Mecca was dead inside and her father — 25-year-old Demarqo Smith — was not there. Authorities said he briefly fled the scene before returning to speak with detectives.
On Sunday, they announced the father had been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct. He is being held at the Fulton County jail without bond.
Few other details about the case have been released.
“It was a child,” neighbor Ellis Jackson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Saturday. “It’s a tragedy to happen to the family.”
The same tragedy has befallen at least three other Georgia families since mid-October.
• On Oct. 17, 8-year-old Sharia Lynch was killed inside her family’s Paulding County home. Her mother, Marsha, told investigators a handgun had fallen and discharged when it hit the floor.
The same bullet struck Sharia in the head and her mother in the leg.
• On Oct. 27, a 2-year-old Acworth boy shot himself inside his family’s home after finding a semi-automatic handgun on a bed. The boy’s father, Grant Dennington, and 4-year-old brother were also home at the time of the shooting, though neither was injured.
• On Nov. 11, 2-year-old Jayden Jamar Clay was shot in the lip and killed after finding a.45-caliber handgun while playing with his twin brother inside their Butts County home. His mother’s boyfriend, Christopher Dwayne Askins, was later charged with second-degree cruelty to children and weapons charges.
According to a database maintained by advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, a total of 15 Georgia children have been injured or killed in accidental shootings in 2015. Also included is the August death of 25-year-old Douglas resident Dorothy Rearden, who was shot and killed by her 4-year-old son.
Earlier this month, Dr. Viviana Goldenberg, a member of the Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action, told The AJC that shootings like these come down to negligence.
“It’s literally terrifying, and this is happening all over the country,” she said. “There is no gun owner responsibility. They’re not thinking of what measures to do to prevent access of the children to the gun.”Plot Edit
Production Edit
Threats and censorship Edit
Cultural references Edit
Reception Edit
Home release Edit
The fourteenth season of South Park was released April 26, 2011 to DVD and Blu-ray, including the episode "201". When playing the episode, prior to the theme playing, a text card appears saying: "The following episode appears as it originally aired on April 21, 2010. After it aired Matt Stone and Trey Parker released the following statement" and then shows the original message that was released after the episode aired. Consequently, Muhammad, his name, and the speeches made by Kyle, Jesus, and Santa are still censored as in the broadcast version. Although the end speeches are still censored, the bleeps are accompanied with music on DVD, unlike the April 21, 2010 airing, which featured a raw audio bleep. In the episode's audio commentary, Parker only comments on the opening scene, noting that they did the episode as intended and sent it in. He and Stone comment that they are not supposed to talk about it. For the next several moments, a large audio beep obscures the commentary before Stone says "Yeah, that's pretty much it." During the commentary in both "201" and "200" Parker and Stone never mention Muhammad directly, referring to him only as "the prophet of the Muslim faith".[53] Despite the package claiming otherwise, both "200" and "201" were omitted from the Region 4 release[54] and have been completely omitted from the Region 2 (which contains the predominantly Islamic Middle East and North Africa) release as well.[55]
Online leak of uncensored version Edit
On January 31, 2014, the original uncensored version of this episode was illegally leaked and distributed online without any approval of Comedy Central after a user on 4chan realized that the episode existed on the official website's web server and could be downloaded using rtmpdump.[2][56] Kyle: That's because there is no goo, Mr. Cruise. You see, I learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we've all wanted to show things that we weren't allowed to show, but it wasn't because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That's obviously the only true power. If there's anything we've all learned, it's that terrorizing people works. Jesus: That's right. Don't you see, gingers, if you don't want to be made fun of anymore, all you need are guns and bombs to get people to stop. Santa: That's right, friends. All you need to do is instill fear and be willing to hurt people and you can get whatever you want. The only true power is violence. Stan: Yeah. The closing speech, which was censored by Comedy Central[2] Despite having been leaked uncensored, "201" as well as "Super Best Friends" and "200" have still not aired in reruns and are still only legally available on DVD.
References EditIf you’ve ever wanted to brew a batch of beer with Wayne Wambles, Cigar City Brewing brewmaster, now’s your chance – kind of.
Wambles has partnered with VetterBrew HomeBrew Supply in Clearwater for the inaugural Pilot This! homebrew kit and competition. The winner of the contest will have his or her recipe brewed on the Tampa brewery’s 15-barrel system and have it served in the tasting room.
Michael Vetter initially approached Wambles about having his shop create and distribute kits for homebrewers based on recipes created by local breweries, but the brewmaster said he wanted to take it a step further.
“I wanted to create something that was more challenging instead of just giving away one of our recipes,” Wambles said. “I thought about it for several weeks, and ended up coming up with the Pilot This! concept.”
The concept works like this: The beer must be hop-centric and must use only the ingredients in the kit, which is designed for all-grain brewing. The brewer is required to use a hop extract included in the kit, and one of three specified yeast strains. Otherwise, the brewer has free rein to us as much or as little of the other ingredients in the kit, which includes seven ounces of various hops and 15 pounds of various grains. No additional ingredients are allowed, other than fining agents.
“The flexibility part was, in my opinion, necessary in order to create more overall possibilities for a final product because I wanted people to learn something from the kit,” Wambles said. “If we continue to do it, which will be based on the success of this first round, I want each kit to have a different challenge, to challenge people in different ways. That way I think it benefits the brewery, it benefits Michael and his homebrew shop, and it benefits the homebrewers.”
Entries are due no later than October 2, 2015, and must be shipped or dropped off at VetterBrew. Judging will take place at Cigar City Brewing, and the winner will be announced by October 16. NOTE: The contest is not limited to Floridians. The kit will be shipped to you, and you just need to find a way to get the bottles back to VetterBrew before the deadline.
The winning recipe will be brewed and served at the brewery, and the winner is welcome to help, but he or she must cover all travel, lodging and other associated expenses.
Vetter said only about half of the original 300 kits, which will ship or be available for in-store pick up the week of August 3, are still available. Each costs $49.99, which includes the contest entry. Purchasers are not required to enter the contest.
For full details and official rules, visit VetterBrew.com.ROANOKE (WSLS 10) - The families of two missing girls are hoping to get answers about their loved ones disappearances nearly 40 years ago.
Angela Rader and Tammy Akers' cold case is one of the oldest in Roanoke city dating back to 1977. Walter Rader was 24 years old when his little sister Angela disappeared.
"My siblings and I wonder if we're gonna find out before we pass on," says Rader.
At the time family, friends, and police believed Angela and Tammy ran away and would come back in a few weeks. Few leads and the passing of decades made this disappearance even harder to solve.
The investigation led authorities to a man named Earl Bramblett as a possible suspect. He was executed in 2003 for the brutal murder of the Hodges family in Vinton.
Police say they can still solve this case if people come forward. Organization Help Save the Next Girl is now looking back at some of our missing person's cases to create awareness.
"That's what we're gonna do," says Kenny Jarels with the organization. "We're gonna continue to do it. It's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. We're bringing families together and they can share their stories."
Even though some family members believe the girls were killed there is hope maybe they're still with us here safe.
Walter Rader says his parents died not knowing what happened to their daughter and he's hoping police at least find the answers during his lifetime.
Copyright by WSLS - All rights reservedAttorney General Jeff Sessions issued a threat to cities and counties that they could lose access to DOJ grants if they don’t comply with federal immigration laws, namely honoring detainer requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for illegal aliens. In short, detainers are when a local law enforcement authority holds an illegal alien in custody until federal agents can pick him up to process him or her for deportation. Here’s the target list if you’re interested—most of those cities and counties causing trouble are in blue states or in heavily Democratic counties. Well, the mayors of these sanctuary cities have a message to the Trump White House and Sessions regarding the threat of yanking funds: screw you; we’ll see you in court (via Fox News):
“If they actually act to take away our money, we’ll see them in court,” vowed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said taking federal funding from the city would be “unconstitutional.” “We will fight to protect the safety and dignity of all Angelenos,” Garcetti said. “We will work closely with our representatives in Congress to make sure that Los Angeles does not go without federal resources that help protect millions of people every day.” […] Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Obama during his first term, has been consistently outspoken on this issue, said that Chicago will continue to welcome immigrants in the face of changes directed by the administration, also calling the denial of federal funds “unconstitutional.” And Boston Mayor Marty Walsh called the threat ‘destructive’ and ‘irresponsible’. Walsh has said that he would shelter immigrants in City Hall if needed, with the support of Boston Police Commissioner William Evans who said officers would not arrest immigrants living in the U.S. illegally unless they are accused of committing violent crimes.
The Department of Justice plans to set aside $4 billion in grants for cities that comply with immigration laws (i.e. non-sanctuary cities). Liberals argue that these laws allow illegal aliens to report crimes without fear of deportation. The problem is that sheriffs from across the country say that doesn’t happen.Blog
Fort Worth Ink & Art Expo – October 2015
Coming up October 9th – 11th is the 2nd Annual Fort Worth Ink & Arts Expo. This show may be young in years, but you wouldn’t know it. Organizers have lined up some great artists and entertainment.
Artists and Entertainment:
Don’t miss celebrity guests Sullen and Big Gus from Spike TV’s Tattoo Nightmares. This show features live tattooing from a lot of great artists, such as Chauncey Kochel, Joe Moak, Andrew Patterson, Ben Fox, Nick Engle, and more. Email addresses for these and others are available on the official site (below), so you can set up appointments ahead of time.
There will be live entertainment each day from Saving Abel, The Captains Sideshow, and Human Suspension by SBS Suspension.
This convention has a ton of different contests every day, with the final Best of Show winner winning a $1000 cash prize. Some of the categories are:
Best Animal
Best Lettering
Best Torso
Most Realistic
Best Nautical
Best Patriotic
Best Asian
Best Floral
Best Skull
Tickets:
Tickets are available online or at the door (kids under 12 are free).
The cost is $20 per day or $35 for the weekend.
Location:
Will Rogers Memorial Complex
3401 W. Lancaster Ave.
Fort Worth, TX 76107
Hours:
Friday, 10/9: 12:00 – 9:00 PM
Saturday, 10/10: 10:00 AM – 9:00 PM
Sunday, 10/11: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Lodging:
Fort Worth South Hotel
100 Altamesa Blvd. East
Fort Worth, TX 76134
Call: 817-293-3088
The rate is $69/night, be sure to mention that you are visiting the expo to receive the discounted rate.
For more detailed information, visit www.tx-tat.com.
August 2015One Dead, Two Injured in Incident with Gun and Sword near 24th and Becher St.
An 18-year-old man is dead and two others are injured during a dispute that involved shots fired and a stabbing with a sword near 24th and Becher Streets Saturday evening.
According to Milwaukee Police:
"Several individuals became involved in a dispute inside of a residence. During the dispute, one subject was stabbed with a sword and two other individuals were shot.
Despite life-saving efforts by the Milwaukee Fire Department, an 18-year-old male died from a gunshot. A second 18-year-old male received a non-fatal gunshot injury.
A 21-year-old male received a serious non-fatal stab wound.
The two victims with non-fatal injuries were conveyed to a local hospital by the Milwaukee Fire Department.
The investigation is ongoing.
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emailUS President Donald Trump. REUTERS/Carlos Barria President Donald Trump told Bloomberg on Monday that he'd be "honored" to talk to Kim Jong Un, and while it's not the first time he's signaled a willingness to meet with one of the world's most brutal dictators, it may provide an important glance into his North Korea strategy.
Several top Trump administration officials have stressed an "all options" approach to North Korea, at different times emphasizing military action, collaboration with China for harsher sanctions, playing coy about cyber-sabotaging its missile program, and now, finally, direct talks.
While Trump has been quick to condemn North Korea's military provocations and hasn't shied away from the prospect of conflict, he has at times had nice things to say about the country's leader.
"He's 27 years old, his father dies, took over a regime, so say what you want, but that's not easy, especially at that age," Trump said in an interview with Reuters.
In an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation," Trump called Kim a "pretty smart cookie."
During the campaign, he said he'd talk to Kim — and that there was a 10% to 20% chance he'd talk Kim out of his nuclear program, possibly over hamburgers.
But Yun Sun, a senior associate at the Stimson Center, told Business Insider that direct talks with Kim would have been "impossible" under President Barack Obama, who took office as North Korea had burned US diplomats by pulling out of the six-party talks at the critical moment when it was set to denuclearize.
"By telling the North Korean leader that he's a'smart cookie' and he'd be 'honored' to talk to them, I sense a difference in the US policy goals coming to North Korea," Sun said. "President Trump's goal and his agenda are quite strictly limited to the denuclearization of North Korea."
Sun contrasted this with another agenda: addressing North Korea's abysmal human-rights record and the dynastic nature of its leadership. According to Sun, Trump may be speaking highly of Kim to signal his goal is not regime change, only neutralizing the nuclear threat.
Wong Maye-E/AP
Sun characterized Trump's apparent course as "pretty classic carrot-and-stick."
But according to Jenny Town, the assistant director of the US-Korea Institute and a managing editor at 38 North, there may not be much to gain by reading into Trump's statements, which have been all over the place. In addition to the "smart cookie" comment, "he's also called Kim a madman, imbalanced, and irrational," Town said.
Town noted that Trump said he'd talk to Kim only "under the right circumstances." If those circumstances were understood to mean North Korea's denuclearization, they would still be "above the threshold of what we can expect North Korea to do unilaterally," Town said.
However, if the US could assure the Kim regime that it didn't want to remove it from power, it may be a little more willing to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
"I think, across the board, this administration attaches less importance to ideological issues like authoritarianism," Sun said.
With China, where religious persecution is well documented and enemies of the Communist Party are routinely silenced, Trump has embraced its leader, Xi Jinping, often pointing to the strength of their relationship as a lever in the North Korean conflict.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. KCNA/via REUTERS
None of the reports from Trump's summit with Xi at Mar-a-Lago has mentioned a discussion of human rights, which might have been a hot-button issue with past administrations.
"Trump has a pragmatic approach to the foreign-policy issues that he sees as most important," Sun said. "In the current state, he sees that the North Korean issue is the most important."
This pragmatism has appeared elsewhere in Trump's foreign policy. Trump authorized a cruise missile strike against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad to punish its use of chemical weapons, while his administration simultaneously admitted Assad's leadership was a "political reality."
But even Xi, North Korea's treaty ally, hasn't found Kim honorable enough to meet with even once since Kim took power in 2011.
Trump, right, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Although Trump said it would be an honor to meet with Kim, the US's evaluation of the North Korean regime most likely hasn't changed, Sun said. Trump may merely be signaling a new, tactical willingness to engage with a country that could eventually pose a nuclear threat.
Meanwhile, the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier lurks off North Korea's coast, and Chinese and South Korean diplomats are meeting to discuss tightening sanctions on North Korea.
According to Sun, these actions are likely to pressure the Kim regime while showing that there's a realistic, non-humiliating off-ramp on the road to a nuclear confrontation.Story highlights Sabrina De Sousa was among nearly two dozen Americans convicted in absentia
Portuguese authorities arrested the former CIA officer in February
(CNN) Former CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa, who was convicted in 2009 for playing a part in seizing a radical Egyptian cleric on the streets of Milan, has received a last-minute, partial pardon from Italy.
De Sousa was poised to become the first US official to face jail time for the practice known as extraordinary rendition, which occurred during President George W. Bush's war on terror.
She was one of nearly two dozen Americans -- most thought to work for the CIA -- who were sentenced to five years in prison in 2009 by an Italian court for their role in seizing the suspected terrorist in Italy in 2003. They were convicted in absentia.
Portuguese authorities arrested De Sousa in February, and she was expected to arrive Wednesday in Italy to serve her sentence.
The pardon reduces her sentence to three years, a punishment that could be served by "alternative measures to imprisonment" -- meaning community service, according to a statement Tuesday by the Italian President's office.
Read MoreThe bombshell revelation that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded Fusion GPS’s work on the Trump dossier came just days before the company faced the prospect of it becoming public anyway.
The House intelligence committee on October 4 subpoenaed Fusion GPS executives, as well as the firm’s banking company, TD Bank, to turn over its financial records, which would expose who paid for the dossier research.
Last week, two Fusion GPS executives came to talk to the committee but pleaded the Fifth on every question. The company also filed a request with a D.C. district court to quash the subpoena for its financial records.
The deadline for TD Bank to respond to the subpoena was Wednesday, October 25, but the court extended the deadline to Friday morning, according to CNN.
Facing this deadline, Perkins Coie, the law firm for the Clinton campaign and the DNC that hired Fusion GPS, gave Fusion GPS permission to disclose that it paid for the dossier research.
Hiring Fusion GPS through a lawyer, instead of directly, created “attorney-client privilege,” that gave the law firm control over what Fusion GPS could disclose.
But faced with the subpoena, the general counsel for Perkins Coie sent a letter to Fusion GPS on Tuesday that said, “We recognize the important principle of client confidentiality, and we appreciate your efforts to fulfill your obligation to maintain client confidentiality.
“In the circumstances, however, we believe it is appropriate to release Fusion GPS from this obligation as it relates to the identity of Perkins Coie.” It then outlined what Fusion GPS could disclose.
The Clinton campaign and DNC’s involvement was first disclosed to the Washington Post by “people familiar with the matter” — potentially those who wanted the story to come out on their terms, versus the House intelligence committee’s.
New York Times reporter Kenneth P. Vogel tweeted Tuesday evening that when he tried to report the same story as the Post‘s, Marc E. Elias, the Perkins Coie lawyer that retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, denied it.
“When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong,'” he tweeted.
Times reporter Maggie Haberman also tweeted, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
The dossier contained outlandish allegations about Trump, and has been widely dismissed as not credible. However, it was reportedly used by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant last summer against one of Trump’s campaign aides, Carter Page, and acted as a “roadmap” for the FBI’s investigation.
The court is still poised to issue a decision this week on whether TD Bank will have to turn over all the firm’s financial records, according to a congressional official. That could expose who else funded opposition research against Trump.
A Republican donor reportedly first funded the dossier, though it was not until Clinton and the DNC got involved that Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who produced the dossier.Police have warned Christmas party goers to obtain consent before kissing under the mistletoe otherwise they may be guilty of rape.
The advice came in a tweet, since deleted, by the Police Service of Northern Ireland which has been criticised for “trivialising” sexual violence.
The force, which has 159,000 followers, tweeted on Saturday: “If you bump into that special someone under the mistletoe tonight, remember that without consent it is rape #SeasonsGreetings”.
The message was then shared hundreds of times, attracting a backlash that was both angry and bemused.
Some respondents suggested PSNI had failed to understand the law regarding rape, while others said it showed the organisation had a “warped view of the world”.
The tweet was subsequently deleted, with the force later saying it had been “taken out of context”.
The message was intended to form part of PSNI’s “without consent” campaign, launched in 2013, which has previously run into criticism for allegedly “victim blaming” over a tweet in March warning women about the dangers of “overindulging”.
One Twitter user, @69mib, wrote: “Bumping into someone, under the mistletoe, is now considered rape? Why do you trivialise such a serious issue with such a nonsense tweet?”.
Another, Mike Love, responded: “This tweet tells people that a kiss is rape. Do you realise what you’ve said?”Our "Scamworld" series has shed some light on a number of internet-based con artists over the last year, mostly ones who try to sell get-rich-quick schemes. They don't just peddle Rush Limbaugh-endorsed business opportunities, or the kind of affiliate sales programs that bamboozle paraplegics out of life savings. Every walk of life has its fair share of people who affix Internet Marketing schemes onto seemingly legit business enterprises. Even the world of mixed martial arts training has its scammers.
Meet Lloyd Irvin.
He’s the king of Scamworld MMA. Since January, he’s taken a search engine optimization campaign — designed, with the help of some of the biggest names in Scamworld, to rope in new "MMA Millionaires" — and redirected it toward a new purpose: disassociating himself from rape charges.
The campaign began in January, when he purchased lloydirvinrape.com (which advertised his free women’s self defense class). Due to the negative publicity this move generated, he pulled the page and issued a public apology almost immediately. That particular URL is still inactive, but as MMA site Bloody Elbow reports, the SEO scheme itself continues.
Somewhere along the line, Irvin got mixed up with some of Scamworld's biggest names
Known internationally within the MMA community, Irvin is supposedly the first African American in the world to receive a 1st degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In nearly 20 years of competition, he’s won national judo prizes, competed for Brazilian team championships, and generally established a reputation as a heavyweight badass: with his bare hands, he supposedly disarmed and chased away two gunmen who attempted to rob his family’s home.
Irvin used that badass rep to build Team Lloyd Irvin, an MMA coaching school and affiliate program in Camp Springs, Maryland. Team Lloyd Irvin has helped to train a host of successful fighters over the years. As Irvin built that school, he also branched into Internet Marketing, associating himself with some of the biggest names in Scamworld. These include Ken McCarthy ("The System"), Dan Kennedy ("Think To Grow Rich"), and James Malinchak ("Millionaire Secrets Revealed").
Irvin used their tactics to turn Team Lloyd Irvin into a hybrid MMA / Internet Marketing organization. For example, his Mixed Martial Arts Millionaires training program claims that he can teach you to attract "50 to 100 new students per month" in the lucrative field of MMA training. According to one testimonial on the site, you "literally robbed yourself of well over $100,000 in the next year alone" if you missed this money-making seminar.
Irvin avoided a conviction in the 1989 rape case
On New Year’s Eve, two of Irvin’s male students were charged with raping one of his female students. Irvin wasn’t involved in the incident but the charges made headlines in local media. The MMA community took notice. By January 10, Brent Brookhouse at Bloody Elbow (part of SB Nation, itself a sister site of The Verge) was publicly asking questions about a 1989 case involving a 21-year-old Lloyd Irvin charged with participating in a brutal gang rape.
Irvin avoided a conviction in the 1989 case. A local news article at the time said "Irvin was saved by the fact that the jury believed he was impotent when it was his turn" to rape the victim; Irvin testified that he "wanted to have intercourse with her but couldn’t."
Irvin purchased lloydirvinrape.com on January 10.
After Brookhouse reported the URL purchase, Irvin issued a public apology.
"Why did I buy and put up the website url that I purchased and put rape prevention seminar information on it shortly after all the news broke regarding New Years Eve?" he asked rhetorically in a MixedMartialArts.com post. His answer, verbatim:
For this I can do nothing other than apologize 100%. I was wrong. The timing |
.9 Asparagus 23 Potato 16 Bread, crusted 15.7 Bread, white 12.2 Wheat flour 11.5 Cottage cheese 8 Plain yogurt 7 Rice, cooked 5.9
I've compiled the best list of purine containing foods that I could find to give a reference for others suffering with gout. Below you will find a list of common foods and the levels of their purines. If you are looking to restrict your intake of purines, this will be invaluable. I would suggest taking all animal sources over 125 or so and cut them out straight away. Others will counsel going much lower and you may indeed need to do that, but at the same time, it is very difficult to cut out all meat from your diet and you may find that you don't even need to. But all meat is not equal when it comes to purines. For example, sardines have have 399mg per 100g, but a steak (sirloin) sits at 110. In fact, fish seems to top the list of meats with the exception of organ meat. It might be worthwhile to cut that out for a time. 1 month should be sufficient to let your body catch up with your intake and let you know if you have lowered your purine intake enough.Note: there are several instances of the term "liver" and different levels of purines given by these sources. Perhaps this is due to testing only a single source? I don't have an answer on that. However, I can state that with as high as liver shows on the list it is a food that should be cut out anyways.Sources:Clifford, Andrew J. and Story, David L. 1976. Levels of Purines in Foods and Their Metabolic Effects in Rats. J. Nutr. 106: 435-442.Brule, D. Sarwar, G., and Savoie, L. 1988. Purine content of Selected Canadian Food Products. Journal of Food Composition and Analysis 1(2): 130-138.Brule, D., Sarwar, G. and Savoie, L. 1989. Effects of methods of cooking on free and total purine bases in meat and fish. Can. Insti. Food Sci. Technol. J. Vol. 22(3): 248 - 251.Choi, H. K., Atkinson, K., Karlson, E. W., Willett, W., and Curhan, G.. 2004. Purine-Rich Foods, Dairy and Protein Intake, and the Risk of Gout in Men. The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 350(11):1093-1103.Clifford, A. J. and Stroy, D. L. 1976. Levels of purines in foods and their metabolic effects in rats. Journal of Nutrition 106: 435-442.Gibson, T., Rodgers, A. V., Simmonds, H. A. and Toseland, P. 1984. Beer drinking and its effect on uric acid. British Journal of Rheumatology, 23: 203 - 209.Young, L. L. 1980. Evaluation of four purine compounds in poultry products. Journal of Food Science 45: 1064-67.But those differences, especially since Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord last month, are inescapable. Ms. Merkel, already grappling with violent anti-globalism protests on streets outside the conference, has been intensely focused on divining a way to coexist with a president whose disruptive views differ so drastically from her own.
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The best she has come up with so far is to cultivate a backdoor channel through the president’s daughter Ivanka, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade her father to remain in the Paris accord.
But Ms. Merkel is up for re-election in the fall, and challenging Mr. Trump has become essential in German politics. So Ms. Merkel, the courteous daughter of a Protestant cleric, is doing something she finds awkward: calling out Mr. Trump in public and questioning his commitment to the American leadership that Europeans had taken for granted since World War II.
“Merkel is clearly trying to figure out how to deal with Trump, and it isn’t easy for her,” said Klaus Brinkbäumer, the editor in chief of Der Spiegel, the country’s largest-circulation newsmagazine.
“She doesn’t like to make news in speeches, but publicly, she’s been more critical of Trump than I would have expected,” Mr. Brinkbäumer said on Thursday, a few hours before Air Force One arrived in Hamburg from Mr. Trump’s one-day stop in Warsaw
“Privately, the only obvious path is through the president’s daughter, which is why she invited Ivanka to that conference in Berlin earlier this year,” he said. “But even that doesn’t seem to be working. German diplomats still don’t know who to call in the State Department on serious issues, or even who their counterparts are in the White House.”
by Mr. McMaster and Mr. Cohn in May that defended Mr. Trump’s “America First” slogan, prioritizing the country’s “vital interests” over international partnerships. Ms. Merkel and her tight circle of advisers had hoped that other White House officials — especially H. R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and Gary D. Cohn, the National Economic Council chairman — would provide a more reliable conduit. But that has not proved to be the case. Ms. Merkel’s team was deeply discouraged by a Wall Street Journal opinion piece writtenby Mr. McMaster and Mr. Cohn in May that defended Mr. Trump’s “America First” slogan, prioritizing the country’s “vital interests” over international partnerships.
The relationship between Ms. Merkel and Mr. Trump has unfolded in stages, said Thomas Kleine-Brockoff, a former German government official who is a vice president at the German Marshall Fund. “At first, I think she thought she could manage him,” he said. “After all, she’s made a study of all these leaders — Putin, Bush, Obama.”
“You could almost see her analyze Trump, run through the various scenarios and approaches for dealing with him,” he said. “Now I think she realizes there aren’t really any.”
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German officials were reticent when asked about possible disputes that might overshadow Ms. Merkel’s meeting with Mr. Trump. Her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, noted that there were many differences of opinion, “and it is not just with one delegation.” This is “also why the chancellor is scheduling bilateral meetings to explore difficult themes,” Mr. Seibert said.
Photo A protester during a “Welcome to Hell” march held in Hamburg on Thursday, before the Group of 20 meeting there. Credit Alexander Koerner/Getty Images
Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said it appeared that German officials were operating under the axiom of “rather than surfacing conflict, better not to say too much.”
Yet Ms. Merkel cannot afford to remain silent as Mr. Trump’s unpopularity grows on the Continent. A former German diplomat who keeps in touch with her staff said Ms. Merkel had studied the February visit to the White House by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and had determined that Mr. Abe’s charm and flattery, coupled with a blunt public articulation of their differences, was the best approach.
That influenced her decision to invite Ivanka Trump to a women’s conference in Berlin in April. Yet around the same time, Ms. Merkel began intensifying her public criticism of Mr. Trump. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union, has conspicuously dropped language from its campaign literature describing the United States as Germany’s “most important friend outside Europe.”
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“Merkel is a contradiction because she understands that she is the most powerful figure in Europe but doesn’t necessarily want to admit that,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who worked on European affairs under President Barack Obama. “But I think she realizes that she needs to assert principles publicly to counter Trump.”
A few days before Mr. Trump arrived in Hamburg, Ms. Merkel took a shot at the president’s “America First” slogan, albeit in her typically muted language.
“While we are looking at the possibilities of cooperation to benefit everyone, globalization is seen by the American administration more as a process that is not about a win-win situation, but about winners and losers,” she told the German weekly Die Zeit.
Mr. Trump has told his staff that he “gets along fine” with Ms. Merkel, though he finds the interactions awkward, two people close to him said.
But those grievances are not personal, aides insist. He is deeply displeased with Germany’s policies, they say, and will continue to hammer Germany about its trade surplus with the United States and its refusal to pay what he believes to be its fair share for self-defense in NATO.
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Still, Mr. Trump — who is almost as allergic to private confrontation as Ms. Merkel — entered Thursday’s short meeting with no set of objectives apart from exiting quickly and without much controversy.
He praised Ms. Merkel for hosting the event under tense circumstances, one aide familiar with the interaction said, and participated in the bilateral meeting partly out of courtesy to her, not because he had any business to transact, the aide added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting.
Still, it will be hard to avoid confrontation. Ms. Merkel’s aides have 48 hours to help produce a communiqué from the summit meeting that all can accept, despite disagreements on climate change, immigration and trade.
In addition to the risk that the G-20 will end up 19-to-1 on the issue of the Paris accord, some advisers to Ms. Merkel fear that Mr. Trump will try to weaken support for the agreement, which was reached in 2015 with America’s backing.
“There are various options that can be discussed,” was all that Ms. Merkel would say before the world leaders began arriving.
For all of these challenges, the G-20 gathering began on something of a high note for both Ms. Merkel and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump had fumbled a handshake in front of photographers during Ms. Merkel’s visit to the Oval Office in March, as the two sat uncomfortably in wingback chairs.
On Thursday, the chancellor extended her hand to the president, who answered with a firm and decisive grip of his own.Sometimes, a dog or a cat just won't do, so why not try a pet otter or capybara?
The cat and the dog have long been the default companion for humans. For some of us, though, they just won’t do. We need a more unusual companion animal. We need something exotic and intriguing like these weird pets:
Weird Pets You Can Own: Skunks
Skunks have one obvious drawback which is why they’ve never really taken off as pets until recently: their smell. However, domesticated skunks have their scent glands removed when they are young, which makes them safe to keep around the house.
Once you get over their less-than stellar reputation, keeping a skunk as pet is similar to owning a cat or a ferret. But as with most pets, if you want to have a strong bond with them you have to give them extra attention when they’re young.
Before you join the Pepe Le Pew fan club, you’ll need to find out if owning a pet skunk is legal in your state. It’s still illegal to own a skunk in most states, so don’t get your hopes up. If you do get one, you can plan on it keeping you company for around ten years.
Pet Otters
If you keep thinking to yourself “You know what? I have too much nice stuff in my home”, an otter can fix that problem for you in a moment’s time. Owning an otter is like unleashing Taz the Tasmanian Devil inside your house.
Otters are frequently described as “ferrets on crack,” and for good reason. They will go through every inch of your home, finding and playing with (and probably destroying) everything they can get their paws on.
Sure, you’ll probably have a lot of funny moments to capture on camera — just be prepared to pay a steep price for them.
From a legal standpoint, owning an otter can be trickier than a skunk, but it is possible. They love water so it is best if you have a body of water nearby for them to frolic in. You’ll also need access to plenty of fish.
Weird Pets: Sugar Gliders
Sugar gliders are quickly becoming America’s new exotic pet darling. Small and very adorable, sugar gliders have a distinctive membrane stretching from its front to hind legs which allows them to glide from tree to tree.
It is unlikely that they will make much use of that membrane in captivity, but they should still be kept in large areas with plenty of stuff to climb.
Sugargliders are marsupials from Australia, but are actually part of the opossum family. Since they are still categorized as exotic pets, ownership restrictions vary from state to state.
One important thing to note about sugar gliders – they are nocturnal. It is very hard for them to adapt to a daytime schedule so they are mostly recommended for people who are active at night themselves.
Weird Pets: Capybaras
Just think of the capybara as the XXL version of that guinea pig you had when you were a kid. This is accurate because capybaras are the largest rodent in the world. They often exceed 4 feet in length and 100 pounds in weight.
As exotic pets, not all states allow people to own capybaras and they aren’t really a good idea for families with small kids, anyway.
Even if they are raised from infancy, capybaras still maintain a sense of territoriality and can bite those who get too close. They will also need a lot of open space to explore, as well as access to a pool or a lake because they enjoy spending most of their time in water.
Axolotls
If the main traits you seek in a pet are weirdness and originality, an axolotl is the perfect choice. They are critically endangered in the wild and nowadays it is actually possible that more axolotls are held in captivity than in their natural habitats in Mexico.
Axolotls are salamanders with a very interesting characteristic – the adults never really get over the larval stage. They do grow, but they never metamorphose into land animals like most salamanders do, and instead remain aquatic creatures. Like other salamanders, axolotls also have the ability to re-grow body parts.
Bearded Dragons
Reptile lovers looking for something different can acquaint themselves with a bearded dragon. Originally from Australia, this guy is relatively friendly and docile and doesn’t pose a threat to humans, even children.
That, combined with the fact that they are easy to take care of, makes bearded dragons very popular as family pets.
A full-grown adult can reach up to 25 inches in size and weigh around 20 ounces. Its name comes from the “beard” surrounding the animal’s throat, which will expand when the animal feels threatened or is trying to show its dominance.
Dragons work best as solitary pets, although females can usually get along with each other. The males, however, will often fight to show which one is the dominant one.
Enjoy learning about these weird pets? Then check out our other posts on ocean animals facts and the world’s ugliest cats!The 30-mile journey will tak passengers from Edinburgh through Midlothian to Tweedbank.
Borders Railway
The new Borders Railway has opened to the public, bringing to an end a near 47-year wait for train services to return to that part of south-east Scotland.
The line is the longest new domestic railway to be built in the UK for over a century and takes passengers on a 30-mile journey from Edinburgh through Midlothian to Tweedbank in the Scottish Borders.
Some local people who live close to the line were given VIP treatment on the train on Saturday as part of a day of celebratory events, and scheduled services carrying the first fare-paying passengers start today.
The £294m construction project, which officials say was delivered on time and on budget, re-establishes part of the former Waverley line, which fell victim to the controversial Beeching cuts on January 6 1969, leaving the Borders region without any access to the National Rail network.
Hugh Wark, project director for Network Rail, said: "It's been a hugely complex project - 30 miles of railway delivered in under three years. It's quite an achievement.
"I believe it will be hugely successful. It's a marvellous railway, so let's really get the best benefits out of it that we possibly can.
"I can remember the line when it closed in 1969 and it was hugely controversial at the time. I never dreamt in my career that I would be involved in reopening this railway."
The Queen will officially open the railway on Wednesday with a special steam train trip marking the day she becomes Britain's longest-serving monarch.
Tourism chiefs hope the 55-minute service will boost visitor numbers to Midlothian and the Borders - an area known for its mining heritage, textiles and the landscape which inspired Sir Walter Scott.
Scotland's Infrastructure Secretary Keith Brown said: "Scotland's railways are enjoying a period of success not seen since the time that the old Waverley line was built in the Victorian era, largely thanks to the Scottish Government's record levels of investment, but also because the people of Scotland see the benefits of rail.
"The Borders Railway will be a real catalyst for growth in the Scottish Borders and Midlothian. It will open up new opportunities for work, leisure, study and investment and business for these areas which will, in turn, benefit the wider Scottish economy.
"Today promises to be a busy day for the new line and I look forward to seeing just how many people have turned up to enjoy these first ever ScotRail Borders Railway services."wikipedia commons An unnamed Chinese warship allegedly challenged an Indian navy vessel as it left a Vietnam port on July 22.
According to the Financial Times, the Chinese craft insisted the Indian amphibious assault vehicle, the INS Airavat explain its presence in Chinese waters.
Indian officials claim the ship was 45 miles off the Vietnamese coast, well within Vietnam's economic zone.
India's senior foreign ministry spokesman told the FT that the Airavat was "contacted on open radio channel by a caller identifying himself as the 'Chinese Navy' stating that 'you are entering Chinese waters'".
The Airavat did not see any aircraft or ships in the area.
While China claims the entire South China Sea as its own, an Indian official familiar with the incident says, "Any navy in the world has full freedom to transit through these waters or high seas. For any country to proclaim ownership or question the right to passage by any other nation is unacceptable."
Vietnam has acknowledged the Airavat was docked in the country from July 19-22, but has released no information on the incident.
China defense and foreign ministries deny the incident as well."A new study has suggested that exercising in your 40s could stop the brain shrinking," The Daily Telegraph reports.
A study found people with good fitness levels in their 40s had larger brains than their unfit peers when measured 20 years later. The concern is that people with smaller brains may be more likely to develop dementia.
The study, part of a big ongoing research project in the US (the landmark Framingham Heart Study) measured people's exercise capacity and heart and blood pressure reactions to exercise during a treadmill test, at an average age of 40.
The same people were assessed about 20 years later, with a repeat exercise test and an MRI scan to determine brain volume.
People with 20% less fitness compared to the average, had smaller brains by the equivalent of one additional year of ageing. A similar effect was seen for higher blood pressure or heart rate in response to exercise.
However, we don't know the importance of the brain size differences measured and as this was only done once, it is not clear whether the size had actually changed.
So we cannot be sure fitness levels directly caused the differences in brain size. But the research does add to the growing evidence that physical fitness and better mental capacity in older age go hand-in-hand.
What is good for the heart tends to also be good for the brain. Read more about how exercise may reduce your dementia risk.
Where did the story come from?
The study was carried out by researchers from Boston University School of Medicine, Framingham Heart Study, Harvard Medical School, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the University of California. It was funded by the National Institutes for Health and the American Heart Association.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Neurology.
Reports in the UK media overstated the certainty of the study. The Daily Mail's headline: "Being a couch potato shrinks the brain," makes the results sound more definite than they are. The report says that "failing to exercise" was the cause of smaller brains.
The Daily Telegraph says the study "revealed … exercising when aged between 40 and 50 could help prevent the brain shrinking". However, the study did not look at whether people exercised, how much they exercised or at what age. It only included information about their fitness levels, blood pressure and heart rate.
What kind of research was this?
This is a prospective cohort study, which tracks people over a long period of time and compares information taken at different time points. It's a good way to look for links between factors – in this case between fitness and later brain size. However, it cannot prove that one thing causes another.
What did the research involve?
Researchers took a large group of people, average age 40, and tested their fitness levels using a treadmill. They recalled them 20 years later to repeat a fitness test and have an MRI brain scan and cognitive tests. They looked for links between fitness at the first test and brain size and cognitive skills 20 years later.
The fitness tests involved people exercising on a treadmill until they reached 85% of their maximum heart rate, calculated by age and sex. Fitter people are able to exercise for longer before reaching this level. This time was used to calculate people's total exercise capacity. People's heart rate and blood pressure were also monitored before and during the test.
The researchers excluded people from their first analysis if they already had cardiovascular disease, had been taking beta blockers (drugs that slow heart rate) or if they had dementia or any condition that could affect the brain scan or cognitive tests. They were also excluded if they were unable to complete the exercise test.
In their analyses, the researchers adjusted their figures to take account of the following confounders:
age
sex
the time between examinations
whether they smoked
whether they had diabetes
whether they had a gene linked to Alzheimer's disease
whether they took medicine to treat high blood pressure
What were the basic results?
People who had 20% lower fitness levels based on the exercise capacity test had smaller brain volumes when assessed in later life. Those with a higher heart rate and diastolic blood pressure while exercising also had smaller brain volumes. Higher systolic blood pressure was also linked to smaller brain volumes, but only when the researchers looked at the subset of people with high blood pressure.
There was no link between lower exercise capacity in mid-life and any measures of cognitive function (thinking ability) in later life.
How did the researchers interpret the results?
The researchers say their findings: "provide new evidence that lower cardiovascular fitness and elevated exercise blood pressure and heart rate responses in early to midlife are associated with smaller brain volumes nearly two decades later, thereby linking fitness over the life course to brain health in later life".
They say that encouraging people to be fit in middle age could improve healthy brain ageing, especially for people with raised blood pressure.
Conclusion
We already know that high blood pressure in mid-life is linked to increased chances of getting dementia in older age. Also, taking regular exercise in middle age has been linked to a lower chance of dementia.
This study adds to what we already know about links between having a healthy heart and circulation, and a healthy brain.
The study found that people who did well in fitness tests at around 40 years of age had fewer signs of brain shrinkage at around 60. However, this did not translate into signs that the brain was working less well – perhaps because people were not old enough to have shown signs of slowed cognitive function.
We don't know from the study whether fitness levels are directly linked to brain shrinkage in a causal fashion. Therefore we can't say whether any particular amount of exercise protects against brain shrinkage. However, the researchers suggest that better cardiovascular fitness provides better blood flow and oxygen delivery to the brain, helping to keep it healthy.
The study has some limitations; importantly, brain volume was only assessed once, at the end of life, so we don’t know how much people's total brain volume had changed over time. We don't know the likely effect of the differences in brain volume measured. Also, the researchers did not calculate the possible effects of carrying out many different calculations on one set of data, which can increase the likelihood of some findings being down to chance.
Exercise has so many benefits that it can be confidently recommended, despite any questions about this particular study. However, there is no 100% guarantee that healthy lifestyles, including exercise, can prevent dementia in later life.An Atlanta father accused of killing his 18-month-old son with a BB gun waived his first court appearance Saturday morning, Channel 2 Action News reported.
Jessie L. Sellers, 23, is being charged with felony murder and second-degree child cruelty in connection with the death of Jesstin Sellers, and is being held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. The child died after apparently being shot in the chest with a BB gun.
Police were called Friday morning just after 9:15 to the Boyton Village apartments in the 1000 block of Hank Aaron Drive.
The toddler’s uncle, Willie Dickerson, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he arrived at the apartment to find Jessie Sellers standing outside crying.
Witnesses saw the bleeding child carried to an ambulance, and police say the boy was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Atlanta Police homicide unit commander Capt. Paul Guerrucci said investigators recovered a BB gun from inside the apartment near Braves Stadium.
“The caller said her young child had been shot in the chest with what she believed was a BB gun,” Guerrucci said. “We found a child that had sustained some type of injury to the chest. Information that we are receiving would indicate that” the child was shot with a BB gun.
Forensic pathologists with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office and the GBI will make the final determination on what caused the child’s death, he said.
“We are speaking with involved parties to try to determine what happened,” Guerrucci said. “We take these types of incidents seriously, and all resources are being used.”
Dickerson said he thought the incident was an accident.
Police say three adults and three children were inside the apartment and police are involving the state Division of Family and Children Services in the investigation.
Police warned that guns shouldn’t be used around children.
“It’s never safe to have weapons around children,” Guerrucci said.
A candlelight vigil will be held Friday at 7 p.m. for Jesstin in the parking lot of the apartment complex where his family lives.
Please return to ajc.com for updates.Continuing the Jincilla Pantheon.Gophalis, the sea god is the son of Xeul and Fala (The king and queen of the Gods). While the rest of the Jincilla gods and goddesses retain the raptor-like shape of mortal Jincilla, Gophalis is cursed with his flightless form as punishment for the murder of the Titan, Xanos.Most non-Jincilla would not understand the torture of being flightless, as the ability to fly is such a huge part of their way of life. If at any point in their life, illness or injury renders them flightless, then they either commit suicide or are killed by their clan-mates as an act of mercy. Severing the wings is a practice reserved for the most heinous of criminals. Eons of being flightless have turned Gophalis wild and unpredictable. He is fickle, and it will always be a toss-up if he will decide to help or hinder mortals.He has the markings of a kingfisher that become marlin markings on his tail.Mechanical Pencil, Paper, Scanner, Photoshop, Paint Tool SaiUnrecordedImage © 2012 Traci Vermeesch-VezinaDO NOT copy, alter, repost, etc without the consent of the artist! Character/Image are NOT public domain!Please think before you type...and please read before asking questions. I will no longer be answering questions that can either be answered by simply reading the image's description or by spending 5 seconds to Google the answer.There are 60 million refugees globally right now. This is a number not seen since the end of the Second World War. It’s a crisis by any measure. And the horrifying photos you’ve seen of dead children washing up on European beaches only represent a tiny fraction of the millions suffering in Syria, Sudan, Burma, Colombia, and a dozen other conflict zones around the world. This number has been mounting for a decade, but unfortunately we didn’t start to notice until a few of them began to cross the Mediterranean.
What is Canada doing to help? Not much. While Prime Minister Harper has claimed Canada has been extremely generous in accepting refugees, the actual numbers tell a different story. According to the federal government, Canada usually accepts 10,000 refugees per year. That is 1/60 of one per cent of the total global refugee population. That’s like spitting on a house fire.
The Conservative government is fond of boasting that Canada settles “one out of 10 refugees” worldwide. That is an incredibly misleading figure that assumes only 100,000 (of the 60 million) refugees around the world are resettled each year.
In truth, we’re doing very little compared to other countries. Annually, we are letting in one quarter of one refugee for every 1,000 Canadian citizens. By contrast, Germany is expecting 800,000 new arrivals this year, or 10 per 1,000 citizens. If one compares the economic ability of a country to accept refugees, Canada is accepting one-quarter of a refugee per $1 of GDP per capita. Germany is accepting 80 times that amount, or 17.4 refugees per $1.
In January the Conservatives pledged to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over a period of three years, of which Immigration Minister Chris Alexander reports 2,500 are now in Canada. Prime Minister Harper later increased this multi-year target by another 10,000. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has upped the ante and called for a target of 25,000. The NDP have been less specific, but Thomas Mulcair has said Canada is “not doing enough.”
Sadly, these promises are almost meaningless. Canada is capable of so much more, and so much more is what is needed. Numbers rarely move us or our leaders to do great things. Sixty million is just a statistic. But we relate to people, and the image of a drowned child, lying in the surf on a Turkish beach, sent a shock of anger through the Western world. This is the moment when we want our leaders to do the right thing, to do something bold. Unfortunately, in Canadian politics, “thinking big” means thinking a little less small.
RELATED: His name was Alan Kurdi
If we wait for the political parties to lead in this crisis, nothing will happen. We all know this.
So, let’s lead them. Let’s push a real proposal to the political candidates, their parties, and their leaders. What if Canada aspired to do one-quarter of what Germany is doing? We wouldn’t double the number of refugees we accept, or even triple. We would increase it twentyfold, from 10,000 to 200,000 per year.
That would be 4.4 refugees per $1 GDP per capita, as compared to Germany’s 17.4. Not heroic, but not shameful.
Gallery Migrant crisis 1 / 11 (Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images/AFP) Röszke, Hungary A young migrant's hair becomes stuck while she crawls under a barbed-wire fence with her family at the Hungarian-Serbian border near Röszke, Hungary
How much would this cost? Contrary to popular perception, the government of Canada pays very little to support refugees arriving in Canada. Financial support can be provided for up to one year or until they find work, whichever comes first. In Ontario, a single refugee could receive up to $781 per month for a year, in addition to a one-time allowance of $905. Germany calculates that they spend slightly more, about $11,600 (in Canadian dollars) per new refugee. Increasing our refugee intake by a factor of 20 would cost approximately $2.2 billion a year.
That might sound like a lot, but it works out to $63 per Canadian. The parties would only need to give up a few of the boutique tax credits they are sprinkling across the country. Better yet, the government could pledge to match whatever the public promises up to a maximum of $1.1 billion. This would cut the cost in half and force Canadians to put up or shut up. When this approach has been used in the past, to address an overseas natural disaster for example, the public has been extremely generous. We might surprise ourselves.
A real long-term solution will still require bringing stability to Syria and a dozen other war zones. And accepting 200,000 refugees per year is still only one-third of one per cent of the global refugee population. It seems like almost nothing in the bigger picture. But it would change the lives of 200,000, and that’s something.
So, Canada, let’s try something different. Let’s think big for once. Email your candidate and ask them why we can’t increase the number of refugees we take by twentyfold. And if they don’t answer, just keep sending them photos of dying refugees. Sadly, you have an almost endless supply.
RELATED: Inside the Syrian refugee crisisTanya Haden (born October 11, 1971) is an American artist, cellist, and singer. She is one of the triplet daughters of jazz bassist Charlie Haden. She is married to actor, comedian and musician Jack Black.
Born in New York City, she was a member of several bands, including Let's Go Sailing, and is the creator of the Imaginary Bear puppet show. She has contributed to recordings of a number of Los Angeles musicians, including vocals and cello on Par Avion's EP, Pop Music United. She is the daughter of the jazz double bassist Charlie Haden; the triplet sister of bassist Rachel Haden and violinist Petra Haden, with whom she has performed as The Haden Triplets; and the sister of bassist-singer Josh Haden, leader of the group Spain.[1]
She received her MFA degree from California Institute of the Arts, where she majored in experimental animation.[2] She continues her work in visual art and has exhibited in several shows including one at the Las Cienegas Projects in 2010.[3] In 2015, Haden was picked up by Rosamund Felsen Gallery where she had a one-artist exhibition showing drawings.[4]
Haden plays cello extensively in the Los Angeles area including performing as an additional member of the band Silversun Pickups. She also plays the cello on their Pikul EP, which was released in 2005.[2] Haden has also recorded with the Los Angeles indie folk band Sea Wolf[5] and played cello on Los Angeles based rock band The Warlocks album Surgery in 2005.[6]
Tanya with her sisters Petra and Rachel, known as The Haden Triplets, released their first album on February 4, 2014.[7][8] The album includes the sisters singing in close harmony.[9] The record was produced by Ry Cooder and also features the sisters on their respective instruments.[7] The album is being released on Third Man Records which was founded by musician Jack White.[10]
Haden married actor Jack Black on March 14, 2006, in Big Sur, California.[11] She gave birth to their first child, a boy named Samuel Jason Black on June 10, 2006 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.[12] Haden met Jack Black when they were students at Crossroads School, a private high school in Santa Monica. Although the two attended the private high school together, they did not begin dating until spring 2005. In January 2008, Black announced that Haden was then expecting their second child. Their second son, named Thomas David Black, was born on May 23, 2008.
According to Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween), the Ween song "Stay Forever" was written for Haden.[13]The old Bronze Peacock Records building, which most recently housed Charity Baptist Church, was razed over the weekend. Country singer Johnny Bush recalled that the sounds of the club would resonate beyond its walls into the streets of the neighborhood. "I'd walk out to the street and just listen," he told the Chronicle. "The music, the sounds were something else. It seemed almost like a dream." >>Keep clicking for a look at Houston's favorite music venues. less The old Bronze Peacock Records building, which most recently housed Charity Baptist Church, was razed over the weekend. Country singer Johnny Bush recalled that the sounds of the club would resonate beyond... more Photo: Nick De La Torre, STAFF Photo: Nick De La Torre, STAFF Image 1 of / 49 Caption Close Houston music landmark razed 1 / 49 Back to Gallery
Decades had passed since the white building at 2809 Erastus at the corner of Wylie in the Fifth Ward served as the epicenter for African-American nightlife in Houston. The storied Bronze Peacock club was eventually shuttered and transformed into the headquarters for the late Don Robey's Houston-based music empire, where he oversaw his Duke and Peacock labels and the successful Buffalo Booking Agency.
The building for years |
to me it’s almost frightening, the number of people who are living that are potentially carriers. Well they are carriers, with the potential to spread, whereas in the past they died more readily and then at that point they are not posing a risk. So we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they are not in treatment.”
It’s not a surprise that Price spoke up. Another speaker who set the stage for the comments, Dr. Wendy Armstrong, an Emory professor, director of Grady Health System’s infectious disease program and immediate past chair of the HIV Medicine Association, had called the panel to action.
“We have significant challenges with stigma, with homophobia, with less access to health insurance,” Armstrong said at the beginning of the study committee meeting that morning. “We need to start treating our way out of this disease.”
Armstrong reported that the epidemic had moved into a “more vulnerable” population including African-American men and young people, and that it was concentrated in the South. About a third spread infection without knowing they were infected, she said, and the others were not getting continuous medication.
“We must facilitate testing,” Armstrong told the panel. “Which equires education. It requires decreasing stigma – people are afraid to get tested because then it puts that red H on their chest for the rest of their life. And it requires linking people to care.”
Price said she, too, was dedicated to ensuring that Georgians receive and adhere to a proper regimen of care, and she wanted to “light a fire” to get it done.
READ THE FULL ORIGINAL STORY: Click here
Here is Price’s written response Saturday in full.
STATEMENT FROM REPRESENTATIVE ELIZABETH PRICE, M.D.
October 21, 2017
At a House Legislative Study Committee meeting this past week, we were exploring the difficult question of why Georgia ranks 2nd in the nation of new cases of HIV and why too many of our fellow citizens who have HIV are not compliant with the effective treatment of this now chronic disease. This is sad and troubling because we have come so far in HIV treatment, to the point where an HIV patient receiving recommended treatment is no longer able to transmit the disease to another person. This is something to celebrate, especially in stemming the transmission from a mother to her newborn baby.
During my entire professional career as a physician, my 10+ year service on the Fulton County Health Board, and the numerous public service roles relating to healthcare and medicine in which I have served, I have always strived to preserve the health and safety of patients and the public.
I made a provocative and rhetorical comment as part of a free-flowing conversation which has been taken completely out of context. I do not support a quarantine in this public health challenge and dilemma of undertreated HIV patients. I do, however, wish to light a fire under all of us with responsibility in the public health arena - a fire that will result in resolve and commitment to ensure that all of our fellow citizens with HIV will receive, and adhere to, a treatment regimen that will enhance their quality of life and protect the health of the public.
I look forward to continuing to work with all to accomplish this goal.USA Ultimate Secures Leadership of Dr. Tom Crawford with Long-Term Contract Extension
Colorado Springs, Colo. (Jan. 28, 2016) – USA Ultimate, the national governing body for the sport of ultimate in the United States and member of the U.S. Olympic Committee, announced today that it has successfully secured the services of USA Ultimate, the national governing body for the sport of ultimate in the United States and member of the U.S. Olympic Committee, announced today that it has successfully secured the services of Dr. Tom Crawford as the organization’s chief executive officer for an extended term. The six-year extension runs through 2021, with a built-in extension if ultimate succeeds in getting on the Olympic program.
"On behalf of the USA Ultimate board of directors, we are very excited to have Tom continue leading our organization," commented President DeAnna Ball. "He has been a tremendous advocate for our sport, and his attention to our strategic plan has resulted in enormous strides for the sport, as well as USA Ultimate. The commitment he has demonstrated is unequivocally reciprocated by the board. I have great confidence in his ability to continue to push our sport forward, both here in the U.S. and internationally."
Added Henry Thorne, board vice president: "There are some unique things about Tom we think the community should remember and celebrate, and that reiterate why the board feels so fortunate to have Tom at the helm.
With a double doctorate in motor (sport skill) development and performance psychology with a minor in exercise physiology and a master’s degree in leadership, Tom has a unique understanding of athlete development and high performance, from youth to the elite level. Tom has also been described as one of the leading experts in talent identification and development. When he was recruited to work alongside more than a dozen Nobel laureates to lead the sport science segment of the inaugural World Science Festival in New York City, he was described as a ‘leading single source expert in achieving athletic excellence.’ The youth development programs he created while he was senior director of the National Institute for Fitness and Sport received national acclaim and were featured live on CBS This Morning. He is also a Distinguished Alumnus of Indiana University.
He is a successful entrepreneur with a long track record of leading, advising and growing companies in the sports, entertainment, health, technology and consulting sectors in both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds. He knows what it takes to lead and grow successful companies and organizations.
The athletes in ultimate should feel excited that the organization is run by a professional with experience working with NBA, NFL and NHL athletes and franchises, top 10 professional tennis players and virtually all Olympic sports. He knows what it takes to be a world class athlete.
Tom served for a decade as the director of coaching for the U.S. Olympic Committee and spent countless hours with the best coaches in the world, helping them become even better and winning on the global stage. He knows what it takes to be a world class coach."
Some notable developments for USA Ultimate under Crawford’s leadership include:
Significant membership growth (more than 80 percent).
Tripling revenues and more than doubling the size of the staff.
Rebranding the organization to USA Ultimate to better fit into the U.S. sports landscape.
Securing ESPN as a broadcast partner in a multi-year deal covering both the College Championships and the Triple Crown Tour and putting ultimate’s top athletes on the big stage.
Gaining U.S. Olympic Committee membership and recognition and helping WFDF secure permanent IOC recognition.
Creating partnerships with the Catholic Youth Organization, Boy Scouts of America, Women’s Sports Foundation, Jewish Community Centers and other youth-serving organizations, all helping to grow youth ultimate.
Creating the new state organization structure to truly scale the sport and grow youth ultimate even faster through great local leadership and entrepreneurial energy.
Launching The Ultimate Foundation to raise revenues and support outside of USA Ultimate’s annual operating budget.
Growing the Youth Club Championships into the largest single event on the annual calendar.
"As I’ve said many times, I fell in love with ultimate as a unique, wicked fun and highly athletic sport," said Crawford. "I love the Spirit of the Game ethos, and unlike other sports that talk about and even emphasize sportsmanship, ultimate has found a way to truly operationalize it, so it sticks and becomes part of the fabric of the sport, and I love that. It makes this sport very different from most other sports, and I’m energized to be sure families learn about it as a great option for their children. And I want to put our world class athletes on the big stage. Thus I am thrilled and truly honored that the board is pleased enough with my leadership and performance to offer me this long term agreement that allows me to continue to lead the smartest staff I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with and to lead the growth of ultimate and this organization for years to come. We’ve got some really exciting plans, and I’m truly psyched about our future!"
Have any questions or comments? We welcome community feedback and discussion made in a respectful manner. Please refrain from profanity or personal attacks, as such public comments negatively reflect on our sport and community.Three Government ministers - Richard Bruton, Frances Fitzgerald and Simon Harris - have not ruled themselves out as candidates in a Fine Gael leadership contest when the Taoiseach stands down.
Enda Kenny is to address a Fine Gael Parliamentary Party meeting on Wednesday on the matter.
Minister for Education Richard Bruton has said he wanted to discuss with colleagues where the party and the country was going at a time of remarkable change.
Minister for Housing Simon Coveney, who is also expected to be a contender, has said he hoped there would not be any further ultimatums or threats from a minority within the party ahead of the Taoiseach's statement.
Fine Gael ministers have also been commenting on a WhatsApp message posted by Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan about Minister for Health Simon Harris.
In it, Minster Flanagan appears to talk about Mr Harris contesting the Fine Gael leadership.
The text to party colleagues reads: "He hasn't announced yet but Frances is encouraging him. He wants out of Health."
This morning, Mr Flanagan said his WhatsApp remark was jovial Sunday afternoon banter, adding that he regrets that it has been taken so seriously.
Minister Harris also dismissed the message saying Charlie Flanagan had many fine attributes but telling funny jokes on a Sunday afternoon was clearly not one of them.
He said he was honoured to hold the position of Minister for Health and he hoped that even his harshest critics would acknowledge he was doing everything he could to engage in the role with energy and enthusiasm.
Fine Gael leadership: Minister for Health Simon Harris says "if and when a vacancy arises I will consider my options at that stage" pic.twitter.com/iHsmeRDyna — RTÉ News (@rtenews) February 20, 2017
Mr Harris expressed his full confidence in the Taoiseach but critically he was less clear about his own intentions regarding the leadership.
At some point were a vacancy to arise he would consider his position at that point, Mr Harris said.
He said Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who this week is expected to indicate when he intends to step down, has his "full confidence and support".
"If and when a vacancy arises I will consider my options at that stage," Mr Harris said in Mullingar this morning.
Tánaiste and Minister for Justice Francis Fitzgerald today said she will wait until a contest has been announced to consider her position regarding the leadership.
Minister for Education and Skills Richard Bruton also did not rule himself in or out of leadership contention.
Asked if he would be ruling himself in or out of a contest, Mr Bruton said he wanted to discuss with colleagues where the "party and this country is going at a time of remarkable change".
Speaking in Brussels, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan reiterated his position that he expects the Taoiseach to give a timeline for when he will step down at a Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday.
While leaving an event in Balla, Co Mayo, Mr Kenny said that he would not be making any comment on his position until Wednesday.
The move means it is very unlikely he will now face a no-confidence motion from TDs or senators.
Over the weekend, a clear timetable for the Taoiseach's departure from office was set out by two ministers who it is expected will seek to replace him.
Mr Coveney wants an orderly and quick transition to a new leader soon after the Taoiseach returns from the US after St Patrick's Day.
The other Fine Gael leadership hopeful, Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar, agrees with this timeline.
Brian Dowling: Ultimatum is a humiliation for Kenny
Mr Coveney has said he thinks Fine Gael needs to settle down and give the party leader the time and space that he needs to follow though to do what he said he would do.
Mr Coveney said he expected that would start when Mr Kenny comes back after St Patrick's Day.
He said everyone should all just back off now and let that process be planned for.
Fine Gael MEP Mairead McGuinness, meanwhile, has said no one can speculate about the Taoiseach's intentions until he addresses the parliamentary party meeting.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, she said "we all have to wait as we should with respect for that comment and then people can discuss afterwards".
Ms McGuinness said her sense from party colleagues is that they are supportive of Mr Kenny and do not want to see "any hasty or undignified departure of the Taoiseach".
Former Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes has said a change in leadership is inevitable and it should happen as soon as possible.
He said he felt personally sorry that Mr Kenny was in this position but the handover of leadership must be done as smoothly as possible. A long farewell, he said, must be avoided.
A senior Fianna Fáil TD has meanwhile said it is imperative that ministers get their priorities right as there are more pressing issues than the leadership of Fine Gael.
Offaly TD Barry Cowen said it was important that the leadership issue was resolved as soon as possible.
"Fine Gael needs to put a process in place to deal with this issue and convince the public that it won't interfere with Government business thereafter".'Vikings' and 'Boardwalk Empire' are also among the American Society of Cinematographers television nominees
Game of Thrones, Gotham and Manhattan earned two nominations apiece in the TV categories for the American Society of Cinematographers 29th annual Outstanding Achievement Awards. The ceremony will take place Feb. 15 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza.
The nominees in the category for an episode of a regular series are Anette Haellmigk for Game of Thrones ("The Children"), Fabian Wagner for Game of Thrones ("Mockingbird"), Christopher Norr for Gotham ("Spirit of the Goat"), Richard Rutkowski for Manhattan ("Perestroika"), P.J. Dillon for Vikings ("Blood Eagle") and Jonathan Freeman for Boardwalk Empire ("Golden Days for Boys and Girls").
See more 'Game of Thrones' Stars on the Big Screen
Additionally, the pilots of Gotham and Manhattan were recognized in the category for a TV movie, miniseries or pilot. Those nominees are John Lindley for Manhattan and David Stockton for Gotham. Rounding out the nominations in this category are David Greene for TV movie The Trip to Bountiful and Theo Van de Sande for TV movie Deliverance Creek.
Freeman has won four ASC Awards for Game of Thrones (2014), Boardwalk Empire (2012, 2011) and Homeland Security (2005). Stockton previously won for his work on Eleventh Hour (2009).
Email: Carolyn.Giardina@THR.com
Twitter: @CGinLAMSNBC's Mika Brzezinski said Wednesday that she refuses to book Kellyanne Conway on "Morning Joe" - and that wasn't even the harshest thing Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough said about the counselor to the president.
"We know for a fact she tries to book herself on this show," Brzezinski said. "I won't do it, 'cuz I don't believe in fake news or information that is not true. And that is - every time I've ever seen her on television, something's askew, off or incorrect."
The declaration that Conway is not welcome on "Morning Joe" is not very surprising. When CNN refused to put the former Trump campaign manager on its Sunday political talk show earlier this month, Brzezinksi tweeted that CNN was "not the first." Wednesday marked the first time that she revealed a blanket ban on appearances by Conway, however.
Even more damning than their blacklisting of Conway was the way the "Morning Joe" hosts characterized her - as an attention seeker who texts TV producers in a constant effort to get on air, so she can speak for a White House where she actually isn't in the know.
"She's in none of the key meetings," Scarborough said. "She goes out and books herself often.... I don't even think she's saying something that she knows to be untrue. She's just saying things, just to get in front of the TV set and prove her relevance because behind the scenes - behind the scenes, she's not in these meetings."
Without making an explicit reference, Brzezinski and Scarborough offered a description of Conway that recalled her character on the latest episode of "Saturday Night Live." In the sketch, Conway (Kate McKinnon) stalks CNN anchor Jake Tapper (Beck Bennett) and holds a knife to his throat until he agrees to let her back on television.
The Conway caricature on "SNL" is desperate to be on TV, and the real-life Conway is, too, according to "Morning Joe."
The Washington Post reported last month that Conway turned down the role of White House press secretary. Conway told The Post at the time that she hoped to limit her TV appearances and focus more on shaping policy.
Yet the White House has continued to use her as a spokeswoman, and she has at times seemed in the dark about major decisions. On Monday afternoon, for instance, she told reporters that Michael Flynn had "the full confidence of the president." Less than an hour later, White House press secretary Sean Spicer contradicted her when he said that Trump was "evaluating the situation." Flynn resigned as national security adviser that night.Turkey’s Foreign Ministry lodged a formal protest Monday with the U.S. ambassador over “aggressive” actions by American security personnel during a visit to Washington last week by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that was marred by a violent clash between Turkish guards and protesters.
The summoning of the ambassador, John Bass, sharply escalated a diplomatic rift between Turkey and the United States following the violence. Footage of the brawl was widely circulated on social media, prompting outrage in the United States, along with calls for the prosecution of the Turkish guards and even the expulsion of Turkey’s ambassador to Washington.
American and Turkish officials have provided directly contrasting versions of how the violence unfolded. Local police said the Turkish guards savagely attacked a peaceful protest outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence as Erdogan was visiting. Footage of the melee showed what appeared to be Turkish security guards kicking and choking protesters as police struggled to contain the unrest. It also showed Erdogan watching, from a distance, as the fighting raged.
Erdogan’s critics seized on the bloody altercation — and a similar flash of violence during the Turkish president’s visit to Washington last year — as indicative of his government’s iron-fisted approach to protests and dissent at home.
But Turkish diplomats faulted the local police, saying they had failed to quell an “unpermitted” and “provocative” demonstration.
(Kareem Fahim, Jason Aldag / The Washington Post)
The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s statement Monday went even further, criticizing “the inability of U.S. authorities to take sufficient precautions at every stage of the official program.” And it demanded that the United States conduct a “full investigation of this diplomatic incident and provide the necessary explanation.”
The statement also blamed “U.S. security personnel” for “aggressive and unprofessional” actions against the Turkish foreign minister’s protective detail. A Turkish official said it was a reference to an incident several hours after the protest, when U.S. diplomatic security agents briefly detained two Turkish guards as they were trying to enter the Turkish Embassy. The guards were later released and returned to Turkey, the official said.
Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, confirmed in a statement that Bass had been summoned by the Turkish Foreign Ministry “to discuss the violent incidents involving protestors and Turkish security personnel on May 16.”
“As we noted previously, the conduct of Turkish security personnel last week was deeply disturbing,” she said. “The State Department has raised its concerns about those events at the highest levels.”
The spiraling argument appeared to sour what by all accounts had been a friendly meeting between Erdogan and President Trump before the protest. In a joint press appearance at the White House, the two leaders were full of mutual praise and spoke of hopes for a closer and more productive relationship.
But the rift has also laid bare policy disagreements, particularly over the war in Syria, that have stirred tensions between the two allies. Turkey has been angered by the Trump administration’s decision to arm a Kurdish force to fight the Islamic State militant group in Syria in partnership with the United States. Turkey says the group is an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is regarded as a terrorist organization by Ankara and Washington.
Kurdish activists were among the protesters in D.C. on May 16 outside the ambassador’s residence, according to footage of the violence. Some held signs in support of Selahattin Demirtas, a co-leader of a pro-Kurdish political party who is in prison and facing prosecution in Turkey. Others held the flag of the People’s Protection Units, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish force.
It is not clear from the footage what set off the melee, but Turkish security guards, as well as men in suits who were standing among a pro-Erdogan contingent, can be seen attacking the protesters, including repeatedly kicking a man lying on the ground. Another video shows Erdogan himself watching the protest after emerging from his car in the ambassador’s driveway.
Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency on Saturday published an account by one of its correspondents that said the first fights broke out when the protesters threw water bottles at a pro-Erdogan group.
When the Turkish president arrived at the ambassador’s residence, it said, “protesters continued their grave insults, so some Turkish citizens and the head of the president’s security detail stepped in.”
The tensions stirred by the violence were apparent at a conference on U.S.-Turkey relations held at the Trump hotel in Washington on Monday. Bass, who was listed as a luncheon keynote speaker, did not attend, though it was unclear whether his absence was caused by the diplomatic row.
Turkey’s ambassador to Washington, Serdar Kilic, used his speech at the conference luncheon to defend his country’s actions. “Differences of opinion are natural among two allies,” he said, but added: “There is a big difference between freedom of expression and expression of solidarity with terrorists and terrorism. It was disappointing to see friends of PKK on the streets of Washington, D.C.”
Another speaker, State Department Undersecretary Thomas Shannon, praised Turkey’s longtime alliance with the United States as well as the resolve of Turkish citizens in responding to the coup attempt last year. “That is why Americans were so concerned and disturbed by the violent incident,” he said.
One of the conference chairs, Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman who is close to senior Turkish officials, was at the center of another recent controversy between the United States and Turkey when it emerged that a company Alptekin owned had paid former national security adviser Michael Flynn to investigate an enemy of the Turkish government.
Carol Morello and Tom Hamburger in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
Erdogan’s guards clash with protesters outside Turkish ambassador’s D.C. residence
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsWe are proud to announce the births of two clouded leopards born March 13 and March 18. The cubs, both female, are doing well and are being hand-raised together.
“Nashville Zoo is on the forefront of clouded leopard care and conservation,” said Karen Rice, carnivore supervisor. “The births of these two cubs aids in our conservation efforts and benefits the long-term plan to create a sustainable captive population.”
Clouded leopards are considered vulnerable to extinction due to deforestation, poaching and the pet trade. As a founding member of the Thailand Clouded Leopard Consortium, Nashville Zoo works with organizations around the world to improve husbandry, breeding and genetic diversity for this dynamic species.
Due to the cat’s reclusive disposition, introducing clouded leopards to potential mates has been difficult, as male clouded leopards have been known to attack and kill potential female partners. To reduce these fatal attacks, the Zoo hand-raises cubs and introduces them to mates at a young age.
Since 2009, 22 clouded leopards have been raised by the Zoo’s animal care team and have gone on to zoos worldwide. This birth announcement come on the heels of clouded leopards born at Lowry Park Zoo on March 7 and Zoo Miami on March 9. The fathers from both of these breeding pairs (at Lowry Park Zoo and Zoo Miami) were born at Nashville Zoo.Before Richard Kadrey was writing the Sandman Slim novels and other thrilling urban fantasy books, he was writing cyberpunk — and now, you can read his classic novel Metrophage, in a new signed edition.
Kadrey has signed the entire first edition of HarperCollins' new version of Metrophage. Here's the novel's synopsis:
In a future not far from our own, Los Angeles has stratified even further. Pockets of wealth and influence seclude themselves behind bars, surrounded by vast territories where anything goes. Welcome to Los Angeles...where anger, hunger and disease run rampant, and life and hope are strictly rationed. This is Jonny's world. He's a street-wise hustler, a black-market dealer in drugs that heal the body and cool the mind. All he cares about is his own survival. Until a strange plague turns L.A. into a city of death—and Jonny is forced to put everything on the line to find the cure. If it can be found. METROPHAGE is an archetype of the cyberpunk/near-future SFF genres, rampant with destabilization/radical change in the social order, A.I., and a civilization reeling from rapid technological change. It's a dark, gritty tale, told as only Kadrey could spin it…and its lesson made only more potent with the passage of time.
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The signed special edition of Metrophage is available now.Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin have made it clear that they still care for one another despite their “conscious uncoupling" in 2014 that led to their divorce this past July.
In the February issue of InStyle magazine, the 44-year-old actress opens up about how she and the Coldplay frontman go about co-parenting daughter Apple, 12, and son Moses, 10, post-divorce. "He's at my house every single day," Paltrow shares. "We have our own lives but we still have our family life."
WATCH: Gwyneth Paltrow Flaunts Bikini Bod During Vacation With Boyfriend Brad Falchuk
The mother of two adds that she still has a strong bond with her ex-husband. "And to this day, Chris would take a bullet for me," she says of Martin. "Even though I'm not his wife."
Paltrow continues, "I honestly think Chris and I have contributed something positive to the culture of divorce."
InStyle
As for how her boyfriend, TV producer Brad Falchuk, feels about this arrangement, she insists, "He has his own version of it, his own family where it's not a couple but it's a family." Falchuk has two children of his own from ex-wife, Suzanne Falchuk.
EXCLUSIVE: Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals the One Food That Really 'Offends' Her -- and It's Not Spray Cheese
In addition to speaking openly about the men in her life, Paltrow also admits that she's sort of over acting. "I don't think I like it anymore," the Oscar winner confides, adding that she's not even sure what Marvel movies she's contracted to appear in as her Pepper Potts character. "I think it's Avengers or Captain America, one of those," she quips.
Earlier this year, Paltrow had a candid conversation with ET's Carly Steel and shared her secret to successfully co-parenting with Martin. "You have to constantly let go," she revealed. "You have to let go of old ideas, old resentments. You have to put the kids first, which I think people have the idea of that, but then oftentimes, you struggle with it."Thinking of giving your baby an unusual name? Think about the effect it will have on their life, says Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad
My name is Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad. No, I’m not kidding. This is the name my parents chose for me 19 years ago and it is the reason I don’t go to Starbucks. Choosing a name for your baby can seem like a way to determine what type of parents you will become – many aim for trendy rather than traditional. However, faced with the resentment of your grownup offspring, who have endured a childhood of being embarrassed by their unusual name, you may wish you could turn back time.
My experience of living with an unusual name has been, to put it lightly, difficult. There has not been one occasion when making a new acquaintance has not resulted in a remark about it, or some degree of confusion.
Faced with an uncommon name, people think they have the right to voice an opinion. The worst is when a stranger feels it necessary to comfort me, having assumed (correctly) that my name is an affliction. “Oh, that’s different,” they say, or “How original.” I’ve learned that what people really mean by this is that they have no idea how to spell it.
Since childhood, I’ve been called Hebe – a short version of my middle name – I think this was my mother’s feeble attempt to shield me from the unkindness of the outside world. In fact, the 2006 fantasy film Penelope – about a mother’s desperate efforts to help her daughter function in society without being branded a freak – could be based on my life. Except in the true story I have a peculiar name, not a porcine nose – and I don’t end up with James McAvoy (sigh).
My childhood peers mocked my name, as did several teachers – resorting to calling me Herbie, Heb and Phoebe. My least favourite gag came in my first year of high school, when a teacher jokingly asked me in front of the whole class where “Jeebie” was. To this day, I fail to understand how an adult could find amusement in embarrassing a child in front of her peers.
One annoyance, which will be shared with other children with unusual names, is that every piece of homework created on a computer would automatically have a red squiggly line under my name – even technology knew that Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad shouldn’t be a name. I wish Bill Gates had informed my parents sooner.
Surprisingly, I’ve managed to cope reasonably well with having an odd name – to the surprise of my grandmother, whom I also blame for not stopping my parents from deciding it wasn’t enough to hyphenate a transliterated Arabic surname and adding a couple of names from ancient civilisations.
I would like to say that I have learned to appreciate my full name in all its ridiculousness. However, every time I have to spell it painfully slowly for someone, or give a stranger a brief historical account of what my parents were thinking when naming me, I realise that I will never feel anything but mild annoyance.
Strangely, I think what has allowed me to cope with my name is hearing others struggle with it. Although this is deeply embarrassing, it is nonetheless amusing. I stifle a laugh when someone from customer services pronounces my name “Fo-nik-ia”. Also, I’ll never run out of small talk; imagine that awkward silence with a stranger – you don’t have to resort to the weather when you can chat for 15 minutes about the unusual origins of your own name. But a couple of minor perks don’t outweigh a childhood of mortification. To all future parents thinking of giving their child a “unique” name, please consider the effect you will have on their life. Just so you do, here are my five golden rules:
Have you heard the name before? If not, no one else will have.
Can you pronounce it without having to look it up? Because if you need to look it up, I can tell you firsthand that you will be the only person your child ever meets who has taken the time to do so.
Avoid hyphens unless both names are easily pronounceable. Dobson – that’s fine. Mouawad – more than enough effort on its own. Dobson-Mouawad – no comment.
Can a child of primary school age say it? If they look confused and say, “What?”, take that as a strong no.
Remember that your child’s name is for their happiness alone and not to prove to the world how cool and creative you are. That’s what Instagram is for. Take it from someone who knows or in 19 years’ time your child will be as fed up as I am.What is it with college girls these days? Growing up in the Midwest—having sex before 18 was considered early, I can’t quite understand fathom having five partners, as a female- by 19? Not only is the drunken teen, in “A Terrible Place to be A Woman”—having sex, profusely—but she is getting ‘raped’ and accepting it.
“Oh it’s no big deal, I can handle it, and I’m a big girl. I don’t get attached to anyone I have sex with. There was one who was kind of okay, but no, not really, I don’t like any of them, so it’s fine. It just pisses me off when they have sex with me while I’m blacked out.”
‘Pisses me off while I’m passed out?’ What does that mean, that she’s pissed off that she’s literally passed out when she gets to have sex or the off chance that she’s pissed off that some guy ends up having sex with her while she’s passed out- which if you ask me sounds like rape- assuming if we adhere to the definition that getting to have sex against someone’s will counts as rape, which is what must be happening here if the young woman in question is unconscious of the fact that she’s participating in a sex act- but then again, strictly speaking she didn’t say no (as she was unconscious), but then again, she didn’t say yes either- or did she?
This it seems to be the prevalent view, or melange of experiences of an ever increasing number of young women if we are to believe the author of the above article, courtesy of Tinfoil Yarmulke. But what strikes me disturbing how did we as women come to accept such behavior, indoctrinate it as some kind of coming of age passage?
Is it a situation of being incredibly jaded, lonely or dangerously promiscuous? What if the girl above had never woken up, or had been impregnated? With shows like “16 & Pregnant,” and “Entourage”—“Californication,” and “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” and the littered fashion covers of photoshopped come hither cover models is it no wonder that so many girls are become accustomed to being objectified, deemed sex objects, and use their bodies for monetary profit or gain, or just plain acceptance as a valuable tool in a man’s world?
The saddest part of it all is that with time, these girls are having many more sexual partners, in the case of the drunken Boston University girl, five—within the first six months she’d lost her virginity. Sure in other countries, women wait until they are married to engage in intercourse, but in America— girls are sexually abused, date raped in college, or drugged and raped, and it hardly registers a yawn. In fact all that we encourage of most women is that they look good, diet well and get their hands on whatever treatment plan that will have them looking good- because the implicit assumption is her role is only really confirmed when she is in a position of desirability- which only then gives her some sort of power as to who gets to dominate her…
The saddest element is that more and more girls, at very young ages, learn toNEW YORK (AP) — New York City has agreed to pay up to $75 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging police officers issued nearly 1 million legally baseless criminal summonses over several years because they were under pressure to meet quotas.
The settlement announced Monday would allow people issued court summonses for offenses such as trespassing, disorderly conduct and urinating in public to get $150 per case, if the summons was tossed because it was deemed insufficient.
The suit was filed in a federal court in 2010 on behalf of people who were hit with 900,000 court summonses that were later dismissed for legal insufficiency.
It came amid a growing outcry over the New York Police Department’s encounters with minorities. The lead plaintiff in the case, Sharif Stinson, said he was stopped twice outside his aunt’s Bronx building in 2010 when he was 19 and was given disorderly conduct summonses by officers who said he used obscene language. But the officers didn’t specify what the language or behavior was, and the tickets were dismissed.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs called it the largest false-arrest class-action lawsuit in city history. The settlement is nearly double the $41 million deal the city made with five men who were wrongly convicted in the vicious 1989 rape and beating of a Central Park jogger.
The 2010 lawsuit includes summonses filed from 2007 through at least 2015, and the number tossed for legal insufficiency is about one-quarter of all the summonses filed during that time, according to data in the lawsuit. Insufficiency is not necessarily a lack of evidence; it may be that an officer wasn’t clear enough in explaining why someone was ticketed. Summonses may also be dismissed for other reasons; the class-action lawsuit doesn’t include those.
According to the settlement terms, those eligible for compensation would receive a maximum $150 per person per incident. A total of $56.6 million would be set aside, and individual payments could end up lower if more claims are made. Any funds not paid go back to the city, which is also paying $18.5 million in legal fees. Possible class members would be notified through social media and other advertisements.
The lawsuit argued police were routinely ordered to issue summonses “regardless of whether any crime or violation” had occurred to meet quotas. It cited claims by two whistleblower officers who said they were forced into quotas by precinct superiors. The quota allegations were explicitly denied in the settlement agreement filed Monday.
Under the agreement, the city said the NYPD must update and expand training and guidance reiterating to officers and their superiors that quotas are not allowed, and officers must not be mandated to make a particular number of summonses, street stops or arrests.
But the department already has undergone major changes since the lawsuit was filed, due in part to public protests and to other cases filed against the department that argued police policy wrongly targeted minorities.
The NYPD curtailed a once-widespread practice of stopping and searching people in the street. Officers now address certain quality-of-life offenses through tickets instead of criminal summonses. The summons form was revised to allow more details so fewer are dismissed.
“This agreement is a fair resolution for class members |
I do. We already do the Morning Sports Report every summer and the three teams come together for that, but wouldn't it be nice if there were more Game On ColumbUS programming that could give back to the community to encourage sportsmanship or the front offices working together for the same goals. We really feel that there is a lot of opportunity.
BW: The challenge of this isn't going to go away in a year, but so much of what we talked about in the next years - not just the Jackets but Crew events and things with the Clippers like the Big Ten baseball tournament that we partner with - this has a lot of legs to catch on, and one of the best examples is the Facebook page. A lot of fans have taken to it and that the mainstream media needs to take notice and support our teams more. Fans are picking it up and that mantra of Game On Columbus may just go on for a long time.
LL: The one thing I also want to mention also is the growth of youth hockey. Columbus is the host of 19 state championships - soon to be 20 when the State HS football championships come to Columbus in 2014. The OHSAA championships at Nationwide Arena are a big thrill for everyone involved and we've all seen it grow each year. Kids across the state set their sights on Nationwide Arena and the Blue Jackets have been a big part of the growth of hockey across the state. I think that program there has a lot of opportunity to grow, and we see new teams in the hunt each year. I don't want to leave them out because it's a great event I think we'll see grow in the future.
MW: You're right, that is a fantastic event that's come from having the Jackets here and the growth of youth hockey.
LL: I just think we have so much to be proud of here, and the reactions of people who have visited this city. When the Blue Jackets were first starting to sell tickets, they did a video featuring a mock up of the Blue Jackets celebrating after winning the Stanley Cup - what this community could become as we envision our future in hockey, and it's great to think about how this city would be engaged by a great playoff run and capturing the ultimate prize - I just think Columbus would be on fire.
BW: And it all starts Friday Night!
Our thanks again to Linda and Bruce for their time. If you're interested learning more about Game On ColumbUS, you can "like" them on Facebook.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 29, 2017, 10:18 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 29, 2017, 10:18 PM GMT By Phil Helsel
The search for a 3-year-old entered its third day Wednesday as authorities in North Carolina said hundreds of law enforcement officers have searched hundreds of acres after Mariah Kay Woods was reported missing — and investigators believe it was a “focused” incident.
The girl's mother, Kristy Woods, said she last saw the child when she put her to bed on Sunday night, and that when she went to check on her Monday morning, she couldn't find her and reported her missing.
"If you have a shed, a barn, a wooded area, go take a look, and call us immediately if you see something that’s out of the ordinary," Onslow County Sheriff Hans Miller said at a news conference on Wednesday.
"If something doesn't fit, something’s out of the ordinary, give us a call," he said.
The FBI's missing persons poster for Mariah Kay Woods whose family reported last seeing the child Sunday night, Nov. 26, 2017. FBI / via AP
Miller said that hundreds of acres have been searched on the ground and by air. He said that more than 225 investigators, agents and other members of law enforcement "are working around the clock." The FBI is among the agencies involved in the search.
Overnight, authorities released surveillance images of a woman and child that was believed to possibly be connected, but later determined that the child is not Mariah and that there is no connection to the case.
Mariah’s grandmother, Melissa Hunter, has said the girl normally walks with orthopedic braces on her feet and can't step straight without them.
Miller said Wednesday that "we believe that this is a focused incident at this point," and that there does not appear to be a threat to the larger community.
Miller said the girl's parents have been interviewed, and he asked anyone who had contact with the girl's immediate family Sunday through Monday to contact the sheriff’s office.
"We are still continuing to do a very active search," Miller said. "Our goal is to bring Mariah back."This counts as a little bit of a development, but not exactly a shocking revelation. San Francisco 49ers general manager Trent Baalke told Bay Area media that he expects Colin Kaepernick to be on the roster April 1 when his 2016 base salary comes due. He said the expectation is Kap and Blaine Gabbert will compete for the starting quarterback job. Baalke is meeting with the national media at 7:45 a.m. PT, but in the meantime, he is doing a scrum with Bay Area folks.
I would not expect Baalke to say anything else in this situation. He could have hem'd and haw'd, but for purposes of potentially trading Kaepernick, he is not going to give anything up. We are a little over a month away from April 1, so plenty can change. It is entirely possible Kaepernick sticks around this year. It is also possible the 49ers trade or release him. If the latter happens, I suspect something leaks about Kap wanting out, and things changing over the course of the next month.
The bigger question of course, as Jim Trotter tweeted at Matt Maiocco, is whether or not Kap is on the roster when September 1 arrives. Heck, even the start of training camp would be a useful date to consider. If Kap makes it through the offseason workout program with the 49ers, then I'll be more inclined to think maybe he sticks around. For now, it is worth noting plenty can change.An unscientific name for the current – and future – state of the world is “jolly dismay.” It is jolly for the people and countries that will prove capable of adjusting themselves to and taking the lead amidst swift changes, as well as making gains on the incessant transformation of the world. For those incapable of re-adjusting to this transformation, it is dismaying.
The majority of people cannot accommodate themselves to the swift change; that is why anxiety, fear and depression have become the predominant moods across the globe today – instead of creative uplift. These sentiments are particularly strong in Russia, a country where today’s structure of society and government does not suggest high competitiveness – even if the current Russian model has potentially – and only potentially – strong assets.
* * *
I would like to start with a brief and rather incomplete overview of the signs of the growing chaos.
This is, above all, an unprecedentedly swift redistribution of power in the economy, accompanied by an increasing redistribution of power in politics. The Europeans, who would until quite recently preach in arrogant tone, have come to the brink of humbly asking financial assistance from the still communist and rather hard-up Chinese.
We are witnesses to an unfolding sharp competition for natural resources, foodstuffs and even territories that resembles that of the 19th century and three-fourths of the 20th century. The old geopolitical struggle is obviously making a comeback – on a markedly new footing.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons goes on unabated. The invasion of Iraq on deliberately falsified charges of the possession of weapons of mass destruction, including nukes, the attack on Gaddafi who surrendered his nuclear potential, and non-aggression against North Korea, which did create a nuclear potential and has maintained it, have made the use of moral and legal arguments against the proliferation of nuclear armaments simply indecent. Only geopolitical arguments remain. This means creating a balance of sticks and carrots: resorting to sanctions and threats, or providing plausible security guarantees and involving Iran in the systems of security and cooperation. Or else, delivering a desperate strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities in the hope that this will delay its then inevitable obtaining of the nuclear bomb. As no one is offering carrots to the Iranians, one has to wait until Teheran obtains the nukes, or to hope that it will stop at the doorstep, i.e. confines itself to creating a capability to produce them. After that, if no reliable systems and guarantees of security are devised for Iran’s neighbors, one will have to wait and see their reaction. Then the time will be ripe for Japan, which is losing the capability to effectively defend its interests in the situation of a briskly changing balance of power.
Here are some more signs indicating a return of history into the customary state of chaos. Practically all institutions of global governance that were established after World War II – the UN, the IMF and NATO – are getting enfeebled. The European Union has slid into a systemic – let us hope, not fatal – crisis.
The age-old rules of international coexistence – respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-interference in foreign countries’ internal affairs, etc. – are collapsing, while there are no new rules to replace them. Instead, there is cold-blooded rationality or something that can be passed off for it. No one gives a damn about unneeded Yemen, although there signals suggesting that a civil war is well underway there. The oil-rich Bahrain regime is pardoned for the atrocities committed against the population, while Syria is given a big time – it is overly big and powerful.
The traditional moral principles in politics (however unpleasant they were, but they did exist) are falling apart, too.
There used to be a principle of never giving out your friends. Or, put differently, “he may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.” First it was the USSR that gave out its friends, although Moscow had a justification – it was going through a revolution itself. Now the West has given away Mubarak and the Tunisian leaders who, if measured by local standards, were the stronghold of relatively enlightened governance, stability and at least some semblance of democracy, even if authoritarian and corrupt. The regimes arriving in their place are no better – and they have a strong Islamist component. The friendly and genuinely democratic Israel is being betrayed in broad daylight. It gets support from Washington only, as the U.S. administration cannot ignore the still powerful Jewish lobby. And practically no one considers the fact that the regimes remaining afloat in the Arab world are, by and large, the most backward and repressive monarchies. Not the constitutional monarchies of some sort, but genuine absolute monarchies. But, of course, they are diligent exporters of crude oil.
The old morality, whatever its imperfections, is vanishing from politics and has certainly abandoned the economy. The current crisis partly arose from the rampancy of filthy lucre. The Puritan capitalism rooted in frugality and high ethics of labor has been drowned in oblivion in practically all countries, except for Germany and the Scandinavian states. Meanwhile, it was these ethics that made capitalism successful. The lust for enrichment has washed away all the dams as soon as the threat of Communists coming to power, which had kept it in check, was gone. Communism collapsed and the fall of liberalism followed in a matter of fifteen years.
An intellectual vacuum is one more sign of the world chaos. The old recipes and considerations do not work anymore. Yet they are not abandoned, and politicians pretend they know what they are doing. This pattern of behavior is especially conspicuous in the struggle against the economic crisis, as directly opposite strategies are being used simultaneously in a bid to curb it: the Keynesian strategy of pouring in money in the hope that a growing demand will entail economic growth (in the U.S.), and a tough cost-saving regime (in Ireland and, to a smaller degree, in the rest of Europe). Yet neither strategy has yielded fruit.
In international affairs, the old geopolitics and Realpolitik based on sheer interest and a balance of power are verbally rejected. The supremacy of human rights and human values and a renunciation of the spheres of influence are proclaimed. But practical policymaking appears in sharp contrast to what is being said. A fight for the spheres of influence, slightly disguised in the parables about democracy, is clearly underway. Ukraine offers a glaring example in this respect. EU officials have stopped concealing their main goal in what regards Ukraine – to prevent Kiev’s falling into the sphere of Russia’s influence and force it to make the right “European choice” instead. That is, to bring it into the zone of EU influence. The Eurocrats are unscrupulously lying when they say Ukraine may join the EU someday – if it displays obedience.
The same kind of disarray is evidenced in the military-political sphere. At a certain point, Washington, acting with typically American mix of idealism and cold-blooded reckoning, proposed to free the world from nuclear weapons. It sincerely considered the nukes to be immoral and hoped that the movement towards nuclear disarmament would stop the potential proliferators. The problem is these hopes, borne out of the long outdated theory of the 1960s and the 1970s advocating limitations on nuclear arms, have proven to be bankrupt. Another part of Americans supported the “nuclear zero” idea hoping that the world without nuclear armaments or with their minimization will become a safer place for the U.S. conventional superiority.
The rest of the world, including Moscow, have supported the nuclear zero idea almost unanimously, although practically no one believes in its feasibility or even desirability. And no alternative ideas have been offered, as, to quote Mikhail Bulgakov, there is “devastation in the minds.” Or else, no one is willing to accept them.
After talking about the zero option for some time, the Americans realized that the current fiscal constraints will make their conventional superiority fly away soon enough. So, they made a little-noticed somersault backwards last year, as they started consolidating their nuclear potential. Simultaneously, they heightened attention on the antiballistiс missile defense that can augment this potential. Although few people, except for especially diehard Republicans, believe in the feasibility of the strategic missile defense project, these plans add to the general uncertainty and chaos in people’s minds.
Globalization of all economic, ecological, and political processes calls for global governance. However, as global governance is falling apart (see above), societies have rushed for help to the traditional instrument – the state, and a “renationalization” of global politics has began. Yet today the states appear unable to control the informational, economic and financial processes the way they did before. So, along with abortive attempts to harness these processes, different countries begin – covertly or overtly – to rely on military force as an instrument they still control. I am afraid we are again heading for the old strong-arm policy or even for an arms race.
It looks like the operation in Libya was only 20 percent, at best, a means to defend the country’s population against dictatorship. For another 80 percent, it was a rearguard “small victorious war” called upon to demonstrate with the aid or armaments that the old great powers are still doing well and are not losing international competition in the new world. They did win the war, provided the future developments in Libya are viewed as victory. However, under the waves of economic shocks in Europe, everyone has already forgotten it.
The turmoil of social revolutions, or social upheavals as a minimum, adds to the geopolitical chaos. The Arab world has been swept by the Arab Spring that was too hastily labeled as a chain of “democratic revolutions.” This spring is rapidly turning into a chilly winter as the new regimes, which combine the old authoritarianism with Islamism, can offer but a far weaker stability.
Many predicted that the seeds of the Arab Spring will yield crops in Russia or China, yet they started sprouting in places where no one had expected them.
Here is where we come to grips with an especially remarkable phenomenon. Social protests and revolts have burst in the grassroots of affluent Western societies, and although the demonstrators calling for the occupation of Wall Street and other places refer to the example of the Arab Spring, the causes of protests in the West are certainly not rooted in tyranny combined with corruption, or in informational semi-openness and semi-famine evidenced in the Arab world.
The root-causes are many but there are two major ones.
First, social inequality has grown unabated across the Western world over the past two to three decades. It was fuelled in many ways by the disappearance of the Communist threat. Overwhelmed by own problems, we, Russians, would whine about inequality in this country and yet it was growing everywhere – and was tolerable until a certain moment, as the downfall of Communism and the consequent vast expansion of the capitalist market made the slices of the pie bigger for everyone.
Second, the situation started changing fast in the last decade, when dozens of millions of jobs shifted to Asia, which was inexpensive, increasingly better educated and ready to work hard. The traditionally consistent increase of wellbeing in Europe stalled and then recoiled.
The West, awash with the euphoria of victory over Communism and the seemingly endless economic growth, which was largely fed by external factors, failed to embark on the necessary structural reforms (Germany and Sweden are rare exceptions). Instead of reforms, the outward prosperity became more and more heavily reliant on borrowings.
Yet the economic crisis, which burst out in 2008 and is still flaring out, made further good life on borrowed money impossible. The Americans and the Europeans have developed an awareness that neither they nor their children will be able to enjoy the habit of living all the time better in the future. In most probability, their standard of living will deteriorate. The social state, which is so powerful in Europe and strong enough in the more liberal-capitalist U.S., is bulging at the seams. The U.S. political system is getting radicalized, the moderate part of its political spectrum is sagging.
The ultra-right and the ultra-left will be consolidating their positions in Europe, as the middle class, the traditional pillar of the left-off and right-off centrism, is beginning to rapidly dissolve.
I would like to be wrong but I have the misgiving that Western democracy, something we have been pining for, is sinking into a crisis. Its enfeebling cannot but undermine – and is already undermining – the impulses towards modernization and humanization of Russian social and political system.
Some four or three years ago, it was voguish to speak about a challenge that the authoritarian capitalism (this is to say, Chinese, Singaporean, Malaysian, or Russian) has thrown to the liberal democratic Western capitalism. Today, it looks like the problem is greater than this challenge alone. The existing model of Western capitalism based on a society of almost universal affluence and advanced democracy cannot withstand a new competition. Not only will the authoritarian regimes have to drift towards greater democracy in the medium term. Western democracies, too, will have to drift towards more authoritarianism. This will be a retreat, a post-modern theory of convergence. Measured against today’s standards, the democracies of the times of De Gaulle, Churchill or Eisenhower were quite authoritarian. Obviously, the West will have to revert to something of that kind.
The reforms that are essential for raising competitiveness are painful and difficult to implement, as the authorities have to seek electoral consent from the majority whom these reforms unavoidably hit the hardest. As for the minority that has made immeasurable gains over the past three decades of unabated growth, it is very unlikely to lay down arms without fighting. Recall the group of New York-based bankers and the guru of correct capitalism, U.S. multibillionaire Warren Buffett, who together started sagely calling for a rise of taxes on the rich, that is, on themselves. The majority of the rich will surely disagree with them. And this means that polarization will be inevitable. Similarly inevitable will be a temporary – let us hope – strengthening of authoritarian tendencies in the policies of even democratic countries. These policies may display non-linear development. Pullbacks are inescapable, as progress cannot last endlessly. It is important that a new historical downfall be averted. The likelihood of such a course of events increases when new challenges are met with the help of old slogans calling for more democracy and more integration (in Europe).
We should think of the ways to prevent the slide of this polarization into totalitarianism, something that happened in the 20th century. Fortunately, a possibility to avoid the worst exists. Both totalitarian systems of the past – the communist and the fascist one – were borne in societies demoralized by war. That is why all the possible steps should be made to avert the outbreaks of new world wars. The nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head will help ward them off, but great human effort will be needed, too.
This is becoming especially relevant as the smell of a major war is hanging over Iran. And not only because of possible actions on the part of Israel that has found itself in a desperate situation without the external support and in the wake of “democratization” of – and, consequently, a surge of anti-Israeli sentiments – among its Arab neighbors. A strike of despair at the nuclearizing Iran, to which Iranians will most likely respond in full blast, may serve as a trigger for such a war.
However, the newly emerging world brings not only problems but also huge opportunities. Billions of people in Asia have extricated themselves from half-famine. New markets and spheres for applying one’s intellect, education and labor are appearing every minute. The world has acquired a real multipolarity. True, it is reverting to the state of semi-chaos, which is so habitual for human history. But the centers of power begin to counterbalance each other, thereby heralding in a new creative instability. The nukes hinder the intentions of the former or the rising hegemons seeking to turn back the wheel of history or to speed up its course with the aid of a big war. Openness to information, the increased activity and self-consciousness of billions of people make such scenarios more and more dangerous for those who may begin to plot them. That is why the chances for an uninterrupted relatively peaceful and extremely interesting world development are good enough.
Victory in it will be won by those people and countries that are capable of readjusting themselves in advance. This means that to be the leaders in the permanently changing world, they must play against and even contrary to the old rules instead of complying with them.
This, in turn, requires an efficient and, alas, authoritarian government and an equally efficient elite.
And what does this world has in store for Russia? For the first time in history, this country has had a big enough luck with the geopolitical environment and with external markets. The restoration of governability played an important role, too. However, an efficient elite is needed as never before to go on with the course. Meanwhile, the Russian elite is being washed out by rampant corruption, which entails anti-meritocracy, that is, ousting the best.
If we succeed in reversing the process, most Russians will find the world a jolly place to live in; if not, it may turn on them as an abode of scare and depression.
Precisely one hundred years ago, Russian poet Alexander Blok characterized the then nascent 20th century in his poem Retribution:
And the black earthly blood//
That overfills our veins and destroys all barriers//
Is about to bring inordinate changes//
And unseen revolts to us…
His prophetic verse is fantastically relevant today. Much depends on us in terms of what the 21st century will bring to Russia – the hitherto unseen changes or devastating revolts.
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Un entretien avec Jacques Tassin
Chercheur au Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (Cirad), Jacques Tassin vient de publier La grande invasion aux éditions Odile Jacob. Dans cet ouvrage limpide et profond, il remet en cause la vision manichéenne portée sur les espèces dites invasives et, du même coup, notre regard sur la nature et son évolution.
Tout d’abord, qu’est-ce qu’une espèce invasive?
Disons que c’est une espèce, ou plutôt une population d’individus, qui manifeste soudainement un surcroît de présence, une sorte d’inflation démographique. Cette inflation se manifeste en général de la part d’une espèce nouvellement présente, mais pas toujours. Il faut cependant admettre qu’il n’existe aucune définition consensuelle précisant ce qu’est une espèce invasive : les experts ne sont pas d’accord entre eux. Leurs points de vue diffèrent, mais aussi leurs sensibilités, sans doute parce qu’en la matière, l’émotionnel et le passionnel ne sont jamais très loin.
J’ajoute qu’on se réfère alors implicitement aux milieux naturels, qu’on estime mis à mal par les espèces invasives. On s’inscrit ici dans le sillage de la vénération américaine du « wild », d’un ordre originel menacé. La dimension culturelle des invasions biologiques est très forte, de sorte que l’appréciation de l’impact des espèces invasives sur l’environnement reste en partie subjective. Or, comme disait Shakespeare, rien n’est bon ou mauvais pour la nature, sinon l’idée que l’on s’en fait.
L’expression « espèce invasive » implique une connotation péjorative. Vous expliquez qu’il faut sortir du manichéisme au sujet de ces espèces et prendre en considération leurs apports bénéfiques. Quels sont-ils?
Le terme « invasif » est vraiment lourd à porter. Qu’attendre de bon d’une espèce qualifiée d’invasive? Lorsque le zoologue Charles Elton diffusa ce terme dans les années 1950, il s’agissait encore d’une métaphore empruntée au contexte de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Mais celle-ci a pris le pas sur la réalité. Notre discours reste crispé autour de cette représentation négative.
Pourtant, toute population qui s’établit dans un environnement interagit aussitôt avec les autres. C’est un jeu de perpétuels ajustements où tout ce qui est bon à prendre est rapidement pris, mais où l’on donne aussi beaucoup. Dans la banlieue de Davis, en Californie, on ne lutte plus contre l’expansion du fenouil parce qu’on a découvert que c’était une ressource essentielle pour le monarque, papillon emblématique. En Camargue, les grandes aigrettes ont décuplé leurs effectifs depuis l’invasion de l’écrevisse de Louisiane, dont elles se nourrissent. De tels exemples abondent, mais la recherche est très peu sollicitée pour prospecter cet autre versant des invasions biologiques.
Cela signifie-t-il pour autant qu’aucune de ces espèces voyageuses n’est dangereuse?
Soyons clair, il ne s’agit pas de minimiser cette réalité, encore moins de la nier. Mais il faut la clarifier si l’on ne veut pas rester empêtré dans les amalgames. Certes, les pathogènes, les prédateurs et les herbivores peuvent faire beaucoup de dégâts, tout particulièrement dans les îles. Le rat noir y serait à lui seul responsable de la moitié des extinctions d’oiseaux marins. Je connais assez bien les îles tropicales. Ce qu’y font les espèces invasives n’est pas beau à voir.
Mais si les espèces invasives apparaissent comme les secondes responsables des extinctions d’espèces dans le monde, c’est précisément parce que près de 80 % de ces extinctions se manifestent dans les îles, où les prédateurs introduits ont un impact très élevé. Récemment, le renard est entré en Tasmanie et on s’attend à des conséquences terribles pour la faune indigène. Mais la Terre n’est pas une île. Ne généralisons pas ce qui n’est pas généralisable. Et il ne faut pas non plus confondre nuisance et changement. Les plantes invasives, en l’occurrence, peuvent certes modifier la physionomie d’espaces naturels, mais elles n’ont jamais entraîné d’extinction avérée.
De quoi les invasions biologiques sont-elles le symptôme ou le bouc émissaire?
Les espèces invasives suivent de près notre sillage mais payent parfois pour nos propres excès. Ce sont souvent des espèces qui ont habilement tiré parti de la manière dont on a façonné le monde. Les invasions d’algues vertes sur le littoral breton, par exemple, résultent du lessivage de produits azotés qui leur conviennent très bien. Beaucoup d’espèces invasives réussissent là où d’autres espèces périclitent. La tortue de Floride peut survivre dans des milieux pollués quand la cistude d’Europe s’y meurt. Mais accuse-t-on alors la pollution, vraie cause de ces deux invasions, pour affronter le vrai problème? Non, on ramasse les algues vertes et on incrimine la tortue de Floride.
Les espèces invasives sont certes opportunistes par nature. Mais ne leur en voulons pas. Elles ne font que nous ressembler, un peu trop peut-être. Les Aborigènes d’Australie considèrent que les espèces invasives sont méritantes parce qu’elles sont capables de se propager dans des milieux hostiles. Ils ont gardé ce don d’émerveillement que nous avons perdu face au vivant. Il ne leur viendrait probablement pas à l’idée de mener des campagnes d’éradication de boucs émissaires.
Ne sommes-nous pas tous des espèces invasives à tel ou tel moment de l’histoire de la nature? A partir de combien de temps n’est-on plus considéré comme tel?
Toute espèce peut devenir invasive si les conditions s’y prêtent. La paléogéographie nous enseigne que les invasions sont une réponse inespérée des espèces aux grands bouleversements climatiques. Le vivant affronte en effet ce type d’adversité en s’y adaptant, ou plus souvent en fuyant. Mais on évoque plutôt les espèces invasives en se crispant sur le temps bref de la chronique. On ne regarde alors que le sommet d’une vague qui pointe un instant sa crête avant de se fondre dans l’océan. Le temps long a aujourd’hui disparu de nos écrans. Tandem aliquando, invasores fiunt vernaculi, disait-on autrefois : au bout du compte, les envahisseurs deviennent des indigènes. Nous vivons trop dans l’instantanéité pour nous souvenir de ce sage aphorisme.
Les espèces invasives se fondent invariablement dans les milieux qu’elles colonisent, y multipliant les interactions. Au plan strictement écologique, on serait même tenté de dire qu’elles deviennent immédiatement indigènes. Mais ce concept d’espèce indigène, qui s’oppose à celui d’espèce exotique, est une création de notre pensée qui n’a pas deux siècles. La nature, elle, ne discrimine rien.
Du point de vue des chercheurs, les invasions biologiques peuvent être considérées comme des expériences grandeur nature. Qu’ont-elles appris aux écologues?
Ce sont en effet des expérimentations qu’aucune équipe de chercheurs n’aurait jamais pu mettre en place pour des raisons pratiques et éthiques. Elles ont d’abord modifié notre perception du temps biologique, capable d’accélérations inattendues. On découvre par leur intermédiaire que les êtres vivants sont capables d’évoluer très rapidement. Il n’a fallu que dix générations au bulbul orphée, passereau introduit à La Réunion, pour que la taille de son bec s’ajuste aux ressources alimentaires locales. Les espèces invasives disposent d’un très fort potentiel adaptatif. Ne tirons pas sur l’ambulance : ce sont elles qui se révèlent les plus aptes à vivre dans ce monde que nous avons transformé.
L’idée de milieux naturels saturés en espèces a également volé en éclats. Dans bien des îles, le nombre d’espèces végétales a été multiplié par deux ou trois sans qu’aucune plante indigène n’ait disparu. Le fameux cycle des taxons qui assimilait les milieux insulaires à des jeux de chaises musicales, chaque nouvel arrivant prenant la place d’un autre, ne tient plus.
Vous dites dans votre ouvrage qu’il faut reformuler l’idée qu’on se fait de la nature. Que cela signifie-t-il?
On traîne une vision obsolète de la nature, aujourd’hui décalée avec la réalité de notre monde et de notre savoir. Même si la science révèle toujours davantage qu’il n’y a ni équilibre ni ordre dans la nature, que le hasard y joue à plein et que tout n’y est que perpétuel changement, rien n’y fait. On en reste toujours à cette idée héritée du romantisme allemand d’une nature fonctionnant comme un Tout, à l’image d’un organisme vivant dont il nous reviendrait de préserver l’intégrité et la santé.
Tout changement dans la nature éveille notre méfiance, alors que le vivant n’est qu’un changement incessant. Le temps intrinsèque de la biologie nous échappera toujours tant que nous l’assimilerons à celui de la physique, disait Henri Bergson. Acceptons parfois de nous laisser surprendre par cette nature vivante que nous peinons tant à prédire et que nous comprenons si mal. Qui aurait cru par exemple, il y a seulement dix ans, que la fameuse caulerpe, cette « algue tueuse » qui menaçait tant la Méditerranée, aurait aujourd’hui disparu de 80 % des sites où on l’avait inventoriée?
En étudiant ce phénomène, vous vous êtes confronté à des notions comme celles d' »invasion », de « transgression des frontières », de « pollution par l’hybridation », qui impliquent une menace des étrangers/intrus sur les indigènes/légitimes. A quel point le parallèle avec les sociétés humaines rejetant l’étranger est-il pertinent?
Comme je l’ai dit tout à l’heure, le discours usuel sur les espèces invasives est d’ordre émotionnel. De ce fait, on ne se prive pas de recourir à des métaphores anxiogènes, comme celles que vous venez de mentionner. Mais il y a dans cette rhétorique un rejet de l’altérité vivante que je trouve très inquiétant parce qu’il révèle à quel point nous nous déconnectons de la vie qui nous entoure. Nos représentations virtuelles du vivant prennent le pas sur notre appréhension directe et ce faisant, laissent alors parfois place à l’idéologie, la méfiance et le rejet.
Cela étant, les ressorts psychologiques et culturels liés à la xénophobie et au rejet des espèces invasives me semblent très différents. Ceci même si l’on observe, comme vous le notez, une forte convergence dans le vocabulaire utilisé. Je crois qu’on ne prête pas assez attention aux mots qu’on utilise dans le langage de la vulgarisation scientifique. Camus disait que mal nommer les choses, c’était ajouter au malheur du monde. Entendre à la radio parler de « péril jaune » en évoquant le frelon asiatique, cela fait froid dans le dos parce qu’on surfe alors volontairement sur l’ambiguïté.
Le biogéographe Daniel Simberloff parle d’espèces « agitées » pour désigner une partie des espèces invasives. Voilà un terme sans danger dont on pourrait très bien se contenter plutôt que de recourir avec beaucoup de légèreté à des qualificatifs renvoyant à la peur de l’autre.
Propos recueillis par Pierre Barthélémy (suivez-moi ici sur Twitter ou bien là sur Facebook)
◊ La grande invasion, de Jacques Tassin (éd. Odile Jacob, 210 p., 22,90 €).
Signaler ce contenu comme inappropriéFrom Tweet to Rust Feature
14 September 2016
Today let’s look at how the sausage Rust language is made, on the case of a feature that I know a bit about, because I proposed and implemented it.
On May 19th, I tweeted:
I think @rustlang needs a better story on how to setup & use static immutable data, one thing C is notoriously good at.
The problem I observed here is that current Rust needs full types for static and const items (for those who don’t know, the former are simply pieces of data in the data area of the executable, whereas the latter are constant definitions whose value is copied everywhere they appear). This includes lifetimes, and just about |
even stronger. First of all, I love this art. Is this where Santa is hiding during the other 11 months?! It’s a shame he only has 1 strength because this guy looks like he could beat anyone in an arm wrestling match. On top of that, he’s a reducer for locations and attachments. He’s a Sworn Brother at half the cost who also covers attachments. Sure, you have to kneel him to get the reduction. Fine. But still. He’ll probably go mostly in the builder decks, but being able to reduce the Wall by 1 is often invaluable. Especially since Here to Serve is 3 gold and Counting Coppers is 2 gold. Drawing the Wall on either of those turns usually means it sits in hand, but not with these guys. This also makes Abandoned Stronghold and Castle Black Mason even stronger.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 5 out of 5
So he’s an econ chud for the cards the Watch
really
care about, and a 1-cost Builder for the burgeoning Builder theme to boot? Yeah, probably quite good.
Scott - 5 out of 5
I would give this 6 out of 5 if the math worked right. He has a positive trait in builder for some decks. But he is another reducer chud (and not an Ally to boot). NW has all the draw and got a reducer for their locations (their favorite toys). Probably shouldn’t have been printed. Will remove Sworn Brothers from decks.
Daye Kaniel - 3 out of 5
A Power icon reducer chud for the Night’s Watch, woo! Except, this guy takes care of attachments and locations rather than characters. Cool! Though, he’s pretty much in direct competition with the Sworn Brother, who’s slot in the Builder deck (or indeed any deck) now looks to be in jeopardy. Oh well. In any case, more 1 cost characters are always welcome - more chaff for the meat grinder is never a bad thing, and he makes cards like Castle Black Mason and even I Shall Win No Glory more viable
Patrick Haynes - 4 out of 5
Easily one of the best cards in this box for the builder deck. Fantastic with basically all of their synergy cards like Abandoned Stronghold, he’s great for setup, and he enables you to get all of your locations out faster. Dare I say it? He might even make Brandon’s Gift playable.
The New Gift
(23 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 5 out of 5
Alright, this card is unbelievable. It’s a 2 cost location (1 cost with fealty) that synergizes wonderfully with Satin and also, along with Builder at the Wall, solves the age old problem of “Man, I only have 3 gold. I wish I could use my reducers to play the Wall!” In addition, once the challenges phase begins wrapping up, if you have any stewards standing, you can just kneel them for some free card draw (dominance and challenge defense/attack obviously taken into account). It’s important to note, however, that if you’re first player and you were planning on passing action windows until after your opponent initiates their third challenge in order to ensure all your defenders were standing, the second player can choose to skip their final challenge, which would immediately end the challenges phase without an action window to use this. In addition, you can kneel it with Halder. It just has everything you could possibly want out of a Night’s Watch location. Economy, Draw and Halder trigger all wrapped up into one.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 3 out of 5
Kinda like Chataya’s Brothel, only on a Limited draw location? This is the NW card we perhaps find most interesting in the box. We’re not quite sold how good it is yet, but we’re looking forward to building around it to find out.
Scott - 5 out of 5
Flexibility for whatever. Now your reducer chuds can get you gold OR cards instead of simply reducing the next character. And you can trigger Satin with this. Only downside is it’s limited, but oh so worth it.
Daye Kaniel - 5 out of 5
Quite simply, the best new Night’s Watch card in the whole box, and that’s saying something as this new box has a lot of strong cards. A super versatile location that enhances your draw and adds flexibility to your economy, becomes absolutely immense with Satin on the table, can be reduced with Fealty and can be used with Halder and still work. Erm, yes please. This goes in every Night’s Watch deck to some degree, unless you’re literally not running Stewards. Even then, you should probably go put some Stewards in your deck and run this card. It’s amazing.
Patrick Haynes - 5 out of 5
Unquestionably great in the stewards build and probably solid in some of the other decks as well. Arguably the best Night’s Watch card in the box namely for its flexibility. Being able to provide up to two gold or two cards per round is very strong especially given that Night’s Watch has a lot of cheap stewards that they don’t care about kneeling.
Abandoned Stronghold
(19 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 5 out of 5
Typically, I wouldn’t give a 5 to a card that will basically only see play in one deck; the heavy builder deck. But this card has the potential to be so good in that deck, that I believe it deserves special recognition. This is another non-unique location, which allows you to have multiple copies on the board at once and makes it easier to achieve special triggers like reducing the Grizzled Miner’s cost, getting the Shadow Tower Mason activated and having more locations for whatever other cards NW eventually get that love having a bunch of locations out. The action could really deadlock your opponent’s challenges as well. If you have enough builders out, let’s say you have 3 to 4 on average, you’re looking at boosting any challenge by as much as 9 to 12 strength if you have all 3 out. You will be able to dictate to your opponent which challenges they win or lose. And this will happen every single turn. It’s not a new concept, but challenge math tricks always cause problems for your opponent, especially ones with this high of potential. Add in Craster, who will protect your board from resets, and you could easily have a huge board of 5 to 6 builders. Suddenly, it’s essentially impossible for your opponent to beat you in almost any challenge. Not too shabby.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 1 out of 5
We might be underrating this card, but so be it. It’s a non-unique Castle Black, but it doesn’t stand the character and you have to build for it and there’s a limit to how many of these effects you want in the first place. Most importantly though, it’s
boring as sin
.
Scott - 4 out of 5
This is the card that is going to make builder decks a thing. The boost potentials here are crazy -- especially that this is a non-unique. It will easily make the Shadow Tower Mason a big, bad tricon.
Daye Kaniel - 4 out of 5
That Builder-Wall deck is starting to look pretty sweet, right? The Abandoned Stronghold is the second non-unique Night’s Watch location to grace the Watch, this time providing a strength boost on defence relative to the amount of Builders you control. Best friends with the now-starting-to-look-a-bit-too-good Shadow Tower Mason, and another component alongside Halder, the Haunted Forest et al to make challenge maths a nightmare for your opponent. Needless to say, it’s very good, though It loses a point because it only goes in one style of one type of deck.
Patrick Haynes - 5 out of 5
I agree with Joe that although this only goes in one deck it essentially makes that deck the best Wall deck in my opinion. Everybody has basically already said everything I could about why this card is great so all I can say is go try it out.
Queenscrown
(23 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 5 out of 5
Guys...This is another one of those deck defining locations! You got defense decks and the Wall, Choke decks and the White Tree and now you have steal stuff decks and Queenscrown. 1 cost is super cheap for this effect, great on set up, and it gives you the ability to manipulate your opponent’s deck. Statistically speaking, you’re looking at an ~88% chance of hitting at least one character as long as your opponent’s remaining deck is at least half characters. If you have 2 gold and Now My Watch Begins, just take a gander at the top 3 cards of their deck. Tyrion, Nymeria or Benjen there? Well, they’re yours now! If not, just throw an applicable character in their discard pile for Old Bear or Yoren to retrieve later. This solves one of the biggest problems with that deck type, which was getting characters into your opponent discard pile. Now it’s super easy! To be honest, from a meta balance standpoint, I’m concerned about this card. This design has been tried in other games and really hurt both the fun and the balance of those games as well.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 3 out of 5
One of our favourites in the box. A fine combo card, yet essentially useless outside of combo (moving three cards off the top of the deck does nothing beyond give you a sliver of information unless the deck was previously stacked or gets shuffled). But those combos are really cool. We’re also happy this isn’t loyal or artificially tied down to the Watch in some way - not for any specific deck (though Greyjoy of course won’t mind it), but simply because too many combo pieces are restrictive in how you can play them, for our liking.
Scott - 5 out of 5
Steal-stuff decks will run 3x. Some control or choke decks will run this depending on the meta to control opponents from getting their weenies. Maybe even a mill deck will run this one day. If mill is ever viable, it will be out of GJ and perhaps it will banner to the watch. That is more shagga...but steal stuff decks will become a thing.
Daye Kaniel - 5 out of 5
Eurgh. This card. I didn’t want to give it a 5 out of 5, but I kind of had to. It’s just grotesquely strong. It will undoubtedly become the linchpin of the steal-stuff decks, providing an alternative and much more reliable way to deposit those coveted characters firmly in the discard pile. Even outside of that use it has legs, serving as a both a control card and psychological weapon against your opponent. No one likes having to surrender control of their draw deck to their opponent, especially when results in you losing playable characters. It’s also got potential as a fantastic little banner card with Tyrell - the synergy with The Bear and Maiden Fair and Caswell’s keep being the obvious benefit. All for the meagre cost of 1 gold, or nothing if you have a Builder at the Wall or a Sworn Brother out. That all said, this card does worry me somewhat. It reeks of NPE, which is never a good thing for a game. Luckily, we seem to be getting lots of Location hate this cycle, so hopefully that will keep it in check.
Patrick Haynes - 5 out of 5
Yeah...I think the nearly 500 words above me sum it up pretty well. I think its a worth while 1-of in the builder wall deck to have more locations for the Carpenter and Miner.
Catapult on the Wall
(12 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 2 out of 5
Let’s be honest. This is a Targaryen card masquerading as a Watch card. I doubt it sees much play in monofaction or typical banner Night’s Watch decks. The 4 strength or less restriction is just low enough that you won’t be able to hit any of their major characters most of the time. Even if they did, the turn you play this, for 3 gold, they could just choose to not attack with those characters that are targetable and then confiscate the catapult the following turn. In addition to that, Night’s Watch has only one native stand action, Satin. There are other ways around it, such as Shae, Fiery Followers etc but those are combos that likely won’t precipitate often enough to be worth building a deck around. The two factions in which this card may work are Targaryen and, to a lesser degree, Tyrell. Targaryen has burn effects. So your opponent attacks with a 6 strength character, you Dracarys! it and then you Catapult it. They also have Plaza of Pride and Magister Illyrio to assist in standing the character. Tyrell, on the other hand, has Renly’s Pavilion, which increases the targeting range to 5 strength characters as well, which significantly improves its effectiveness. Will it be a fun card to play? Sure. Is it tournament worthy in decks outside Targaryen and possibly Tyrell? Probably not.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 4 out of 5
In ‘normal’ decks we don’t see this justifying a spot - 3-cost and the character remaining knelt for a telegraphed kill that is restricted in choice of targets? - but it’s a very enticing combo card, perhaps even moreso than Queenscrown. In Targaryen, the faction of both STR-reduction and stand effects, this card slots in perfectly. We also hear Shae can wield this pretty effectively, as can any Stark character paired with Jon and Robb, as can Randyll Tarly (particularly when paired with Renly’s Pavilion). We look forward to deckbuilding with this.
Scott - 2 out of 5
Meh. Never play in just NW. If you have a way to reduce strength in a faction like Targ then this can be pretty good. Still 3 gold and requiring help of another card might be a bit much.
Daye Kaniel - 2 out of 5
I’ve already reviewed this card once with Joe, resulting in long Facebook thread with people telling me why my review was wrong. My mind hasn’t changed on this one. It’s too expensive, it’s straight up bad out of the Watch where it competes with so many other, better cards, and it can be vanquished easily by the most commonly played plot in the game. Yes, there are a large amount of janky combos you could dream up that make this card playable or even a threat, but those scenarios are few and far between. Even as a lover of jank, the best case scenario I can think of for this card is as a banner card in some sort of Randyll/Pavillion build, or out of Targaryan with the new Plaza as a Dracarys! aid. But then who’s stupid enough to walk into that? It does absolutely nothing vs passive power decks which are all the rage right now. I’d love to be proven wrong with this one, but I feel safe saying that this will never be seen in a tournament winning decklist outside of Store Championship level.
Patrick Haynes - 2 out of 5
Time will tell if Weirwood bow and this make Targ Night’s Watch better than Targ fealty for burn but if they don’t then this card will never see play. Its way too expensive, too costly in that you have to kneel your dude for two rounds, and too easy to remove.
Ghost
(14.5 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 3 out of 5
Saves are great. There are more characters in this deluxe box that can receive attachments, so your target pool in a monofaction deck expanded significantly. I think it’s nedly that you can also attach him to Stark characters. I used to play a lot of NW Wolf. Maybe that build becomes viable again somewhere down the line (or the inverse, Stark Watch). It works wonderfully for the new Jon Snow. I do find it a bit sad, however, that this is just another card that Core Jon Snow can’t benefit from. Poor guy…
Q&T Curmudgeons - 2 out of 5
Why did the designers make this strong Stark card have a black border? Now it can only see play in Stark Watch! (It has limited use in Night’s Watch themselves because it’s not a Weapon and is competing against a strong core card, in case that wasn’t clear.) Still, good in Stark. Time for Wolves is now the Valar-counter that it once was in first edition - someone sound the Seefeldt Alarm?.
Daye Kaniel - 3.5 out of 5
As Joe said, saves are great, and reusable saves are even better. He’s expensive, and that makes him a prime target for Confiscation, but I feel that a lot of the time players will have to choose between taking a Milk or Craven off one of their guys or taking Ghost off one of yours, which makes including him in those decks an easier choice. He also alleviates the need for core set Aemon in certain decks, which is a welcome boon for the Watch. His application is a straightforward one - he doesn’t go in Wall decks, this guy is in the mix to keep your new Old Bear Mormont/new Jon Snow/Bowen Marsh/Whatever alive. The fact that he’s called Ghost doesn’t even matter that much either - core Ghost is usually only run as a one of, leaving him susceptible to board wipes/resets, meaning you can probably run a copy of each Ghost in a deck without it causing problems. That having been said, I prefer this new iteration as of the box, with the meta we currently find ourselves in.
Patrick Haynes - 3 out of 5
I think you rarely play this guy out of Night’s Watch. There are still simply too many characters that can’t take attachments to make him reliable, plus they already have core Aemon. Unless you’re playing a deck with new Aemon, I think you can safely leave this guy at home. Out of Stark however, having a repeatable save for the Blackfish, Robb, or Eddard is huge. The only issue is you have to find 9-11 more Night’s Watch cards to play and you dilute your Stark-ness that that faction loves so much.
Scott - 3 out of 5
If you have a combination of Stark and NW, play this. Repeatable saves are good, especially when they are available for key big, renown characters. Out of NW itself...probably not worth it.
Sworn to the Watch
(11.5 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 2.5 out of 5
Finally! A way to convert non-Night’s Watch characters to Night’s Watch characters, thus bringing them under the comfortable embrace of Maester Aemon and the Wall! I’ve already mentioned this card’s synergy with Jaremy Rykker, but the ability to give out any of the three traits is great as well, since this works with Watcher on the Walls, the New Gift and Abandoned Stronghold/Castle Black Mason (assuming the attached character has the corresponding icon). Its obvious weakness is that you can’t give it to characters with the ‘no attachments except weapons’ text. I don’t think many monofaction decks will bother with it, but it has some very interesting interactions once you consider bringing in other factions’ cards. Also, Halder loves attachments that he can kneel for strength pumps.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 1 out of 5
Ire
loves
this card, it’s his kind of jank. The rest of us are scratching our heads something fierce at why he has such poor jank antennae. Possibly the only valid use of the card currently is to make Shae a Steward for the New Gift (second mention of her for us in this review? Combo deck incoming, clearly…), and maybe more will rise up in the future, but it needs a lot more to earn the slot in an actual competitive deck.
Scott - 1 out of 5
Can do neat tricks and synergies with cards like new gift, Jaremy Rykker, Watcher on the Walls, Abandoned Stronghold, etc….but not worth the card slot. Card slots are valuable. And it’s a condition on top of everything. Maybe you can make some fun Shagga deck with this and Satin.
Daye Kaniel - 4 out of 5
I guess my score will invite some backlash here, so bring it on! I love this card. It’s great for set ups, and it opens up Night’s Watch/Banner X builds to all sorts of tomfoolery. All those banner/neutral cards you wish could interact with all your specific Night’s Watch-only synergy now can (The Wall and Castle Black are two of the more obvious examples), also your Night’s Watch specific attachments can now go on non Night’s Watch characters. It’s tutorable, great for setups, another trigger for Halder, non terminal and the best friend of Ser Jaremy Rykker in banner/neutral/steal stuff builds. You could definitely have some fun with this and Satin as well (standing Tyrion or Jaime? Eurgh gross). Scott’s correct in that attachment slots are at a premium in the Watch, but I’m convinced this one has a staple place in clever banner builds going forward. Shagga players, UNITE!
Patrick Haynes - 3 out of 5
I might be being optimistic on this one. I’m torn between a two and a three but I think it has the potential to be very strong going forward. It will almost certainly find a place in the discard digging deck and in any Watch banner of the x decks. The only problem is that most of those decks are worse than similar mono-faction builds.
Now My Watch Begins
(23 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 5 out of 5
Queenscrown’s release literally changed my entire review of this card. No longer are you relying on having to trigger Varys and hold onto 2 gold. No longer are you forced to keep 2 gold every turn just in case your intrigue challenge happens to hit a character you can take. No longer do you have to banner out to get Seen in Flames or His Viper Eyes to make this card work. No longer is this even predictable by your opponent. In fact, if you’re going first, they’ll almost never have the gold to stop this effect (barring things like Calling the Banners or Trading with the Pentoshi) and if they’re going first, they would have to save 2 gold to even be able to cancel this effect before you marshall. So it’s no longer forecastable. Now, all you have to do is...kneel Queenscrown when you have 2 gold (often at the beginning of your marshalling) then just...take whatever 5 cost or less character is in those top 3 cards. You can even combo this with Tyrell to get “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” to maximize your hit potential. This doesn’t have the non unique restriction that Old Bear has, so there are more commonly used targets available, such as Melisandre, Knight of Flowers, Aggo, Arianne, Asha, Benjen, Brienne, Catelyn or Nymeria Sand. Unbelievably strong card...
Q&T Curmudgeons - 4 out of 5
So great for character discard decks - be that pillage, targeted with your Queenscrowns and the like, bannering into Seen in Flames or Viper Eyes, or just picking up the pieces after a Varys. (Or even reserve, if your revealed plot is Littlefinger’s Meddling!) 2 gold for a surprise character that could cost up to 5 make this an economy card as well as a surprise body. The only problem with it is that it can be clunky to time - most ways of discarding a character require a specific window of opportunity.
Scott - 4 out of 5
Intrigue claimed Nymeria, or core Cat, or Benjen...gimme gimme. The list goes on. Varys, Marched (if you can keep some gold around from Old Forest or another mechanism)
Daye Kaniel - 5 out of 5
I originally scored this as a 4, before I saw the newly spoiled Queenscrown. That location pushes this up to a 5. This event itself is already really strong - potentially the best steal stuff Night’s Watch card to date. With the added ease that the Queenscrown provides in helping your opponent’s characters handily into the discard pile, it’s just bonkers. The best thing about the event is the lack of targeting restriction in regards to unique characters. Lannister players might not give a toss about Old Bear Mormont (WotW), but they sure as hell should be worried about this event snatching their best cards. There are a lot of bomb cards even at the 2-3 cost slots as well as the highly coveted bomb 5 costers (Tyrion/Nymerias/Asha/Brienne etc), so chances are you’re going to be stealing something good when you draw this event. This is perhaps one of the only 2 cost events I can see myself running as a x3 as standard in the decks you play it in
Patrick Haynes - 5 out of 5
Another card that is amazing in the deck that you play it in. With Queenscrown you’re basically guaranteed to find a character with this and if nothing else it is basically pure economy as you can pay two for up to a five cost character. Easy 3x in the discard digging deck.
I Shall Win No Glory
(5.5 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 1 out of 5
Oh god, this card is bad. I understand the impact of ending a challenge immediately could be devastating for your opponent. If you’re playing against a LotC deck and they packed all their renown into their final challenge, ending that challenge with no winner could rob them of as much as 5 to 6 power, or more depending on their triggers. The problem is that cost restriction is insane! Kneeling 3 builders, rangers or stewards is an extremely hard cost to fulfil. It would have been playable if it was kneel 3 of any of the three traits, such as 1 ranger and 2 builders or something like that. But requiring 3 of one trait all standing and all available to kneel (you still need defenders for other challenges if you’re trying to defend the Wall) seems like a nearly impossible standard to hit. On top of all that, you could kneel 3 characters to stop this one big challenge and then your opponent plays Hand’s Judgment for 0 gold and ruins your entire plan...and your characters remain knelt, as that was part of the cost to play the card. In a truly mono-trait deck, such as a builder deck with 20 to 30 builders, this may be possible to work with, but even still, kneeling 3 builders is a steep cost to merely end a challenge.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 1 out of 5
It shall win no deck slots. The only scenario we can think of it actually making a deck is if you’re running a defense deck with an icon deficiency (most likely Builders) and relying on this and Haunted Forest to fill in the gaps. And since that deck probably sucks we’ll put this straight in the binder for now, maybe forever.
Scott - 1 out of 5
Ending the challenge is really bad for the opponent. But this is pretty costly…
If Frey-style Lord of the Crossing decks become a thing, this would certainly hurt that. It is also good on a For the Watch turn, especially if you also have the Haunted Forest out. But not worth the deck slot.
Daye Kaniel - 1.5 out of 5
I feel bad for this card. On one hand, I feel it would be too powerful if it’s cost was “kneel 2 X to stop X challenge”. On the other hand, the fact that it requires 3 character kneels (all of the same trait) and is total Hand’s Judgement bait really hurts it. You could outright lose yourself a game, say, if you knelt 3 Builders to stop a power challenge, only to have this event cancelled. On top of that, what events are you cutting for this? The Night’s Watch has a plethora of amazing location and attachment cards to choose from, and generally tends to run event-light. Are you cutting your Nightmares for this? Your Hand’s Judgements? Your Meagre Contributions? Your The Watch Has Needs? No? I didn’t think so. To throw this card a bone, perhaps the one deck where you might consider a copy or two of this into is the Builder-centric Wall deck, which looks like it lacks Military icons and might benefit from this. Even then, it still probably doesn’t make the cut.
Patrick Haynes - 1 out of 5
This card simply doesn’t make the cut. In single trait wall decks the triggering condition is possible but it’s only worth it in very rare situations and slots in those decks are pretty tight already. The meta has seemed to be trending away from Hand’s Judgment but even so this card is hard to justify.
The Fire That Burns
(22 Total Points)
Joe From Cincinnati - 4 out of 5
We finish it off with a wonderful plot for the Night’s Watch defense decks. It has good stats, with 4 gold, 6 initiative and 7 reserve. That 7 reserve, in particular, is great because it pairs well with Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and Fist of the First Men. The 0 claim kind of sucks but you’re playing this card because you’re playing a defensive deck, so having 0 claim doesn’t hurt you too badly, as there is a decent chance you had no intention of initiating any challenges that round anyway. With the Wall decks as they are right now, I would suspect you have to pick between this card and For the Watch! There may be a time when you can run both, but I think 4 gold is just a bit too low to have both of these, as well as Building Orders/Counting Coppers and Here to Serve in your deck. That’s a lot of low gold plots. So, in the case that you do have to pick between the two, which is more impactful? Ignoring your opponent’s first challenge, or not having to kneel to defend challenges? There are legitimate arguments for both. This also helps win dominance, after all. But, in the same token, I rarely find myself lacking in defenders except in very specific circumstances (post bad Valar, huge board wipe like Lanni Rains Wildfire). It could be amazing or it could be superfluous. Testing required.
Q&T Curmudgeons - 4 out of 5
Very solid for defensive decks, but it’s not going elsewhere and it’s not even a cornerstone for that deck (the Night’s Watch themselves already have a better plot for it). The reason we’re rating this so high is because of the high initiative and Winter trait, and we might still be overrating it even then.
Scott - 5 out of 5
Are you playing NW defense? Yes? You play this. Claim doesn’t matter much for you. 4 gold is the only thing that concern you a bit, but I’d play this at 3 gold. 7 reserve is insane.
Daye Kaniel - 5 out of 5
It’s an amazing plot for any Wall deck, which as of this box is slightly weaker than it was going into it (I’m not whining, this game needs more location hate, so any offerings of that are thoroughly encouraged), so it’s good to have plots like this that keep it relevant. I think you can run both this and For the Watch! for a defensive double whammy, though if you only want to run one this one seems to be the better of the pair. The gold value on it is middling, but after watching the First Ranger himself (Tamas Albeck) at Batalla with his slightly unusual but brilliantly considered plot deck, I’m not convinced that Wall builds need to bother running plots over 5 gold any more, thanks to the shadow economy of the New Gift, Old Forest Hunter and Eastwatch Carpenter. Gold aside, the plot is just fantastic. As an added bonus, it has nice reserve for your Ravens as well.
Patrick Haynes - 4 out of 5
A strong plot to be sure but I don’t think it is necessarily an auto-include. I think most watch builds (other than perhaps a good stuff one that runs carpenters, new gift, and old forest hunters) still need at least one econ plot and with Here to Serve, Building Orders, Counting Coppers, Winter Festival, and one reset you only have room to run either this or For the Watch! I think it really depends on your deck for which one of those is better but there are cases to be made for them both. This plot may edge it out in the end but like with For the Watch there will be times when this plot doesn’t give you the kind of recovery you need and the slot would be better spent on another econ plot. If you’re being choked out, or out-rushed (which I personally think are the two biggest issues for Night’s Watch right now) then this plot isn’t gonna do a whole lot. If you’re being choked, four gold is not enough for you to recover a board and while it may give you a turn to defend all three challenges with your measly board it’s not going to help in the long term and if you’re being out-rushed they are either doing 0 challenge (hello IKEA decks) or they are doing one massive power challenge that you can’t fully block which means it doesn’t matter if you lose with all of your dudes standing or with one dude knelt.
Total Score Night’s Watch Cards:
67.7% (410.5 out of 625 possible points)
Top Cards:
Queenscrown
The New Gift
No My Watch Begins
Bottom Cards:
I Shall Win No Glory
Seasoned Woodsman
Samwell Tarly
If you're hungry more content, check out the list of podcasts, articles, game video and more in
the Community FAQDekraai, 42, was widely known as a wife-beater, Sesler said. Court papers indicated that he was physically abusive to Fournier during the marriage, and that he once assaulted his stepfather.
After the 2008 attack on the older man, Dekraai was sentenced to a year of anger management therapy.
The shooter opened fire inside the hair salon one day after a court date regarding custody of their 7-year-old son.
A photo of Michelle and the salon manicurist, also killed in the gunfire, was posted on the store's exterior Thursday.
"There may be something to the motive as to a relationship with somebody in the salon," Police Sgt. Steve Bowles told The Associated Press. "That is our assumption."
Officials have not released the names of the victims.
The shooting spree began about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday when Dekraai - sporting a bulletproof vest - walked into the hair salon just off the Pacific Coast Highway, police said.
A salon patron named Cindy said she was getting her hair done by owner Randy Fannin when the shooter came in and immediately targeted his ex-wife.
"He shot his wife," Cindy told KNX-AM radio."Then he pointed the gun at Randy. Then Randy turned around and then the man shot Randy and then I ran."
Six people were killed almost immediately, authorities said. Two other shooting victims died on the way to the hospital and one was clinging to life. Several others escaped without injury.
"I was in the kitchen when I heard the shots," said Sesler. "People ran in here screaming, and my wife dialed 911. And then there were police everywhere."
Neighbors described Dekraai as a nice man and said that he and his ex-wife had shared custody of their boy.
"I know there was a custody battle involved with his son, Dominic," Jo Cornhall told KTLA.
Dekraai, who was injured in a work-related accident in 2007, had reportedly remarried. His wife, Mindy Miguel, was being questioned by police.At first glance Syfy’s new show The Magicians, which can be described as “Harry Potter goes to college,” might seem like just another story about young heroes with supernatural powers. But over the course of its first season the show slowly reveals itself as something strange and unexpected. Fantasy author Melinda Snodgrass calls the show, based on a series of novels by Lev Grossman, a master class in adaptation.
“It was fascinating to be reading the book while I was watching the show, and seeing the choices that the showrunners had made that I thought were really smart and just took this whole series up a level,” Snodgrass says in Episode 199 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I can’t wait for it to come back.”
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was particularly taken by a scene in the pilot episode in which a spell goes horribly wrong, summoning a mysterious monster.
“I really thought the climactic scene where the Beast shows up was just one of the most riveting things I’ve ever seen committed to television,” he says.
The show can sometimes feel uneven though. Pop culture critic Andrew Liptak says that too many episodes feel disconnected from the larger story.
“There’s a whole stretch in the middle of the season where they just go through the standalone episode thing, and I wasn’t quite sure if I liked the show at that point,” he says. “But once the show started getting darker, that’s when it really started to pay off.”
And The Magicians gets very dark by its season finale, which features a string of shocking twists that have outraged some viewers. But Snodgrass praises the show for doing the unexpected.
“I never thought they would go as dark as they did,” she says. “That was quite powerful.”
Listen to our complete interview with Melinda Snodgrass and Andrew Liptak in Episode 199 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Andrew Liptak on the novel The Magicians:
“It was a book that I read when I was a little bit out of college, and it was one of those things that really struck me. I identified pretty closely with some of the characters, even though they were kind of horrible. … I liked how Grossman had set up a magical academy, and did |
year:
“I think we have been the epitome of competition in Australia, we innovate, we changed the shape of dial-up and then broadband with our pricing policies and our own DSLAMs, we introduced a quality VoIP offering to the masses, drove ‘Naked’, built a better modem in BoB, challenged Telstra’s wholesale pricing, reduced costs for the industry, introduced IPTV, put customer satisfaction at the centre of everything and contributed significantly to the public debate about copyright infringements, filtering, NBN applications, the digital economy and regulation.”
However, there is also one disturbing factor regarding this obvious layer of innovation which iiNet has brought to the market. It is very clear that iiNet was not the only company innovating in the areas which Dalby mentions — a number of its rivals, such as TransACT, Netspace, Westnet and Internode were also innovating in these exact same areas. With the removal of those companies from the market, the burden of innovation now rests much more strongly on iiNet’s shoulders alone.
In Australia’s telecommunications sector, Telstra and Optus have long been very reluctant to risk their current revenues by developing new and innovative services, and low-cost players such as TPG have no acted as product innovators in this space either, due to their low margins. With the removal of many of the innovators from the market and their inclusion under iiNet’s wings, iiNet currently faces vastly reduced pressure to continue innovating itself — and Australian consumers face a reduced choice between companies who are pushing for better products and services.
So what’s the answer to our initial question about iiNet? It’s a mixed bag. The company has acted as a strongly competitive force in Australia’s telecommunications market. However, it has also acted as a strongly anti-competitive force, and it’s at iiNet’s door that consumers must lay the sector’s current oligolopic structure.
Is four (perhaps five, with Vodafone) major players enough to guarantee decent competition in Australian telecommunications? History from the nation’s banking and retail sectors, which are similarly dominated by oligopolies, would suggest not. Time — and the rollout of the National Broadband Network — will give us a final answer.
Image credit: iiNetTwo years ago serious allegations of sexual assault and rape were made against Julian Assange, the founder and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks.
The allegations followed a visit by two women (known in legal documents as AA and SW) to a Swedish police station on 20 August 2010. From what they told the police, a formal criminal investigation was commenced. Due process started its course.
And then came the legal mythology. Since August 2010 a number of inter-connected assertions have been made about legal aspects of the criminal investigation and subsequent proceedings by supporters of Assange. Some of the assertions are false and misleading but they remain widely circulated. In my previous quick post I described these contentions as “zombie facts” which carry on regardless even when shot down.
This creation of this Assange legal mythology presents rather a paradox.
The great merit of Wikileaks was that it placed into the public domain information which would enable informed public debate. That is why I and many others support the Wikileaks project in principle, and wish it could be disconnected from the on-going Assange matter.
Nonetheless, a detailed and sourced approach to the legal issues relevant to the Assange extradition remains important, and this post builds on the earlier post in setting out the correct legal situation. In doing this, I have no view on the ultimate outcome of the investigation and any trial. I am neutral as to whether Assange is charged, or whether he is convicted or acquitted, so long as the complaints are properly dealt with and the investigation reaches its natural conclusion. (Indeed, there are obvious questions to be asked about the conduct of the investigation and the complaints; but those are a matter for the investigation and any hearing.)
The starting point is to understand what the process has been so far.
The process to date
In July 2010, Assange explained in a TED talk why Sweden was attractive to Wikileaks (see here at 0.20). It would appear that Wikileaks was at that time hosted in Sweden to take advantage of its liberal protections for the media and journalists. In August 2010 Wikileaks itself promoted a story in Reuters which described Sweden as a “legal shield” – their tweet is here.
Assange came to Sweden in August 2010. Between 13 and 18 August there was a sequence of alleged incidents of sexual abuse against AA. There was also an allegation of rape in respect of SW.
On 20 August 2010 both AA and SW went to a police station. As a result of what the police were told, a criminal investigation was commenced into sexual molestation.
On 31 August 2010, Assange was questioned about the allegations, which he denied. This interview is important, as it meant that from this stage he knew of the allegations against him.
Following this interview, the Swedish prosecutor decided to proceed with the investigation. On 22 September 2010, messages were left with Assange’s lawyer saying that Assange was now required for “interrogation”, the second stage interview before a prosecution.
(Assange’s Swedish lawyer was later to falsely maintain that the prosecutor had not tried to contact him. When this was exposed as incorrect, he then claimed that he was not able to pass the messages on to his client.)
On or about 27 September 2010, Assange left Sweden for England. It is not clear whether Assange was aware of the request for interrogation. However, his Swedish lawyer confirmed that Assange could return in October 2010. This offer is declined by the prosecutor, as Assange was then required sooner.
The Swedish prosecutor proceeded to obtain a warrant for Assange’s arrest on 20 November 2010. Assange instructed his Swedish lawyer to challenge the warrant and it is appealed to the Court of Appeal of Svea. On 24 November 2010 the appeal court upheld the warrant. The significance of this is that the allegations giving rise to the warrant have already been tested in the Swedish legal system.
On 26 November 2010 the prosecutor issued a European Arrest Warrant (EAW). This EAW is certified by the UK serious crime agency on 6 December 2010. The following day Assange surrendered himself to a London police station.
Assange instructed his English lawyers to challenge the EAW, and a hearing was held before the Chief Magistrate of England and Wales on 7 and 8 February 2011. Assange’s barrister attacked the extradition on a number of detailed grounds. However, in a detailed judgment handed down on 24 February 2011, it was decided that the EAW was valid and that the alleged offences would constitute offences both in England and Sweden.
The Chief Magistrate also heard witnesses on behalf of Assange. Under cross-examination, it became clear that Assange’s own Swedish lawyer had misled the court and Assange's other witnesses over whether the Swedish prosecutor had been in contact to request interrogation before Assange left Sweden. In a scathing passage of the judgment, the Chief Magistrate even accused Assange's Swedish lawyer of “a deliberate attempt to mislead the court”.
Assange then instructed new English lawyers to appeal the decision of the Chief Magistrate. This hearing took place at the High Court on 12 and 13 July 2011. Just as Assange had had the Chief Magistrate at the first hearing, the High Court was headed by the President of the Queen’s Bench Division. Again, Assange's case was being dealt with by a senior and experienced judge.
The High Court took three and a half months to consider Assange's legal submissions and in a carefully detailed and reasoned judgment dated 11 November 2011 the High Court rejected each ground of appeal. In particular, they held that the allegations in the EAW would constitute offences in English law.
The High Court even considered a range of extraneous material so as to be satisfied that the EAW even contained fair and accurate descriptions of what was alleged – see my post here for more on this.
Assange was then given one further opportunity to appeal. In February 2012, the Supreme Court heard argument on the technical but important point of whether the Swedish prosecution authority could issue an EAW. In May 2012, in a 93 page judgment of some 266 paragraphs, the Supreme Court held that the EAW was valid.
By May 2012 it thereby appeared that extradition was inevitable. All legal avenues in England had been exhausted. A number of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers had made detailed and complex submissions to a number of England’s top judges at three hearings, and all of the submissions had been addressed in three lengthy judgments. Few respondents in English legal history have ever had such an opportunity to challenge an extradition request. But Assange had failed and the EAW was upheld. A return to Sweden was imminent.
It was at this stage Assange seeks protection in the London Embassy of Ecuador, and on 16 August 2012 he was granted political asylum.
It was just under two years to the day of the allegations being first made.
The substantive allegations
One common assertion by supporters of Assange is that the allegations do not really constitute rape or sexual assault.
For example, Assange’s then English solicitor was quoted as saying on 11 December 2010:
Whatever'sex by surprise' is, it's only a offense in Sweden -- not in the U.K. or the U.S. or even Ibiza. I feel as if I'm in a surreal Swedish movie being threatened by bizarre trolls. The prosecutor has not asked to see Julian, never asked to interview him, and he hasn't been charged with anything. He's been told he's wanted for questioning, but he doesn't know the nature of the allegations against him.
One cannot explain why Assange’s English solicitor should say such things. Assange had already had the allegations put to him on 31 August 2010. The prosecutor had asked his Swedish lawyer for interrogation on 22 September 2010.
The same English lawyer was also widely reported as saying:
The honeytrap has been sprung. Dark forces are at work. After what we've seen so far you can reasonably conclude this is part of a greater plan.
These were remarkable statements by an English solicitor about a case.
The allegation of “sex by surprise” was a flat mischaracterisation of the allegations in the EAW. The accusations were not of “sex by surprise”. Instead, the accusations were as follows:
"1. Unlawful coercion On 13-14 August 2010, in the home of the injured party [AA] in Stockholm. Assange, by using violence. forced the injured party to endure his restricting her freedom of movement. The violence consisted in a firm hold of the injured party's arms and a forceful spreading of her legs whilst lying on top of her and with his body weight preventing her from moving or shifting. 2. Sexual molestation On 13-14 August 2010, in the home of the injured party [AA] in Stockholm, Assange deliberately molested the injured party by acting in a manner designed to violate her sexual integrity. Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her without her knowledge. 3. Sexual molestation On 18 August 2010 or on any of the days before or after that date, in the home of the injured party [AA] in Stockholm, Assange deliberately molested the injured party by acting in a manner designed to violate her sexual integrity i.e. lying next to her and pressing his naked, erect penis to her body. 4. Rape On 17 August 2010, in the home of the injured party [SW] in Enkoping, Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep. was in a helpless state. It is an aggravating circumstance that Assange. who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used. still consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her. The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party's sexual integrity."
The High Court held that the test of "dual criminality” was met in respect of each of these offences: they were offences in both England and Sweden. The High Court even examined extraneous materials, such as the statements of AA and SW, to see if the allegations were a fair description (see my post here for more on the statements of AA and SW).
Meanwhile, alongside the mischaracterisation of the accusations were the on-going attacks on the complainants by those supporting Assange. Various suggestions were made of connections to the CIA or that the complainants were seeking revenge. Unfortunately there are even websites devoted to effectively “slut-shaming” the complainants.
But the simple fact is that the allegations do constitute a criminal offence in both England and Sweden.
If the version of events of AA and SW is not correct, or if AA and SW are unreliable witnesses, then the correct forum for challenging such evidence is in a Swedish trial and not the proxy of English extradition hearings and still less heated internet battles.
Indeed, the more emphasis which is placed by Assange supporters on the credibility of the complaints or the complainants, the more it becomes obvious that this is a matter for due process in Sweden and not for anything else.
The investigation
There have been various criticism of the conduct of the investigation. Some of these criticisms have more force than others. For example, it is not clear what happened between 20 and 31 August 2010 where it appeared the more serious allegation seemed to be dropped, only to be revived on or about 1 September 2010. It is also not clear why the prosecutor waited until 22 September 2010 to arrange for a date of the interrogation.
However, if any of these points amount to an abuse of process, then again – as with the substantive allegations – the correct forum to challenge the conduct of the investigation is a Swedish court room.
It is often forgotten that Assange has already challenged the investigation once in Sweden, but his appeal was rejected by the relevant appeal court in November 2010. It was only then that the EAW was issued.
What has become clear is that the Swedish approach to criminal proceedings is different from that of England or other common law jurisdictions. The interrogation requested takes place at a late stage, just before prosecution. Assange is thereby not required for mere questioning – indeed, he was questioned on 31 August 2010.
As the English High Court held (paragraphs 152 and 153):
Plainly this is a case which has moved from suspicion to accusation supported by proof. […] In England and Wales, a decision to charge is taken at a very early stage; there can be no doubt that if what Mr Assange had done had been done in England and Wales, he would have been charged and thus criminal proceedings would have been commenced.
Some commentators have made the point that the prosecutors should come to the UK to question Assange. However, this appears to misunderstand the procedural stage of the investigation. Assange is not required for mere questioning; he is required to surrender for interrogation before any charges can be made and prosecution brought.
Assange has already been questioned. The prosecutor has also told the English courts that the need to deal with the other witnesses and expert evidence means that the interrogation stage needs to take place in Sweden. That is a matter for a prosecutor to decide. The allegations are about incident in Sweden, and in respect of Swedish complainants on the basis of witness and expert evidence in Sweden.
And, of course, it is not for the accused in a serious crime investigation to determine how any investigation should proceed.
Sweden and extradition
Some supporters of Assange contend that he would happily return to Sweden to be interrogated, if only he could be certain that he would not then be extradited to the United States.
The underlying concern is that Assange is somehow likely to be extradited to the United States from Sweden.
However, this is the most curious of the contentions, as - even without any guarantees - Assange would be far safer from any extradition to the United States in Sweden than he would be in England.
If Assange was genuinely concerned about avoiding extradition, rather than avoiding the rape investigation, then properly advised he should go to Sweden without delay.
And here there is also an obvious point to be made. The United States has actually not made an extradition request. Although it is reported that there is a “Grand Jury” investigation currently proceeding (and even that there is a “sealed indictment”), there remains no extradition request. There may never be one.
It is not even clear for what crime the United States could indict Assange and apply for his extradition. If it were an espionage or computer offence in respect of his role at Wikileaks then not only would he possibly have protection under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, the actual extradition treaty between Sweden and the United States prohibits extradition for political or espionage offences. The treaty also prevents extradition where there is a death penalty.
In Sweden Assange would furthermore have the protection of any onward extradition requiring both the consent of the United Kingdom and Sweden. Accordingly, any decision to extradite Assange to the United States would be subject to legal challenges in both Sweden and England.
In my previous post I made the straightforward (and I thought uncontroversial) point that any extradition of Assange from Sweden would be subject to international law. This was in the context of whether the Swedish government could provide a guarantee against Assange being extradited. My actual words were:
It would not be legally possible for Swedish government to give any guarantee about a future extradition, and nor would it have any binding effect on the Swedish legal system in the event of a future extradition request. By asking for this 'guarantee', Assange is asking the impossible, as he probably knows. Under international law, all extradition requests have to be dealt with on their merits and in accordance with the applicable law; and any final word on an extradition would (quite properly) be with an independent Swedish court, and not the government giving the purported 'guarantee'. [...] Also Sweden (like the United Kingdom) is bound by EU and ECHR law not to extradite in circumstances where there is any risk of the death penalty or torture. There would be no extradition to the United States in such circumstances.
My implicit contention was that any decision to extradite Assange would be subject to judicial oversight in respect of compliance with international law, as well as national law. This would be because any decision to extradite would ultimately be under the terms of the relevant treaty between Sweden and the United States.
However, an American legal blogger has challenged me and has even demanded in a Guardian blogpost an apology and retraction from the New Statesman. His concern is whether the government or the courts have the final word.
Unfortunately, it would appear that he made a simple mistake and missed that any extradition of Assange would have to comply with international law, and not just national law.
On this I am grateful for confirmation from Swedish legal scholars Mark Klamberg and Pål Wrange.
Klamberg’s view is:
…if there is an extradition treaty the Government is bound by an international obligation to extradite and it is only for legally sound reasons that it may refuse. An extradition treaty limits in a considerable way the discretion of the Government to deviate from the ruling of the Supreme Court.
Wrange’s view is:
To put it shortly, Green is right, but his argument can be misinterpreted (no need to develop that here, though). As Klamberg has explained in his blog post on the Swedish extradition procedure, the Government always makes the final decision. However – and this is a very important caveat – even if the Government has leeway under national law, it is bound by international law. Both the Swedish and the UK Governments have extradition agreements with the US, and these agreements provide that extradition shall take place, if the legal requirements are met. Hence, the Government could not provide a guarantee, without potentially violating an international obligation.
I am most grateful to Glenn Greenwald, the American blogger who raised this interesting issue, but on the basis of (and subject to) what Klamberg and Wrange have now said, I stand by what I said in my original post.
Accordingly, the Swedish legal position is clear.
The Swedish government simply cannot give any prior guarantee in respect of an extradition request which has not even been made. It is a legal impossibility. Even though this is a "pre-condition" being demanded on behalf of Assange, it cannot lawfully be given. Any "guarantee" would bind neither the Swedish courts nor the government itself should the United States demand extradition.
And the Swedish government is bound by international law in dealing with any United States extradition request (if one was ever made). It would be a matter for a Swedish court as to whether the government was in breach of its international obligations in ordering extradition. And this would be in addition to any legal challenges which Assange could bring against an extradition decision under Swedish, EU and ECHR law, and any actions against the UK government given that their consent would also be required.
There are a couple of short final points to be made about the relationship between Sweden and the United States.
First, Assange’s supporters often refer to the dreadful 2001 case of Agiza and Al-Zery. Here, in an extra-judicial move, two men were renditioned by Sweden to Egypt at the request of the CIA.
Is this case analogous to the Assange extradition? The first answer is that there is a distinction between judicial and extra-judicial activities – and Assange is wanted for a judicial process. Second, rendition is not extradition. Third, the Agiza and Al-Zery case caused scandal in Sweden leading, among other things, to payments of substantial compensation once the judicial system was engaged. It was an awful incident but it is not one which carries over easily to the Assange situation.
But in any case, it appears that in 2006 Sweden stopped rendition flights for the USA. This was reported in December 2010 following a disclosure.
The disclosure was by Wikileaks.
Conclusion
The above analysis is moot to the extent that Assange is now in the London Embassy of Ecuador. If he can get safe passage beyond UK territorial waters and arrive in Ecuador, he would appear safe from the Swedish criminal investigation, let alone any extradition request by the United States.
But subject to this, there appears two possible explanations for why he is seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden.
First, it may be possible that there is a subjective fear of being extradited to the United States from Sweden, based on the mistaken belief that it would be easy to extradite him to the United States. However, as set out above, even if the United States can get round the First Amendment, Assange would have protections under the Swedish-United States treaty, under ECHR and EU law, and under the domestic law of both Sweden and England. Nonetheless, if he has that fear then this mistaken belief may be sincerely held.
But even taking any subjective fears at their very highest, unless and until there is any extradition request by the United States, then due process of an investigation into allegations of rape and sexual abuse in Sweden must be the priority, and Assange should return to face the accusations. As it stands the criminal investigation is frustrated and unresolved. And complainants of rape and sexual abuse have rights too.
Then there is the rational explanation. In view of the significant protections he would have against onward extradition to the United States from Sweden, it would appear that the only rational (as opposed to subjective) explanation for his refusal is not that he is seeking to avoid any onwards extradition; it is that he simply wants to avoid interrogation and any prosecution for allegations of sexual assault and rape in Sweden.
David Allen Green is legal correspondent of the New StatesmanWe present a driver's-eye view of the most dramatic moments from a nail-biting race in Sochi...
Ordinarily lapped traffic is not what a race leader wants to see when he has a rival in close pursuit, especially on the last lap, but in Sunday’s race Valtteri Bottas caught Felipe Massa’s Williams at just the right time – or just the wrong time if you were Sebastian Vettel, as we can see in the video above. Having pushed relentlessly to get himself into DRS range of the Silver Arrow, Vettel admitted it was somewhat galling to see Bottas benefit from a big DRS-assisted tow down the pit straight to begin the lap, though the German’s major source of frustration - as evidenced by his not so subtle sign language - was Massa not jumping out of the way sooner as the duo rounded Turn 3. After that, Vettel’s best hope was that Bottas would trip up passing Pascal Wehrlein’s Sauber, but when the Finn nimbly nipped past the Swiss car, the Ferrari driver was forced to concede, eventually crossing the line just 0.6s down on the Mercedes for the closest finish in Russian Grand Prix history.
Stroll spins on his own
After failing to finish the first three races of the season, and logging the fewest laps of anyone, Lance Stroll was in desperate need of reaching the chequered flag in Sochi. In the end he did just that – but only after an early scare when he spun at Turn 5 on the opening lap. The stewards initially investigated whether the 18-year-old had come into contact with Renault’s Nico Hulkenberg, but as this onboard from the German’s car shows, Stroll lost the rear of his FW40 entirely on his own after running over the inside kerb while battling Esteban Ocon’s Force India. Thankfully for Stroll, the quick onset of the safety car warning lights – a result of Grosjean’s clash with Palmer – slowed oncoming traffic and prevented any further drama.
Grosjean and Palmer come to blows
Unsurprisingly, Romain Grosjean and Jolyon Palmer pointed the finger of blame for their first lap tangle at each other, with both men saying the other had put their car where they shouldn’t have. Having reviewed video evidence, the stewards determined it a racing incident – and when you watch this exclusive side-by-side video, you understand why. Having nearly been squeezed between Pascal Wehrlein’s Sauber and Carlos Sainz’s Toro Rosso, Palmer had little choice but to turn in when he did, leaving Grosjean powerless to avoid contact when the gap he went for suddenly disappeared. The third big opening lap crash at Turn 2 in as many races in Sochi.
The only blot on Bottas’s copybook
“Keep putting pressure on him,” Ferrari told Sebastian Vettel as his pursuit of Valtteri Bottas in the latter stages of Sunday’s race in Sochi reached fever pitch. “He will make a mistake.” In the end that prediction proved nothing more than wishful thinking, but the Prancing Horse were no doubt encouraged by what had happened at Turn 13 several laps earlier, when Bottas nearly ruined his hard work with this error under braking – a minor lock-up that on another day might have proved costly. The Finn said the lapse, which caused a small flat spot on his left-front tyre, ‘hurt his pace’ in the closing laps, but despite coming under increasing pressure he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
Max gets off to a flyer
Max Verstappen was left frustrated after qualifying only seventh in Sochi, saying P5 had been his target. But in the race he quickly catapulted himself into that position thanks to a dynamic getaway in which he rapidly overhauled Felipe Massa’s Williams before slicing right and benefiting from the three-wide battle between Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricciardo which left the Australian hung out to dry on the outside. The rest of the race was, by Verstappen’s own admission, ‘very lonely’ as he came home fifth, but who knows how it might have turned out had he not vaulted so quickly off the line.
Valtteri’s Russian Rocket
In Bahrain Valtteri Bottas was unable to convert a maiden pole position into a first victory, but in Russia he did something that had never been done before in Sochi – he won from off the front row. Starting third, the Finn made full use of being on the clean side of the track as he made a perfect getaway, quickly getting into Sebastian Vettel’s slipstream before powering past the German, who was also feeling the force of the headwind. “I knew with the tow it would be tough,” Vettel told UK broadcaster Channel 4 afterwards. “I defended the inside but he had so much more speed, he just drove past me. I had no chance!” In an extremely tight race, it would prove the decisive moment.
Ham sandwichTIME WARNER CABLE: BUYING LEGISLATORS AND SELLING LEGISLATION
Global Revolution 1: American Revolution 2: Day 45: Communication 1
IronBoltBruce’s Kleptocracy Chronicles for 31 Oct 2011 (g1a2d0045c1)
How many examples of greed and corruption must you see before you act?
Many Americans think that at the state level a bill becomes law only if it is passed by both House and Senate and signed by the Governor. Not so. Across our 50 states we have no less than 63 ways a bill can become “law without signature” by a Governor looking to avoid controversy or accountability that might quash their Presidential hopes or land them in jail:
http://tinyurl.com/3euvua9
One such bill was North Carolina House Bill 129 (NC H129), which on 21 May of this year became North Carolina Session Law 2011-84 (SL 2011-84) without the signature of Governor Beverly Eaves “B” Perdue … whose last name is actually that of her dead ex-husband … whose middle name is her current husband’s last name … and the “B”, well, ask Andy about that.
http://tinyurl.com/43p4hrf
Anyway, with Aunt B’s inaction the “Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition” bill – like the USA PATRIOT Act of a decade before – was passed into law with covenants that were the exact opposite of its Orwellian cover. Opponents like the Institute for Local Self Reliance referred to NC H129 as the “Time Warner Cable Monopoly Protection Act”, and with good reason.
http://tinyurl.com/3s3knvj
As Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn warned, “Do not let the title fool you. This measure, if enacted, will not only fail to level the playing field; it will discourage municipal governments from addressing deployment in communities where the private sector has failed to meet broadband service needs. In other words, it will be a significant barrier to broadband deployment and may impede local efforts to promote economic development.”
http://tinyurl.com/3bdb4f6
Another reason the Time Warner Cable logo should have been on the cover of NC H129 is that, according to industry watchdog StopTheCap.com, it was Time Warner’s lawyers and lobbyists who actually drafted th legislation and assigned it to State Representative Marilyn Avila to sponsor. And sponsor it she did, despite the fact that it was opposed by many of her own constituents:
“Raleigh’s City Council adopted a resolution opposing Avila’s legislation, written on behalf of Time Warner Cable. H129 will destroy North Carolina’s community-owned broadband networks and prevent new ones from launching. Council Member Bonner Gaylord, who authored the resolution, says passage of these kinds of anti-competitive bills would stop local governments from providing needed communications services, especially advanced high-speed broadband, and deny local governments the availability of federal grants under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to assist in providing affordable access to high-capacity broadband service in unserved and underserved areas.”
http://tinyurl.com/4y8z3sy
But despite a thumbs down from industry watchdogs, and over the protests of the cities and people of the state, NC H129 still received the support of enough legislators to become law. And how did Time Warner Cable garner the necessary votes? They bought them, as Joey Mornin explains:
“If you’re like most Americans, you probably buy your Internet service from one of a small handful of corporate providers. The big incumbent broadband providers – like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable – often enjoy monopoly or duopoly privileges in the areas they serve. Recently, some communities have started to implement their own municipal broadband networks. These community-owned networks are often faster, cheaper, and more reliable than the corporate alternatives. In North Carolina, for instance, community-owned networks like Fibrant and Greenlight consistently outperform the commercial offerings from Time Warner, AT&T, and CenturyLink. Similar municipal broadband projects are taking root across the country. Their expansion, however, threatens the comfortable markets that corporate broadband providers have come to expect. In what could become a typical case, Time Warner is supporting a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would impose sharp limits on the growth of municipal broadband networks. Despite widespread opposition, the bill recently passed in both chambers of the state legislature. Time Warner, which reported $26 billion in revenue in 2010, has donated over $6.3 million to North Carolina politicians over the last four years.”
http://tinyurl.com/3rwe496
Related Image:
http://ldrlongdistancerider.com/images/Time_Warner_Cable.jpg
Related Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLi7bxZ33Yo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDCwgGrAmmQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9EgDGDZWWk
###
IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT OF THE LAST 14 U.S. PRESIDENTS, 7 HAVE BEEN DEMOCRATS AND 7 HAVE BEEN REPUBLICANS.
Our Kleptocracy-controlled media focuses on America’s two-year election cycles as if who wins or loses in the swinging of the pendulum was a matter of life or death, when in fact even at the Presidential level it makes no more difference than the outcomes of Monday Night Football, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, Hillbilly Handfishing or the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor. U.S. elections are staged primarily to give Sheeple the illusion of control so they will (a) vent their frustrations and expend their energy, emotions and resources supporting or attacking the Puppet on the Left hand or the Puppet on the Right, and consequently (b) never recognize and challenge the common omnipotent Puppetmaster.
There was no real change in 2008. There was no real change in 2010. There WILL be real change in 2012, but it won’t be coming from tele-brainwashed couch potatoes, manipulated voter lists, rigged voting machines or predetermined ballot counts. It will be coming from us…
The 99 Percent
http://corporatecriminalsexposed.com
###
I AM NOT ANONYMOUS. I AM AN AMERICAN.
I am not just a Consumer. I am a Citizen.
I will no longer be labeled Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative, Demopublican or Republocrat.
I will no longer follow Puppets labeled Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative, Demopublican or Republocrat.
I am the People. And I am coming for the Puppetmasters.
I am part of the 99 Percent. And I demand the following:
1. End the Fed.
2. Reverse Citizens United.
3. Repeal PATRIOT Act.
4. Expose 9/11 Truth.
5. End Profit Wars.
6. Refund Taxpayer Trillions.
7. Imprison the Kleptocrats.
8. Single Term Limits.
Or, if these demands are not addressed promptly:
1. Regime Change.
http://ironboltbruce.com
###
LABELS (A POEM OF PROTEST)
“Democrat”, “Republican”,
The parties of the system;
Puppets both, for sale their votes,
No character or wisdom.
“Liberal”, “Conservative”,
For change or status quo?
Pick either one, the change is none,
All charlatans and whores.
Far “Left” we place the Anarchists,
Libertarians claim far “Right”;
Yet both decry the government:
False continuum brought to light.
For oil, “We” bomb their mud huts,
Strip them bare, then offer “Aid”;
And fake their retribution as
Pretext – a false flag raised.
Unarmed hundred thousands killed
By weapons of “Defense”,
While rights are lost for “Freedom” sake –
On profit, all depends.
With stroke of pen, the “Patriot” Act,
And patriots’ gifts are taken;
Then “Citizens United” leaves
Our citizens forsaken.
We protest loss of liberties,
Put “World Wide Web” to use;
Cloudmark Authority censors us
For “messaging abuse”.
They label us to finger-point,
With labels, “They” deride us;
Their labels keep us all at bay,
For with labels, “They” divide us.
http://ldrlongdistancerider.com
###
JOIN THE GLOBAL REVOLUTION!
Occupy Wall Street/OWS:
http://occupywallst.org/
Occupy DC/Stop the Machine:
http://october2011.org/
Occupy Together:
http://occupytogether.org/
Watch these Videos:
http://tinyurl.com/kleptocracytutorial
Take this Pledge:
http://wp.me/p19dS3-9o
How many examples of greed and corruption must you see before you act?
###
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2563Saturday, May 30, 2015
By Mex
“ Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I’m a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor – however you want to call it, Lord… I’m guilty. Hunter S. Thompson ”
Ahoy there!
Last time we had a brief tour around Nantucket, now it’s time to take a closer look to what the town has to offer. The inevitable first stop has to be at the tavern, where you will be able to hire some helpful hands during your adventures.
Nantucket features five different character classes, each one specialized in a different seafaring area.
Sailors are valiant explorers who spend their lives at sea. No matter is a majestic vessel, a whaleboat or a simple board, they know how to keep it afloat, come rain or shine.
are valiant explorers who spend their lives at sea. No matter is a majestic vessel, a whaleboat or a simple board, they know how to keep it afloat, come rain or shine. Hunters are men without fear, born to chase their preys. They can stand on a whaleboat’s bow sailing toward danger or face the wickedest pirate without hesitation.
are men without fear, born to chase their preys. They can stand on a whaleboat’s bow sailing toward danger or face the wickedest pirate without hesitation. Craftsmen are experts artisans, specialized in dealing with all the practical errands of a ship. Their hands are surely the dirtiest and most |
in Cambridge, for more than a decade, but has also brought the annual National Poetry Slam Finals to the Boston area twice � each being among the competition's most successful years.
Beaubien was quick to quash any nomination because, as a Cambridge resident, she doesn't feel she qualifies. But that wasn't her only issue.
"What's most difficult for me to wrap my head around is the mission of the poet laureate," says Beaubien. "Essentially, the position is a political one before it is an artistic one. This is not to say that it isn't beneficial for both a city and the genre of poetry, but it does mean that a poet's own individual ideas � about artistic merit, language, genre, and which poem one might like to enjoy with a drink at a bar or with a blanket on the couch � get steamrolled into a kind of open-mic-host niceness that has to uplift and advocate for the whole genre before adding much in the way of constructive criticism. I've been hosting an open mic for a decade, not to mention serving as the face of the National Poetry Slam for two years, and I make a lot of positive noises about poetry because I genuinely think that so many more people could be enjoying it. But someday I'd like to get on the radio and say that I think a poem sucks without feeling like I'm dropping a match in my own barn. It kind of makes me want Sam Cornish to write some really ripping criticism once he leaves the office."
All of which raises the question: What does a poet laureate do? In England, it's clear cut: The poet laureate writes poems for royal occasions and such, as well as overseeing some poetic projects. Here in the U.S., it's more free-form. The national poet laureate usually embarks on a large educational program, such as former laureate Robert Pinsky's "Favorite Poem Project," which recorded people reading their favorite pieces of verse. Of course, other laureates have simply taken the honor and the publicity, and not done much of anything. Worcester native Stanley Kunitz, who was appointed in both 1974 and 2000, was 95 the second time around, and while he still got around and did readings, it was clear he wasn't shooting for any great undertaking. (The position, then called the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, was fundamentally different the first time Kunitz held the job.)
Similarly, Halstead was 91 when she was honored, and clearly, it was an act of honoring a magnificent person for their contributions to the city, not of creating a permanent position. But would Worcester benefit from the job being continued?
"I think having one is good for a city," says Worcester poet Jenith Charpentier, "that it speaks to a city's belief that arts are important."
Charpentier has a few ideas of what a poet laureate would do, including writing or selecting poems for events, setting up city-sponsored events and acting as a liaison between the poetry community and the city, schools and public for poetic opportunities.
Other local poets aren't so sure, or are indifferent to the concept. Some, though, such as Worcester-turned-Boston-area poet Dawn Gabriel, think a laureate could have a place in a city.
"I believe being a poet laureate is much, much more than composing a sonnet for the opening of the new landfill, or reading a special poem when the mayor is inaugurated," says Gabriel. "You need to be able to reach out to the wider community, share the LOVE of poetry, all poetry, and not just read your own stuff at civic events. You need to foster the wider literary scene, work with underserved populations and show up for the word all the time."
There are poets in Worcester who reach out to schools already, and some who do work in poorer communities. There are rebels and academics and everything in between here. Is there room for a laureate? Is it needed? I don't know, but maybe it's time to have that conversation again. (Victor D. Infante)An Albuquerque Fire Department dispatcher has been reassigned after he allegedly refused to help a distraught woman asking for assistance on a 911 call as her friend was dying after being shot, fire officials said.
In audio released Tuesday, a dispatcher identified as Matthew Sanchez appears to get frustrated by a woman tending to Jaydon Chavez-Silver, a 17-year-old who was shot by a gunman who opened fire into a house where a party was being held at around 10 p.m. on June 26, authorities said.
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Chavez-Silver was pronounced dead at a hospital, and there have been no arrests, Albuquerque police said Tuesday.
Sanchez…
Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News
Contact us at editors@time.com.Unless you have access to a F-22 fighter jet, you probably haven’t been able to fly faster than the speed of sound since the last Concorde flight in 2003. NASA wants to change this. The agency said that it is spending over $6 million to fund research into cheaper and greener supersonic travel.
This isn’t NASA’s first attempt to bring back supersonic travel. The agency has been (literally) pushing the boundaries of flight for years. NASA’s predecessor was involved in building the first supersonic plane in 1946, and the agency has been working on concepts since 2006 with companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing that may one day lead to a new generation of planes that get you places very quickly.
The largest awards of this round of funding went to MIT and Wyle Laboratories, a research contractor in Virginia, to investigate the environmental impact of commercial supersonic flight and how turbulence affects sonic booms, respectively.
MIT’s study will be looking into updating the environmental impact models created for NASA in the ’80s and ’90s. While many modern fighter jets have the ability to fly faster than the speed of sound, the environmental impact is relatively small, because there just aren’t that many fighter jets in operation. It would be a different case if commercial jets were capable of supersonic flight. There are roughly 7,000 flights over the US alone at any given time, all burning fuel to stay up there. Supersonic flight burns more fuel—albeit for a shorter period of time—than a traditional jet engine. NASA said that supersonic jets also travel at higher altitudes than regular jets, closer to the stratosphere, and so they have a greater potential to damage the ozone layer.
Another big chunk of the funds went into research on how to make supersonic travel quieter. For anyone who has ever been near the Concorde’s flight path, they’ll know that it was really, really loud. If supersonic jets are to become the norm, they’re going to have to get a lot quieter, or we’re all going to go deaf. NASA told Quartz that it’s already had some “pretty outstanding success” in past attempts to reduce the sound of supersonic booms.
Then there’s the running costs issue. The Concorde was a loss-leader for Air France (one of only two carriers that regularly flew the plane), but it was built by a French company and was regarded as a symbol of national pride. In an era when airlines are trying to cram more people onto existing planes, modern commercial supersonic jets would need to be economically viable before any company is likely to purchase one.
NASA said that if all goes to plan with these studies, it sees the first business-jet-sized supersonic planes going into production by 2025, and commercial planes by 2030. For now, we’ll have to stick to spending inordinate amounts of time and fuel to fly anywhere.When Jeb Bush campaigners came across an undecided Republican in New Hampshire, they simply called his mom.
The former Florida governor's staffers told the Washington Post that putting Barbara Bush, the former first lady and mother of the Republican candidate, on the phone usually convinced the voter.
This level of family involvement marks a shift in Mr. Bush's campaign, and he evidently hopes it will shift voters as well.
It may not be as tough a sell as it looks, as family ties may impact voters subconsciously more than they even realize, says Doug Wead, historian and author of "All the President's Children," a book about family involvement in political campaigns.
"The voter is not actually a very good expert on why they have voted the way they have, that is, they may have been influenced whether they know it or not," Mr. Wead writes in an e-mail to The Christian Science Monitor. "And so family members may indeed have influence."
He points to the familial success of the Kennedys or Richard Nixon, who was told by a political enemy during Watergate, "If you've raised two daughters like that you can't be all bad."
In a campaign where voters seemd to favor political outsiders with minimal governing experience, Bush understandably kept the focus off his family ties at first. For one thing, his mother's early comments were hardly complimentary, as she famously told NBC's Today show, "We’ve had enough Bushes."
Mother and son have resolved their difference of opinion; in addition to taking phone calls, Ms. Bush appeared alongside her son at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire before the primary election.
"Barbara Bush is the most popular Bush and a reminder of what is good about the family," Wead says. "So, of course, [Jeb Bush] will wrap himself with his mom."
Initially, Jeb was not expected to call for help from the nation's 43rd president. That seems to have changed as well.
Former President George W. Bush intends to join his brother's campaign in earnest with a South Carolina rally on President's Day, Philip Rucker and Ed O'Keefe reported for the Washington Post. The former president has said that given the uncertainty of this unusual race, a surprise showing in South Carolina could boost his brother's campaign.
“Donald Trump and anybody else who wants to be critical of George W. Bush, I hope they do it, because the people of South Carolina are sick and tired of people tearing down George W. Bush,” Jeb Bush said on Brian Kilmeade's radio show on Friday.
Polls currently give Donald Trump 37.3 percent of the South Carolina primary vote, while Bush comes in fourth at 9.3 percent, according to Real Clear Politics. But Trump's success thus far has been at the expense of Republican traditionalists.
If Bush does well in the Feb. 20 primary, it could indicate that an "Old Guard" in the Grand Old Party is willing to fight back against the anti-establishment populism that has kept Trump, a former Democrat disliked by Republican leaders, at the top of the polls.
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Bush's next test is to prove himself in Saturday night's CBS Republican debate, where his biggest challenge is "finding a way to attack Mr. Rubio," wrote Reid Epstein for The Wall Street Journal, referring to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
"Mr. Bush survived a near-death experience by besting Mr. Rubio in New Hampshire, and now he needs to build off his last two strong debate performances," Mr. Epstein wrote. "Mr. Bush has to play to the pundits to keep his donors satisfied and find a way to contrast his experience with Mr. Rubio’s and his conservative bona fides with Mr. [John] Kasich’s."A relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in Uzbekistan, bridging a 20-million-year gap in the carnivore's evolutionary tree. The discovery shows T-rex only grew to its giant size toward the end of the dinosaurs' existence.
A 20-million-year gap in fossil records has meant palaeontologists have been unable to learn how and when the Tyrannosaurs grew so large. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes a newly-discovered fossil dating back 90 million years.
"The middle Cretaceous is a mysterious time in evolution because fossils of land-living animals from this time are known from very few places," said Alexander Averianov, researcher working on the study. "Uzbekistan is one of these places. The early evolution of many groups like tyrannosaurs took place in the coastal plains of central Asia in the mid-Cretaceous."
Timurlengia euotica
The scientists uncovered a new species of horse-sized dinosaur in the Kyzylkum Desert, north Uzbekistan, that is an ancestor to the T.rex. The species – Timurlengia euotica – lived 90 million years ago; 24 million years before the T.rex dominated the land.
The distant cousin of the T.rex weighed around 250kg, and had long legs and sharp teeth. The T.euotica existed some 80 million years after the first Tyrannosaurs are known to have existed.
"Timurlengia was a nimble pursuit hunter with slender, blade-like teeth suitable for slicing through meat," explains researcher Hans Sues of the Smithsonian Institution. "It probably preyed on the various large plant-eaters, especially early duck-billed dinosaurs, which shared its world."
Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex
The discovery gives researchers an insight into how the T.rex evolved to its large size. Seeing as T.euotica was still horse-sized 90 million years ago, scientists say the T.rex must have evolved to its 5m height right at the end of the Tyrannosaur's evolutionary history. In the space of 24-million-years, the Tyrannosaur evolved to three times the height, and 28 times the weight.
Steve Brusatte, the lead researcher said: "The ancestors of T. rex would have looked a whole lot like Timurlengia, a horse-sized hunter with a big brain and keen hearing that would put us to shame." He added: "Only after these ancestral tyrannosaurs evolved their clever brains and sharp senses did they grow into the colossal sizes of T. rex. Tyrannosaurs had to get smart before they got big."Galaxy Airlines Flight 203 was a Lockheed L-188 Electra 4-engine turboprop, registration N5532, operating as a non-scheduled charter flight from Reno, Nevada, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The aircraft crashed in 1985 shortly after takeoff; all but one of the 71 on board died.
Flight chronology [ edit ]
The flight took off from runway 16R at Reno-Cannon International Airport (now Reno-Tahoe International Airport) at 1:04 am on January 21, 1985. A short time later, the aircraft crashed about 1.5 mi (2.4 km) from the end of the runway and burst into flames. It landed near a recreational vehicle dealership, and debris was scattered across US Highway 395 and South Virginia Street. Of the 71 people aboard, three survived the initial impact, but one of them died on January 29 and another on February 4. The lone survivor was then 17-year-old George Lamson Jr., who was thrown clear of the aircraft and landed upright, still in his seat, on South Virginia Street. (His father, George Lamson Sr., was one of the three initial survivors of the crash along with Robert Miggins but both later succumbed to their injuries in hospital.)
Truckee Meadows Fire Department was the first emergency response department to arrive at the scene of the crash. Several other Washoe County and State of Nevada agencies also responded. George Kitchen, who was a fire captain in the Reno Fire Department leading a crew from station No. 6 in south Reno, noted, "One of the first things we saw was the boy. He was still strapped in his seat out on South Virginia Street. He was conscious. We gave him first aid until the medics got there." Lamson gave an interview shortly after the crash in which he stated that he was able to walk away from his seat prior to the aircraft exploding. Lamson's testimony is substantiated by the owner of the Magic Carpet Mini Golf Course, who witnessed the crash and called in to emergency services. He states the boy was up and walking before the arrival of emergency services. The owner reported it took longer for the fire department to get there because they did not believe his call reporting a plane crash.[1][2]
A store and seven RVs were also damaged. The aircraft was returning from a gaming/Super Bowl trip sponsored by Caesars Tahoe.
Heavy vibration started shortly after takeoff, and the cockpit voice recorders recorded one of the pilots asking the tower to allow them to make a left downwind turn, and that they had to get back on the ground.
Due to a lack of facilities for handling so many bodies at once, the victims were taken to the Reno Livestock Events Center for autopsy and identification processes. The autopsies were led by the Washoe County Coroner, V. McCarty, and four medical students from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Investigation [ edit ]
Air start door sketch (from NTSB report).
Air start door location (from NTSB report).
The United States National Transportation Safety Board investigated the accident, and issued the following probable cause:
The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the captain’s failure to control and the copilot’s failure to monitor the flight path and airspeed of the aircraft. This breakdown in crew coordination followed the onset of unexpected vibration shortly after takeoff.
The NTSB added the following Contributing Factor:
Contributing to the accident was the failure of ground handlers to properly close an air start access door, which led to the vibration.
The NTSB report indicates that the ground handlers did not properly close the air start access door due to a sudden change in their procedure when the ground handler supervisor realized that the headset being used to communicate with the flightcrew was nonfunctional, and had to revert mid-routine to using hand signals. This break in routine led the supervisor to signal the flight to taxi before the air start hose was disconnected. Although he then realized that the hose was still connected and signaled the flight crew for an emergency stop, and the hose was successfully disconnected, the closing of the air start access door was not completed either prior to the supervisor's initial go-ahead or after the emergency stop.
The report concluded that the open air start access door led to vibrations that distracted the flight crew. The investigation indicated that these vibrations were not a threat to the aircraft's safe operation, and would likely not have prevented the aircraft from reaching cruise speed and altitude. Similar reports surfaced from other Electra pilots which indicated that the vibrations ceased at higher air speeds.
While the flight crew was trying to determine the source of the vibrations, they reduced power to all four engines simultaneously, presumably to test the engines to see if they were the source. Power was then not increased before the wings stalled.
The aircraft had been chartered to transport U.S. presidential candidates John Glenn and Jesse Jackson periodically in 1983 and 1984. On one flight with Jackson and his entourage between Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas, in May 1984, the aircraft shook, dropped and pitched due to heavy turbulence, reportedly resulting in a stewardess screaming and vomiting.[1] The United States Secret Service asked the Federal Aviation Administration to examine the aircraft, but nothing was found wrong.[1]
Aftermath [ edit ]
In April 1985, Lamson, Jr. returned to Reno to testify about the crash at the National Transportation Safety Board hearing. He told the Reno Gazette-Journal at the time, "I feel I was watched over for sure. I feel lucky to be alive."
A memorial called Galaxy Grove was dedicated at Rancho San Rafael in 1986. After the plaque was stolen in 2013, The Washoe County Parks Department commissioned a two-ton granite replacement. Lamson did not attend the dedication, feeling that it would be too difficult for him.[3]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Sole Survivor, a 2013 documentary by Ky Dickens, follows Lamson's story and challenges living with survivor's guilt along with the lone survivors of other plane crashes around the world.
See also [ edit ]Welcome to The HOP
Operated by Hill Country Transit District
Hill Country Transit District (HCTD) operates The HOP, a regional public transit system that started in the 1960’s as a volunteer transit service that has since grown to serve a nine-county area covering over 9,000 square miles. In the last decade, the system has experienced significant growth and consists of three divisions: the nine-county Rural Division, the Killeen Urban Division consisting of Copperas Cove, Harker Heights, and Killeen; and the Temple Urban Division consisting of Belton and Temple.
The HOP coordinates many types of trips. Service is provided to passengers with disabilities via the Special Transit Service (STS) which often connects with the Fixed Route Service (FRS). The HOP partners with many area social service agencies to provide transportation to their clients.
The local time is:
Inclement Weather:
Thanks to KWTX in Waco, the following link has been provided in order to notify our passengers of any service delays: KWTX Closings
We understand that many of our passengers rely on The HOP to get to work, school, and medical appointments, however sometimes unsafe driving conditions prohibit The HOP from operating. While it is important that our passengers are able to travel to their destinations, HCTD values safety above all else.Between 2009 and 2011, Harrison paid $21,488 in healthcare premiums for workers who had died, according to a state comptroller audit issued today.
The report also finds that "excessive" benefits packages led to 12 Harrison employees who retired between 2009 and 2011 costing taxpayers about $1.1 million in sick time payouts, with one employee nabbing $200,000.
Similar payouts for unused vacation time cost Harrison taxpayers $950,000, with one employee getting $170,000, the report says. Several firefighters cashed in more than 275 unused vacation days when they retired, according to the report.
These are the highlights of the financial “weaknesses” Acting Comptroller Marc Larkins' office say they found in Harrison, a former industrial mecca on the western edge of Hudson County with a population of 13,620.
When the state office began its audit in 2011, the state Department of Community Affairs had described Harrison as being "in serious financial distress,” leading to $20 million in state aid between 2009 and 2013.
Despite the town's financial problems, the report says, between 2009 and 2011 the town paid employees more than $3 million in longevity pay, 2 to 14 percent bonuses that are given to workers on top of contractual raises and cost-of-living increases. In Harrison, workers can begin receiving longevity pay after only three years
“When a municipality asks for more money from the state and its local taxpayers so it can pay its bills, it must also do whatever it can to place appropriate limits on personnel costs and spending,” Larkins said in a press release. “This audit offers the town of Harrison a sensible plan to save significant dollars for taxpayers.”
Paul J. Zarbetski, Harrison’s town attorney, takes exception to how the report characterized Harrison’s finances.
"A lot of the things that they quote unquote point out in the report are things that we already had on our radar to work on,” Zerbetski told The Jersey Journal. “And a lot of them were already accomplished."
The town is undergoing a transition in political leadership, owing to the unexpected death of its former mayor, Raymond McDonough, who suffered a massive heart attack in Town Hall on Feb. 12. He had been an elected official in the town for 36 years, and mayor for 19.
The council selected James A. Fife, a former Harrison High School principal, to succeed McDonough until Dec. 31. There is a mayoral election in November.
In an unsigned response included with the audit, Harrison objects to the state finding the town’s benefits “excessive” and said that its records showed that only three deceased employees had not been recorded as such.
The OSC report makes 13 recommendations, including creating a specific and consistent payout calculation method for lump sum payouts; periodically requesting an updated list of retirees to make sure the town isn't paying benefits to deceased individuals; and imposing penalties on developers who fail to complete projects in a specific time period.
That last recommendation is in response to Harrison borrowing $40 million in 2006 for a project that was delayed by lawsuits. The town had to borrow again to refinance $6 million in bonds that they had expected would be paid via taxes on the stalled developments, and the second round of borrowing will cost taxpayers an additional $5.1 million, the report says.Christian Horner has rubbished suggestions Daniel Ricciardo could join Ferrari by insisting the Australian has a watertight contract at Red Bull for 2016.
Ricciardo is one of the names which has been linked with Kimi Raikkonen's seat should Ferrari opt against retaining the Finn's services next year, though Valtteri Bottas remains the favourite. When asked about the rumours in June Ricciardo refused to rule out the move and said he did not know the intricacies of his Red Bull contract, which has three years left to run.
However in Hungary Ricciardo admitted there had been no contact from Ferrari in the three weeks since the British Grand Prix as rumours about Bottas intensified. Horner has played down the Ricciardo link further by emphasising the strength of his contract.
Asked whether Ricciardo's contract for 2016 was "watertight", Horner replied: "Absolutely."
The follow up question was whether the Ferrari stories had any foundation, to which the Red Bull boss simply said: "No, none at all."
Ricciardo scored his first podium of the season in Hungary, though his chances of victory slipped away in the closing stages following contact with Nico Rosberg. Horner, who has already said Ricciardo's "half-term report is A+" going into the summer break, thinks the Australian back to his best again after a mixed start to the year.
"You can always improve in some areas, of course you can. But he's at the top of his game and some of his overtaking moves [in Hungary] were back of the best that we've seen of him."By Catherine Burns
Newsbeat reporter in Hailsham, near Eastbourne
Alfie's story has been front page news in many newspapers Alfie Patten, 13, has said he's going to have a DNA test to prove he is a father. His girlfriend, 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman, gave birth to a girl last week. Now it looks like the couple could make big money selling their story. Alfie Patten's family have a big house on a quiet leafy street. You can tell a mile off that children live here. There are footballs floating in the pond, and piles of dirty trainers and rollerskates outside the front door. It looks as if someone is inside - you can see the TV flickering in the kitchen. No-one is answering the door though. Alfie says he's convinced that he is baby Maisie's dad and that he'll stand by his girlfriend. But the 13-year-old is also going to take a DNA test to be 100% sure. Gossip Hailsham's high street is about a mile up the road, and everywhere you go people seem to be talking about this story. Some locals are sitting in a coffee shop, swapping theories about Alfie and his girlfriend. And it's the same on the shopping precinct. Thirteen-year-old Elijah says he knows Chantelle and feels sorry for her: "They need to live their lives. They're not going to live their lives now they've got a baby." His mum Helen agrees: "13 and 15-year-olds shouldn't be doing that sort of thing." But Sarah's out with her daughter and thinks people shouldn't overreact: "It doesn't really worry me to be honest. They're together and that's the main thing. Maybe they'll stay together." Under age sex Social services deny claims that they haven't done anything to help. They say they've been visiting both families to check how they, and baby Maisie, are doing. Sixteen-year-old Chloe lives nearby and says there's a lot of underage sex going on in the area. "It happens, and no-one's ever going to be able to stop it. But he's only 13, and they're not going to be able to bring in any money for at least five years, until he's qualified to do anything." TV programmes and newspapers are already lining up to get Alfie's story. His family has signed PR guru Max Clifford to help them and some media experts think they could make up to £500,000. Chloe thinks that's sending out the wrong message. "If they do make loads of money out of it, then other people are going to think, 'I'll have a baby, I'll go to the press about it, I'll get lots of money, and that's how I'll make my living.'"
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionIn this June 8, 1972, file photo, 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, runs with her brothers and cousins, followed by South Vietnamese forces, down Route 1 near Trang Bang after a South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on its own troops and civilians. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
If you were to pick a handful of images that changed how people think about war, Nick Ut’s most famous photograph would surely be among them. The image of 9-year-old Kim Phuc running from napalm — her skin burning, her clothes burned away — defined the horrors of the Vietnam War.
Norwegian author Tom Egeland had the lasting power of Ut’s work in mind when he shared the photo to Facebook weeks ago. But when Facebook’s moderators saw the Pulitzer Prize-winning image, they saw not its documentary significance or its impact on the world, but a violation of the site’s nudity policy.
Facebook’s moderators removed the photograph from Egeland’s page, along with its accompanying text. His account was suspended for 24 hours after he shared an interview with Phuc criticizing Facebook’s decision to censor this image, he said. But that was just the beginning of the incredible outrage at Facebook that has swept across Norway in recent days, becoming the subject of an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from Norway’s largest newspaper, and rising all the way up to the country’s prime minister.
After initially defending its decision to remove the photograph, Facebook decided to “reinstate” the image on Friday afternoon, according to a written statement from a Facebook spokeswoman. “We recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time,” the statement reads. “Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal.”
The company said it would “adjust our review mechanisms” to permit the sharing of the image in the future, but that the change could take “days” to fully go into effect for all users.
[Can you read the minds of Facebook’s moderators? Take a short quiz.]
Facebook has increasingly found itself under scrutiny for its influential role in the distribution of news across the world. According to Pew, 44 percent of the general population in the United States say they get their news from Facebook. While Zuckerberg recently said that Facebook is “a tech company, not a media company,” this incident highlights just how much control the platform can wield over what media its users do (and don’t) see.
Espen Egil Hansen, the editor of Aftenposten — Norway’s largest paper — called Zuckerberg the “world’s most powerful editor” in an open letter to Zuckerberg protesting Facebook’s censorship of the photo, which was published on Friday morning.
“I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly,” he wrote.
The outrage in Norway escalated when Prime Minister Erna Solberg posted the image to her own Facebook page on Friday, after the publication of Aftenposten’s letter. “Facebook gets it wrong when they censor such pictures. It limits the freedom of speech,” she wrote in an accompanying statement that was translated by Reuters. “I say yes to healthy, open and free debate — online and wherever else we go. But I say no to this form of censorship.”
Solberg’s post, along with the statement, then disappeared. A spokesman for the prime minister’s office confirmed that she “did not remove it” herself from her own page — instead, Facebook deleted it.
She later reposted the image — censoring Phuc’s entire body with a large black box — and called on Facebook to reconsider its policies. She paired the censored version of Ut’s work with several other censored versions of iconic photos, writing, “What Facebook does by removing images of this kind, good as the intentions may be, is to edit our common history.”
Aftenposten ran its direct address letter to Zuckerberg on the front page of its paper. “I am writing this letter to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove a documentary photography from the Vietnam war made by Nick Ut. Not today, and not in the future,” Hansen, the paper’s editor, wrote.
“The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single case. This may be a heavy responsibility. Each editor must weigh the pros and cons,” Hansen wrote. “This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California.”
“With over 1.5 billion users, Facebook’s ability to shape views and outlooks is unprecedented,” said Matthew Stender, a project strategist for the social media censorship tracking project, Onlinecensorship.org. Stender expressed concern that Facebook’s increasing importance to the distribution of journalism could eventually allow Facebook to “impose their community guidelines as an arbitrary and puritanical basis for what type of content can be included (and excluded) from journalism published exclusively on the platform.”
The company encountered questions about its ability to handle disturbing but newsworthy content this July, when Diamond Reynolds used Facebook Live to broadcast the dying moments of Philando Castile, after he was shot by a Minnesota cop during a traffic stop. The video was removed from Facebook shortly after it posted, eventually returning to the site with a “graphic content” warning.
[Is Facebook ready for live video’s important role in police accountability?]
Hansen reported that Facebook asked the paper this week to either remove or pixelate Ut’s work from one of its own articles on Wednesday morning, after the paper had reported on Egeland’s suspension from the platform.
“We place limitations on the display of nudity to limit the exposure of the different people using our platform to sensitive content,” the note from Facebook, published alongside Aftenposten’s open letter, reads. “Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breasts, will be removed.”
“We understand that these limitations will sometimes affect content shared for legitimate reasons, including awareness campaigns or artistic projects, and we apologize for the inconvenience,” Facebook continued.
Instead of pixelating or removing the image as requested, Hansen wrote that Facebook was “restricting my room for exercising my editorial responsibility. This is what you and your subordinates are doing in this case.”
By Friday afternoon, Facebook had reversed its position. Here is Facebook’s full explanation for its new stance:
“After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case. An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our Community Standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography. In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time. Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have decided to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed. We will also adjust our review mechanisms to permit sharing of the image going forward. It will take some time to adjust these systems but the photo should be available for sharing in the coming days. We are always looking to improve our policies to make sure they both promote free expression and keep our community safe, and we will be engaging with publishers and other members of our global community on these important questions going forward.”
This post has been updated multiple times.03 September 2016
Strengthening the Tube CAD Journal
When I first started selling PCBs (and later tube-audio kits), I assumed that the following Venn diagram would prove true:
Makes sense, doesn't it? I thought only those who read the Tube CAD Journal would want to buy PCBs. But the reality is much closer to this diagram:
Most of those who buy the PCBs used Google to find them. Many do not even read English. One clue that I ignored for the longest time was that I kept getting e-mails from PCB purchasers who asked if the board could be used in a particular way. What struck me odd about the question was that I had spent half of my last post on just how this could be done. Had he not read the post? No, he hadn't.
My efforts also differ from most other web realities, as most websites begrudgingly post content to promote sales of stuff; I begrudgingly sell stuff so that I can lovingly produce and post content. Over the years, I have received generous requests asking how the devoted reader could monetarily contribute to my postings. My usual answer has been to ask the reader to buy either a software download or a PCB. But not everyone needs these items or can use them. (One reader, however, has repeatedly bought the same software download each year. I wrote to him and he explained that this was his way of contributing to the Tube CAD Journal.) Some readers have just—unasked—sent in checks, one of which was for an embarrassingly large amount. Embarrassing for me, as I wish I could afford to make a similar contribution to my favorite websites; I do contribute to at least three websites, but nothing so generous.
"Most websites begrudgingly post content to promote sales of stuff; I begrudgingly sell stuff so that I can lovingly produce and post content."
Well, I have decided to listen to my ardent readers and friends and set up a Patreon account. If you wish to assist, bolster, and strengthen my efforts here and you are so inclined, please do check out my Patreon link. Thanks.
Unbalancing the Differential Amplifier
Differential amplifiers appear everywhere—even when you don't think they are not there. For example, all solid-state amplifier input stages hold them (when you go over 99.99% you are allowed to use the categorical "all"). A simple grounded-cathode amplifier is a differential amplifier, whose inverting input sees the input signal and its non-inverting input |
, right? The more fish you catch and shoot, the more money you'll earn to spend on ridiculous upgrades: lures, lines, hats and weapons. The fun lies in how well executed it all is. Vlambeer have created a truly charming package, and they’ve hinted at a huge update in the works. More game of the year? Yes please! – Garry Balogh
Grab It Now Game: The Room Two
Developer: Fireproof Games
The much-anticipated sequel to The Room - Apple’s Game of the Year 2012 and recipient of a BAFTA award – delivered on all the hype. You follow a trail of cryptic letters from an enigmatic scientist known only as "AS" into a compelling world of mystery and exploration. If this is your first foray into The Room, you’ll quickly learn that nothing is ever what it seems. You may think that you have all the pieces to the puzzle, but that really doesn’t matter when the picture you’re trying to put together is always changing. A game that’ll leave a mark on you. – Grant Fois
Grab It Now Game: Rymdkapsel
Developer: Grapefrukt
You really need to give Rymdkapsel a good go, and not just because it is awesome. It’s slow going at first, and you’ll have to show a bit of patience before you unearth what makes it so memorable. You’re tasked with managing a vessel floating in space, for a purpose only revealed late in the game. You have a few crew members that you need to set to tasks, namely adding to the ship by constructing new areas using Tetris shaped rooms, and then using the resources of each room intelligently to survive and further grow your vessel. You’ll be periodically attacked by waves of alien vessels that expand in number, requiring your resource management, room creation and crew hiring to ramp up. The touch interface works a treat and the minimalist nature of the entire experience works to the game’s favour. Weird name, sure, but a fun game. – Chris Stead
Grab It Now Game: The Silent Age
Developer: House on Fire
If you’re a fan of classic point-and-click adventure games then The Silent Age will be right up your alley. You play as the almighty everyman Joe who makes a living working as a janitor. Everything about his life is mundane and predictable, except that’s all about to change. One morning while tending the floors, a mysterious dying man who seems to appear out of nowhere suddenly confronts Joe. As the man draws his last breath, he hands Joe a portable time travel device and warns him that a terrible event is about to occur. It isn’t long before Joe activates the device and is confronted by the truth. The mysterious man was right: 40 years into the future mankind has become extinct. Stuck between a desolate future and a present where he is largely ignored, it is now up to our accidental hero to find out what has happened and how to prevent it in order to save mankind. – Grant Fois
Grab It Now Game: The Shadow Sun
Developer: Ossian Studios
A few years ago, Ossian Studios embarked on an ambitious project: create a made for touchscreen RPG that was a fully-featured standalone experience, rather than a clone of a well-known console or PC franchise. They have certainly succeeded. The Shadow Sun boasts a game-world rich in lore, loot, sidequests, spells and weapons. With a console-like 10 to 15-hours of solid RPG goodness that will keep you coming back for more and more. Wonderful. – Garry Balogh
Grab It Now Game: Shadowrun Returns
Developer: Harebrained Schemes
The original Shadowrun is a darling of the Super Nintendo golden era of the 1990s and fans have long clamoured for a true sequel. Successfully funded on Kickstarter, Shadowrun Returns is guaranteed to please new and old fans alike. An interesting story underpins the game, which follows your quest to track down the killer of a close friend. Similar to tactical strategy games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, players engage in exploration and turn-based combat. Fans of old school tabletop RPG games will feel right at home. With beautiful visuals, an engaging story and meaningful combat, this is one game not to overlook. – Stephen Mitchell
Grab It Now Show Next 10
Have You Collected All The Grab It Episodes?
- Episode 1 - With The Making of République
- Episode 2 - With The Making of Oceanhorn
- Episode 3 - With The Making of Monument Valley
- Episode 4 - With The Making of Last InuaPrandelli open to Totti return
By Football Italia staff
Cesare Prandelli has opened the door for Francesco Totti’s return at Euro 2012. “Why not? If he’s in good shape...”
The Roma captain made history on Saturday when scoring his 211th Serie A goal in a Roma jersey, breaking Gunnar Nordahl’s record of goals for a single club.
Italy have a striker shortage for the European Championships, as both Antonio Cassano and Giuseppe Rossi must race against time to recover from surgery.
“At the end of the season we will evaluate the physical condition of the players,” Prandelli told TG1.
“We started the campaign with a project and if there are players with great character in good shape then they will be taken into consideration.
“Does that include Totti? Why not, if he’s in good shape...”
The veteran retired from international duty in 2007 when recurring injuries took their toll, but has never entirely closed the door to a comeback.
Azzurri Coach Prandelli was also asked about the often problematic task of dealing with Mario Balotelli.
“Unfortunately this lad is under the spotlight 24/7. He has to relax and stay calm, then judged for what he does on the pitch.”
Balotelli went to the Premier League for Manchester City and Daniele De Rossi could soon follow if he doesn’t renew his Roma contract.
“When a Nazionale player leaves Serie A there are negatives and positives. If Daniele were to go abroad, he might bring some extra experience to the Italy squad.”BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Brazil’s Senate voted Thursday to impeach President Dilma Rousseff after a months-long fight that laid raw the country’s fury over corruption and economic decay, hurling Latin America’s largest country into political turmoil just months before it hosts the Summer Olympics.
Rousseff’s enraged backers called the move a coup d’etat and threatened wide-scale protests and strikes. Her foes, meanwhile, insisted that she had broken the law, and that the country’s deep political, social and economic woes could only be tackled without her.
The 55-22 vote means that Rousseff’s ally-turned-enemy, Vice President Michel Temer, will take over as acting president later Thursday while she is suspended. The Senate has 180 days to conduct a trial and decide whether Rousseff should be permanently removed from office.
“Did anyone think that we would get to 2018 with a recovery under this government? Impossible,” said Jose Serra, the opposition Social Democratic Party’s failed presidential candidate in the 2010 race that brought Rousseff into power. “The impeachment is just the start of the reconstruction.”
Rousseff, 68, was impeached for her alleged mishandling of the federal budget. Critics said she used accounting tricks to hide ballooning deficits and bolster an embattled government. Brazil’s first female president, who was tortured under the country’s dictatorship, has frequently blasted the impeachment push as modern-day coup, arguing she had not been charged with a crime and previous presidents did similar things.
She has also suggested that sexism in the male-dominated Congress played a role in the impeachment.
Rousseff’s impeachment ends 13 years of rule by the Workers’ Party, which is credited with lifting millions out of abject poverty but vilified for being at the wheel when billions were siphoned from the state oil company Petrobras.
Analysts also say Rousseff got herself into trouble with a prickly manner and a perceived reticence to work with legislators that may have alienated possible allies.
Temer, a 75-year-old career politician, has promised to cut spending and privatize many sectors controlled by the state. For weeks, he has been quietly putting together a new Cabinet in expectation of taking over, angering Rousseff supporters. The lower house voted 367-137 last month in favor of impeachment.
The marathon debate in the Senate began Wednesday morning and took 20 hours as dozens of lawmakers rose to give their opinions.
Humberto Costa, the Workers’ Party leader in the Senate, brandished a photo of Rousseff from her days as a young Marxist guerrilla during the country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship at the military proceedings against her.
Costa called Thursday’s impeachment the second unjust trial Rousseff had endured, saying it was a bid by Brazil’s traditional ruling classes to reassert their power and roll back Workers’ Party policies in favor of the poor.
“The Brazilian elite, the ruling class, which keeps treating this county as if it was their hereditary dominion, does not appreciate democracy,” Costa said.
When the impeachment measure was introduced last year in Congress, it was generally viewed as a long shot. As late as February, consultancies like Eurasia were predicting it wouldn’t even make it out of committee in the lower Chamber of Deputies.
But the momentum built, as Brazilians seethed over numerous corruption scandals linked to Petrobras and daily announcements of job losses added to a growing desperation. The Brazilian economy is expected to contract nearly 4 percent after an equally dismal 2015 and inflation and unemployment are hovering around 10 percent, underscoring a sharp decline since the South American giant enjoyed stellar growth for more than a decade.
Polls have said a majority of Brazilians supported impeaching Rousseff, though they also suggest the public is wary about those in the line of succession to take her place.
“Dilma is a bad president and waiting until 2018 was a horrible option,” said cab driver Alessandro Novais in Rio de Janeiro, minutes after the vote. “I don’t think Temer will be much better, but at least we can try something different to overcome the crisis.”
Temer has been implicated in the Petrobras corruption scheme as has Calheiros, the Senate head who is now No. 2 in the line of succession. Former House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, who had been second in line, was suspended from office this month over allegations of obstruction of justice and corruption.
Rousseff has vehemently denied her administration’s financial sleight of hand moves constituted a crime and argued that such maneuvers were used by prior presidents without repercussions. She has stressed that — unlike many of those who have pushed for impeachment — she does not face any allegations of personal corruption.
The impeachment process, Rousseff and her supporters say, amounts to a coup aimed at undoing social programs that have lifted an estimated 35 million Brazilians out of grinding poverty over the past years.
“I think Brazil went backward in institutional maturity,” said Tiago Cordeiro, digital media consultant. “I am shocked to see how people find it OK to oust a president without reason.”
Temer, of the centrist Democratic Movement Party, insists he would expand the popular social programs, though he has also signaled that fiscal rigor is needed to dig Brazil out of its current financial hole.
Adding to Brazilians’ economic worries, the investigation into a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme at Petrobras has ensnared dozens of elite politicians and businessmen across the political spectrum. Although Rousseff herself hasn’t been implicated, top officials in her party were and that tarnished her reputation.
The president “is having to pay for everything,” Sen. Telmario Mota de Oliveira said.
___
Savarese reported from Rio de Janeiro.A video went viral Tuesday showing a Maryland student kicking a chair out from beneath his classmate who refused to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance.
In the video, the student responsible for the kick is seen wearing a shirt with an American flag on it, cowboy boots, and jean shorts. The student who is seated and then knocked to the ground has dyed green hair and is wearing skinny jeans and a hoodie.
The knocked-down student eventually stands back up and says, “really?” while the student who kicked him stands with his hand on his heart and continues to recite the pledge.
Before the video cuts off, an off-camera person begins to issue a reprimand: “OK. You’re gonna get…”
According to the Carroll County Times, both students attend Winter Hills High School in Westminster, Maryland. The Times reported that the student responsible for the kick was disciplined after he posted the video of the incident to Instagram.
“Some people don’t understand how disrespectful it is to sit during the pledge or national anthem and deserves to get there ass kicked,” the student posted. “More of y’all need (stand up) to these jackasses that sit during the pledge.if you have an issue with what I did today talk to me about it not your little buddy’s behind my back. #standthef***up #america #dumbass #hedeservedmore #bitch”
The pledge is recited during morning announcements at Carroll County public schools. However, students are not required to stand during it, the Times reported. In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects students from being forced to stand or salute the flag during the pledge.
The sitting student also made a statement on social media, according to the Times.
“I was practicing my right to free speech, a right given to me by the soldiers that I do respect,” the student wrote. “So I invite all to join me tomorrow, and #sitthef***down if you believe that free speech is a fundamental right of the people, and that it should be protected.”
The students’ arguments echo an ongoing national debate about NFL athletes kneeling during the national anthem, which was first done in protest against racism and police brutality.
The director of student services at the school system, Dana Falls, told the Times that the now-disciplined student’s behavior was “unacceptable.” Due to student confidentiality laws, Falls did not disclose what specific punishment the student received.
Falls said that since it is a standalone incident, the school would not be involving law enforcement or considering it to be bullying.
“In my opinion, based on what I know about the initial incident … that would be considered an unsafe behavior or disrespect to the student,” Falls said. “If it continued, it would absolutely be considered bullying.”
H/T Insider Business TimesIt’s nothing new anymore and I bet by now everyone has at some point heard about it: User Centered Design (UCD). UCD is a way of designing with a constant focus on the user. Designers are no longer free to express themselves in their work for any means, but they are forced to focus on what the user will like. OK, so you all understand the idea behind user centered design. But is it really that simple?
Let me introduce you to 6 steps that will lead you towards UCD on a safe path:
Step 1 – Define your target group
I admit, this first step is obvious. But hey, who says we may not start off with baby steps? So let’s start with defining our target group. Find out who you are going to sell stuff to. How old are they? Are they men or women? Are they well educated or not? Are they long term customers or completely unfamiliar with your product? If your target group turns out to be anything but homogeneous, you might want to consider to categorize them. So for example you target mostly men, but they can be divided into experts and laymen.
Step 2 – Create Personas
Now this step is already a little bigger and requires either some practice or at least a good theoretical base. Personas help us to grasp our target group. See, we might have already defined typical users to be middle aged men with either a lot or little prior experience. But that is not enough to keep us on our path towards UCD.
If we really want to design for our prospective users, we need to get to know them ‘in person’. This might sound silly, at least to me it did when I first learned about personas, but trust me, it’s worth giving a try. Designing for 32 year old Pete, who can’t wait for the the product release with promising new features, requires a completely different approach than designing for 39 year old John, who would rather not get involved with technical staff but is required to by his job. Breathing life into a selection of characteristic users will make it so much easier for you to design for them. If you want, compare it with designing for any average middle aged man and designing for your friend, whom you know inside out. I bet it’s much easier to design for your friend, right?
Try to define your personas as detailed as possible but only include information that is relevant as a user. For example, feel free to mention if your persona likes sports, if physical activity is somehow relevant to your product. You can also use more indirect characteristics, like traveling. A love for foreign countries can stand for openness and an interest in new things.
Step 3 – Come up with user scenarios
Great, now that you have ‘met’ the people you are going to design for, it’s time to get some hands on user scenarios down on paper. User scenarios describe situations in which your users will actually use your product. These scenarios can be brief or very detailed, like a short story. They help you put yourself into the perspective of your users and truly understand what their goals are and how they use your product to achieve these goals. Besides, user scenarios pay attention to your users foreknowledge, their expectations, abilities, and limitations, but also environmental aspects that will help you to detect possible difficulties your users might encounter. With a series of thought through user scenarios, you made a big step into the right direction. And make sure you include all your personas as they probably all have their own way to approach your product.
Step 4 – Create use cases
While user scenarios describe the whole situation in which users interact with your product, use cases describe more specific actions. Usually a use case can be split into single tasks that a user needs to complete in order to achieve a defined goal. These tasks can be as specific as (1) clicking a menu button, (2) selecting one of the pull-down menu items, and (3) clicking on the selected item. You see, we start big and then we get step by step closer to the core.
Step 5 – Create prototypes & test with prospective users
You are about to take your last but not less important step towards UCD. According to everything you have found out so far, you should go ahead and create your first prototype. This first prototype does not necessarily be of high fidelity, but make sure you can justify every detail that you do include with what you know about your users. Remember that only now you start your first cycle of an iterative design process. Meaning based on the hypothetical knowledge about your users, you come up with a design. However, there is still a chance you got it wrong, so you do need to test what actual users think of your design. After a first round of feedback, you know if you really are on the right path. Then add more details and test again. Implement feedback and test again.
Conclusion
User Centered Design is great, but there is more to it that just including your prospective users in user tests. UCD starts long before you build your first prototype, even before you should think about the design. Defining and getting to know your users is an essential start of UCD. Being familiar with your users’ goals and how they will go about these goals is very important before you start your design. Test your design repetitively and with real users to verify your concepts.Conservatives should reject the premise that Congress must immediately open the federal piggy bank to replenish the unconstitutional subsidies the Trump administration cut off.
Upon the unveiling of another health insurance “stabilization” measure Tuesday, Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) claimed he did not view it as a repudiation of his own “stability” measure, introduced last week.
“We’ve gone from a position where everyone was saying we can’t do cost sharing [reduction payments] to responsible voices like [Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin] Hatch and [House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin] Brady saying we should.”
In the words of Margaret Thatcher, “No. No. No!” Conservatives should reject the premise that Congress must immediately open up the federal piggy bank to replenish the unconstitutional cost-sharing reduction subsidies that the Trump administration cut off earlier this month. Instead, it should first hold insurers—and insurance regulators—accountable for the irresponsible actions that got them to this point.
Insurers Disregarded a Federal Lawsuit
My May article explained how insurers sought to hold Congress hostage over cost-sharing reduction payments. Unless Congress guaranteed the payments for all of calendar year 2018, insurers claimed they would have to raise premiums to reflect “uncertainty” over the payments.
But that “uncertainty” always existed. Insurers just ignored it. They ignored a federal district court judge’s May 2016 ruling striking down the cost-sharing reduction payments as unconstitutional, because the judge stayed her ruling pending an appeal. They ignored warnings that the next presidential administration could easily cut off the payments unilaterally. And they ignored the fact that a presidential election was scheduled for November 2016, and that “come January 2017, the policy landscape for insurers could look far different” than under the Obama administration.
Upon reading my May 2017 article, a former colleague who works for an insurer responded by claiming that no one took the litigation against the cost-sharing reduction payments seriously last year. In other words, it was a risk that he and his colleagues ignored until President Trump started making threats to cut off the payments, and finally did so earlier this month.
A Congress that responds to this type of risky behavior—ignoring for more than a year the risk of cost-sharing reduction payments disappearing—by immediately reinstating the payments would only validate and encourage more risk-taking by insurers in the future.
Regulators Asleep at the Switch?
Likewise, state insurance commissioners largely disregarded until this spring and summer the possibility that cost-sharing reduction payments would disappear. At a Capitol Hill briefing last month, I asked Brian Webb of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) whether his members had considered the prospect of cost-sharing reduction payments disappearing last fall, when regulators examined rates for the current (i.e., 2017) plan year. By last fall, a federal court had already declared the payments unconstitutional, and every state insurance commissioner knew a new administration would take office in January and could stop the payments directly.
Webb’s response? “Under the court decision, they [the cost-sharing reduction payments] are still being paid, pending appeal.… In the meantime, payments are being made.” That is, until three weeks after the briefing in question, when President Trump stopped the payments. Oops.
It does not appear that most regulators even bothered to consider this scenario last year, just like most insurers ignored the prospect of cost-sharing reductions going away. Instead, as with banks who assumed a decade ago that subprime mortgages could never fail, the health insurance industry blindly assumed—despite significant evidence to the contrary—that cost-sharing reduction payments would continue.
Prevent ‘Too Big to Fail’
Therein lies the premise that conservatives should reject: That because an entire industry made a bad bet on a flawed premise, Congress must immediately acquiesce in this flawed premise by restoring the flow of payments.
Yes, the Congressional Budget Office has indicated that cutting off the cost-sharing reduction payments would cost the federal government more in the short-term. That and other facts may give Congress a reason to restore the payments, eventually.
But most importantly, Congress should take action—by exercising its oversight authority, and through legislation if necessary—to end the “too big to fail” mentality that led insurers and their regulators to make a series of bad decisions regarding cost-sharing reductions. To instead give insurers a blank check, paid for by federal taxpayers, could cost far more in the longer term.Did you know that you can help us produce ebooks by proof-reading just one page a day? Go to: Distributed Proofreaders
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Award-winning matador Ivan Fandino has been killed after he tripped on his cloak in the bullring and was fatally gored.
The 36-year-old fighter, who was a professional matador for 12 years, died in the French town of Mont-de-Marsan, near the Spanish border.
Fandino's feet became tangled in the cape used to goad the specially trained fighting bull and he was left with horrific injuries after the animal plunged its horn into his lung.
The matador, who had a wife and a daughter, came from Spain's Basque region and fought hundreds of bulls during his career in the controversial bloodsport.
It is understood his heart stopped in the ambulance and on his arrival at hospital, doctors could not do anything to save his life.
(Image: AFP)
(Image: AFP)
Award-winning matador Ivan Fandino fatally gored by bull at 36
Horrific photos show Fandino being tossed into the air by the enraged animal, which also suffered brutal wounds in the ring.
"It's a tragedy," said a shocked colleague. "We just do not know how it could have happened."
Tributes are flooding in on social networking sites, with rancher Victorino Martin tweeting: "Our friend and great bullfighter Ivan Fandino dies in France. A great loss for the world of bullfighting. We are dismayed."
(Image: AFP)
Shocked spectators watched the matador land on the floor before the bull plunged its horn into his chest.
Two other matadors, Juan del Alamo and Thomas Dufau, were due to take to the ring later in the afternoon.
The last Spanish bullfighter who died due to a goring was Victor Barrio, who was killed at the age of 29 after being savaged in the bullring in Teruel on July 9, 2016.
(Image: AFP)
He was the first Spanish matador to die in the arena since 1992.
Spanish-style bullfights enjoy legal protections in the parts of southern France where the so-called sport is practised.
Around 1,000 bulls a year are killed in this way in France every year.
The country has four bullfighting schools and the practice is designated as an "uninterrupted local tradition" in the limited areas where fights are held.
Humane Society International said in a statement: "The matador's death is a tragedy but for the 1,000 bulls brutally killed in French bullfights every year, every single fight is a tragedy in which they have no chance of escaping a protracted and painful death.
"Bloodsports like this should be consigned to the history books, no-one should lose their life for entertainment, human or animal."Florida administrators are reportedly looking into whether they can fire head coach Jim McElwain with cause after failing to find any evidence to back his claim that he had received death threats against his family and players.
According to an ESPN report, which was published during the Gators' 42-7 loss to No. 3 Georgia on Saturday, university officials are discussing whether the allegations are enough to relieve the school of paying the $12.9 million buyout should it part ways with McElwain.
From ESPN:
Sources told ESPN that they believe the university has enough cause to fire McElwain without having to pay his buyout. Sources also said that if McElwain were to be relieved of his duties, defensive coordinator Randy Shannon would be asked to be the team's interim coach.
McElwain told reporters Monday that he had received death threats against his players and his family.
"There's a lot of hate in this world and a lot of anger, and yet it's freedom to show it," McElwain said. "The hard part is when the threat's against your own players, death threats to your families, the ill will that's brought upon out there."
It was reported Saturday morning that Florida was negotiating a buyout with McElwain’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, but the school issued a statement denying the report.The Belgian Scene
Over the course of the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with a lot of different musicians and members of the hardcore/metal scene in Belgium. Through out my various encounters there has been one common point that has been recurrent. It’s something we all know and feel, but that no one seems willing to bring to light. It’s almost as though it would be taboo to speak about, and yet we all know that silence has never solved anything. I was presented with the idea of writing my thoughts down about it, and true to my word, I’ve done so. I gave myself a few days to think about what I really wanted to write, and what I really felt was the issue. I contemplated the question of whether or not there was truly a solution. This is what I came up with…
Disclaimer: Before I write anything down, I would like to state that I write from my own perspective. You may know me as the vocalist for Now, Voyager, you may know me as the ex-vocalist for Blood Redemption, or you may just know me as the brown dude with an American accent. Regardless, these views are my own, and I should not want them to be reflected upon any of my band mates. I am the only person responsible for my words, and I hope you can respect that. Whether you will choose to agree or disagree with my thoughts is perfectly fine, however I do ask you to read this with an open mind, and an open heart, and realize that I write as a member of a music scene that I care deeply about, and with the hopes that we as a Scene can change things for the better. It would be easier to remain in silence and let things play out however they may, but I’ve always stood for truth and so today I make my stand. If you should happen to agree with me, please feel free to share this message, and help create awareness. Strength lies within unity, and as it stands right now, we’re all divided.
Divided
I’m not quite sure how to begin this, simply because there is so much to say. The easiest thing to do is to start at the core of everything: Music. Let me ask you: what is the intent of music? Why do musicians create music, and why do we as listeners enjoy music? Take a few moments to think about it, because from what I gather, most of us have forgotten what music’s true purpose is.
I firmly believe music has always been about Passion and Love. Music has always been about sharing that Love with others. Music offers an escape we all desperately seek from our lives. Music gives us a safe place where we can forget about the problems of the world. Music allows us to cast our differences aside. Music allows us to come together in one place, and accept each other for who we are. Music creates a community; a family that brings us all together, and reminds us that we are not alone. Music erases separation so that we may come together, and be as One.
The Crowd
How beautiful the world would be if this were true. Sadly, when I go to a show this is not what I see. I’m sure this is not what you see either. It suffices to open our eyes, and to realize that we are as divided as we will ever be. Nearly every show I go to I can’t help but feel a hostile atmosphere that lingers in the air. A cancer that feeds off our fears of difference, and our pride that does not allow us to speak nor mix with others. Groups of friends will stick together separate from the rest to the point where you’ll see small ‘gangs’ formed. There’s no interaction, there’s small exchanges of the odd ‘hey, how are you?’ with acquaintances but nothing further. The awkward social elements that compel us to say hello. If I can be bluntly honest, in my eyes this is all fake. There doesn’t seem to be any genuineness, any desire to be a part of a greater family, nor any interest to let go of our differences. We claim to be there for music, and yet, I have to ask myself: Has music failed us, or have we failed music?
Unless I’m mistaken, the era of segregation has long since past, so why is it that we can’t just go to a show for the music? Time and time again I’ll see hardcore kids on one side, hipsters on another, and metalcore kids somewhere in between. Walloons in one corner, and Flemish in the other. A metalcore band takes the stage and you’ll see kids leave the room. Their reasoning: ‘it’s not my style’.
There’s two very big problems in this scenario.
The first problem is the innate reaction that we have to separate ourselves from one another. Weren’t we there for the love of music? How can we be one unified family when we take it upon ourselves to mark our differences. Let me state this clearly: It doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter what language you speak, and it doesn’t matter what you wear. Music is freedom, and we are meant to accept each other. The most basic rule of being in a moshpit is to “have fun, and pick each other up if someone falls down”. Why doesn’t this rule apply to the rest of the room? A show isn’t a place for pride, nor is it a place to make a fashion statement. It’s a place to be yourself, and forget about every single rule you’ve been taught in the outside world. We are all equals, we all have a right to be there, and we are all there for the same reason. Music.
The second problem is the unquestionable degree to which we all seem so hell-bent on trying to stand for something, and yet in doing so we’re spitting right in the face of music. You’re spitting right in the face of the bands that have put their hearts and souls into their music. For every single person that has never been in a band, allow me to say that it is NOT easy by any stretch of the means to be in a band. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard ‘it must be so cool to be in a band!’. Believe me when I say, it’s not cool.
I’ve been doing music for 9 years now. To be in a band you have to be willing to devote countless hours of your life to it. I don’t even care to express the amount of time and energy that goes into writing songs, recordings, and rehearsing. Simply put, it’s exhausting. You sacrifice your social life, and lose a lot of friends in the process. Your relationships, should you be lucky to have one, are often very unstable and end in ruins. And as for money? Try imagining how much it costs a band to have their gear, pay a monthly rental fee for a rehearsal room, go record, pay for printing, pay for merch, pay for a van, pay for van insurance, pay for maintenance, and pay for gas. I’m nearly broke at the end of every single month because my band bleeds me dry. I can confidently state that I am not the only one in this situation. Let me state this again: being in a band is not cool. The only reason I am in a band is because I love music. I love creating music, I love performing music, and I love sharing my heart and my passion with others for music. I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like without music. To be perfectly honest, there’s a very good possibility that I wouldn’t be around if I didn’t have music. Once again, allow me to say, I’m probably not the only musician who feels this way.
Back on the issue. Knowing all of this, how would you feel if you were in a band up on stage, and you saw people walk out simply because ‘it’s not my style’? Your heart would sink. You’ve devoted your time and energy to be there and play for a crowd that is basically saying ‘we don’t want you here because you don’t play my favorite style of music’. A certain respect is owed to a band that goes through all of that to perform, whether you like the music or not. Give them a chance, try and open your minds, and perhaps you might find something you do enjoy in a different style of music, even if it isn’t your favorite. You have every right to prefer a style of music over another, but in the end it’s just a lack of respect to come out to a show, go check out one band, and stay outside for the entire set of another. Give them a chance, that’s all I’m saying.
Belgium is the breeding ground for a lot of bands that have a lot of potential. The problem is, we don’t realize the extent to which our attitudes at shows does not promote a scene. It promotes difference amongst ourselves, and even more so, indifference towards music. Instead of gaining support, bands feel overlooked and under appreciated. They lose confidence, and sooner or later, they call it quits. The irony is, once a band says it’s over, that’s when people come together and express their disapproval. A band can spend their entire career playing shows to crowds of 15-20 people, but when it’s over they’ll do their farewell show to a packed crowd. Are we too blind to see that |
of her 14 cookbooks and is playing for Paula Deen’s The Bag Lady Foundation
o Bobby Deen – Paula’s youngest son and a cooking show television host
o Jamie Deen Jr. – Paula’s oldest son and a cooking show television host
o Michael Groover – Paula’s husband
o Peggy Ort – Paula’s aunt
VERSUS
Carson Kressley - Emmy-winning television star, celebrity stylist, NY Times bestselling author and fashion designer and is playing for the Al D. Rodriguez Foundation
o Diana Kressley-Billig – Carson's sister, national champion equestrian. She runs the family farm which has been in the family for four generations - raising hay and American saddlebred horses
o Brett Kressley – Carson's nephew, award winning race car driver. Honored this year as the 2015 NASCAR Whelen Sportsman high point champion
o Morgan Billig – Carson's niece, 18 years old and will graduate from northwestern Lehigh high school in June where she is a star softball player. She is a multi- world titled fourth generation equestrian
o Beverly Kressley - Carson's sister-in-law, runs the family car dealership with her husband. But main job is fan club president for her race car driver son Brett
____________________________________________________________________
Laila Ali – Undefeated four-time world champion boxer and a semi-finalist in season four of “Dancing With the Stars,” two-time Food Network “Chopped” champion, currently writing a cookbook, competing on new season of “Celebrity Apprentice” and playing for Peace4Kids
o Hana Ali – Laila’s sister
o Veronica Porche – Laila and Hana’s mother
o Maryum “May May” Ali – Laila’s sister
o Miya Ali – Laila’s sister
VERSUS
Alana Stewart – Actress and producer known for “Farrah’s Story,” “George & Alana” and “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!” is playing for the Farrah Fawcett Foundation
o George Hamilton – Actor and Golden Globe recipient, known for “Love at First Bite” and “Where the Boys Are”
o Ashley Hamilton – George’s son
o Sean Stewart – George’s stepson
o George Thomas Hamilton (G.T.) – George’s son
____________________________________________________________________
Sheryl Underwood – Co-host of “The Talk,” contributor on the “Steve Harvey Morning Show,” CEO of Pack Rat Production, Inc., Pack Rat Foundation For Education, Inc., and 23rd International President of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., and is playing for the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc.'s National Education Foundation
o Christopher “Chris” Underwood – Sheryl’s brother
o Michael Martin – Sheryl’s brother
o Deborah Martin – Sheryl’s sister-in-law
o Mercedes Alexander – Sheryl’s cousin
VERSUS
Gus Kenworthy - 2012 Olympic Silver Medalist and a five-time World Freeskiing Champion on the Association of Freeskiing Professionals (AFP) World Tour. Won four medals at the X Games and European X Games in 2016 and is playing for the Happy Hippie Foundation
o Heather “Pip” Kenworthy – Gus’ mother
o Hugh Kenworthy – Gus’ brother
o Nicholas “Nick” Kenworthy – Gus’ brother
o Peter Kenworthy – Gus’ father
____________________________________________________________________
Todd Chrisley - Patriarch of the Chrisley family, star and executive producer of “Chrisley Knows Best”on USA Network and playing for Generosity.org
o Julie Chrisley – Todd’s wife
o Lindsie Chrisley Campbell – Todd’s daughter
o Faye “Nannie” Chrisley – Todd’s mother
o Chase Chrisley – Todd’s son
VERSUS
Sara Evans – Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum country singer with five #1 radio hits; CMA and ACM award recipient and playing for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
o Matt Evans – Sara’s brother and musical director; plays bass in her band
o Lesley Lyons – Sara’s sister
o Ashley Simpson – Sara’s sister
o Jay Evans – Sara’s brother
____________________________________________________________________
Giuliana Rancic - Queen of the red carpet and host of “Fashion Police,” New York Times bestselling author, has a clothing line called G by Giuliana on HSN and wine called XO, G and is playing for Fab-U-Wish (The Pink Agenda, Inc.)
o Bill Rancic – Giuliana’s husband; entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, restaurant owner and philanthropist
o Karen Soenen – Giuliana’s sister-in-law
o Tom Comstock – Bill’s cousin
o Anna DePandi – Giuliana’s mother
VERSUS
The Band Perry - playing for Teen Cancer America
o Neil Perry (team captain) – Youngest member of The Band Perry; handles mandolin, bouzouki, and vocals
o Reid Perry – Middle child and bassist of The Band Perry
o Kimberly Perry – The Band Perry’s front-woman who wrote the group’s breakthrough single and fourth best-selling country single of all time, "If I Die Young"
o Ann-Carter Bloomfield – Paternal cousin
o Hunter Bloomfield – Paternal cousin
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Tony Hawk - Professional skateboarder, entrepreneur, owner of skateboard company Birdhouse and playing for the Tony Hawk Foundation
o Emily Alice Deremo – Tony’s niece
o John Edward Dale – Tony’s nephew
o Lenore Hawk Dale – Tony’s sister
o Keegan Hawk – Tony’s son
VERSUS
Joely Fisher - Golden Globe nominated actress and former Miss Golden Globe, best known for her roles on “Ellen,” the Disney hit “Inspector Gadget,” her 4 seasons as Brad Garrett’s saucy wife on the Fox hit “‘Til Death,” and currently on ABC’s “Last Man Standing” as Wendi. Joely is playing for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Inc.
o Christopher Duddy – Joely’s husband; director and award winning cinematographer, best known for his work on “Thirteen Days” and “Dante’s Peak”
o Tricia Leigh Fisher – Joely’s sister
o Collin Duddy – Joely’s son
o Byron Thames – Joely’s brother-in-law
____________________________________________________________________
Alan Thicke - Best known as the father on “Growing Pains.” Recently toured in the musical, “Toy Shoppe,” and recent TV appearances on “Scream Queens” and “Grandfathered” will be playing for The Alan Thicke Centre for Juvenile Diabetes Research
o Tanya Thicke – Alan’s wife and stars in her family’s hit sitcom/reality series, “Unusually Thicke” on the POP Network
o Carter Thicke - Alan’s youngest son
o Creighton Thicke Rattray - Alan’s nephew
o Kenny Callau – Tanya's brother
VERSUS
David Chokachi – Actor/dad/environmental enthusiast, best known for his role as Cody Madison on “Baywatch.” Starred in the TV series “Witchblade” and “Beyond The Break,” and has made several movie appearances and is playing for the Surfrider Foundation
o Robert Al-Chokhachy - David’s brother
o Sarah Al-Chokhachy - David’s sister-in-law
o Phillip Cronin - David’s nephew
o Phil Cronin - David’s brother-in-law
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Rico Rodriguez – Actor and four-time SAG award winner best known as Manny Delgado in the five-time Emmy Award-winning comedy “Modern Family” is playing for Fiestas Patrias Mexicanos of B/CS, Texas|
o Raini Rodriguez - Actress and director starring in the Disney Channel comedy “Austin & Ally” and the “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” movies
o Roy “Big Roy” Rodriguez – Raini and Rico’s dad
o Roy “Lil’ Roy” Allen Rodriguez Jr. – Raini and Rico’s brother
o Ray “Ray Ray” Anthony Rodriguez – Raini and Rico’s brother
VERSUS
Jaleel White - Star of classic 90s’ sitcom “Family Matters,” competitor on season 14 of “Dancing with the Stars” and host of “A Total Blackout” will be playing for the Los Angeles Mission
o Gail White – Jaleel’s mother
o Dierdre Johnson – Jaleel’s aunt
o Brandon Hawkins – Jaleel’s cousin, played for the Harlem Globetrotters
o Diane Ponce – Jaleel’s aunt
____________________________________________________________________
Tommy Davidson – Stand-up comedian and actor best known for his work on the hit show “In Living Color,” and movies “Booty Call” and “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” is playing for the Down Syndrome Foundation of Florida
o Amanda Davidson - Tommy's wife
o Jillian Davidson - Tommy's daughter
o Rhonda Pirghibi - Amanda's sister
o Yannick Alexis- Tommy's nephew
VERSUSWSOP Main Event Champion Selling Action to Play In Future Events
November 16 2013 PokerNews Staff
Brand new 2013 World Series of Poker Main Event champion Ryan Riess has made it clear he intends to continue playing a busy tournament schedule in the coming year, following up on over a year's worth of cashes on the WSOP Circuit culminating in his huge $8,361,570 payday earlier this month. According to a recent Facebook post, Riess announced that he had "put together a high roller package for the PCA, Aussie Millions, and the WPT World Championship," demonstrating his plan not only to play more tournaments, but to sell action as well.
As Riess goes on to explain, the "package" he is offering to would-be investors "includes 2-100ks, 2-25ks, 1-15k, and 3-10ks," referring to the various buy-ins of the tournaments he plans to play, ranging from $10,000 on up to $100,000.
"I am selling the package at $3250 for every 1%" Riess adds. By that he means to say that for the stated price an investor stands to receive back 1% of Riess's total winnings earned in all eight of the events. The buy-ins for those events add up to $295,000, and so since 1% of that total is $2,950, Riess is charging investors some "markup" to have a piece of his tournament action.
For more about selling action and how it works, see Josh Cahlik's recent article here on Learn.PokerNews, "A Beginner's Guide to Selling Tournament Action."
As Cahlik explains, selling tournament action represents a way for players to reduce their variance when playing tournaments. If Riess successfully sells "pieces" of himself for the aforementioned tournaments, he'll spend less to play those events and thus reduce the amount of money his is risking. He also, of course, will reduce the amount he will earn should he cash in those events. However, by selling action Riess gives himself a chance to play in some higher buy-in tournaments like the $100K "super high rollers" without risking as much of his own bankroll.
For more about the WSOP champion's plans, see "WSOP Champion Ryan Riess Puts Together High Roller Package; Plans to Travel Circuit" on PokerNews.
For all the latest here at Learn.PokerNews, follow us on Twitter @LearnPokerNews! Find us as well on both Facebook and Google+!1977 was a turbulent year for the United Kingdom. It was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, financial hardships, and the violent popularization of punk rock. On January 1st, before Baby New Year could even take his first breath, The Clash would perform at the soon-to-be-infamous Roxy. Filmmaker Julien Temple (The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury) was on hand to capture the concert. Now, in a new BBC documentary, Temple has unleashed that footage for the first time.
Timing makes the concert significant, as it marked the rise of both The Clash and the Roxy venue as staples in the exploding punk scene. The band was coming out of the Anarchy Tour with Sex Pistols and Heartbreakers as the least-controversial, most-appreciated act on the bill. Roxy, meanwhile, had just dropped its previous name, Shaggarama, and “cheesy” gay club esthetic to try and become a haven for the oft-ostracized punks. For the first time ever, those not in attendance can watch it all come to a head as The Clash debuted new drummer Rob Harper and a new song, “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.”.
Temple surrounds the concert material with behind-the-scenes and found footage of media broadcasts, riots, reggae, and other punks like Johnny Rotten, all working together to create a fascinating look into the year that was ’77 in England. You can watch the whole 75-minute film below for now.Mexico’s government is sending vehicles, boats, food and other supplies to Houston to help the city deal with the massive devastation from Hurricane Harvey, which has displaced tens of thousands and left at least 25 dead.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson thanked the Mexican government on Wednesday for its “generous” aid offer, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has formally accepted.
“I particularly want to thank the government of Mexico for its offer of assistance to the state of Texas,” Tillerson said during a joint press conference with Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Luis Videgaray Caso. “They’ve offered a wide range of assistance, coordinating with the governor down in Texas and also through FEMA. It is very generous of Mexico to offer their help at this very challenging time for our citizens down in Texas.”
Meanwhile, separate from the aid package offered by the Mexican government, a team of more than 30 English-speaking volunteers from Mexico’s Red Cross are making their way to Houston to offer assistance in shelters, which are providing refuge to an estimated 30,000 people.
This isn’t the first time the Mexican government has stepped in to offer assistance to the United States. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Mexico sent 200 troops on a relief mission to the U.S. The soldiers set up camp at a former Air Force base just outside of San Antonio, Texas, and distributed clean drinking water, medical supplies, and 7,000 hot meals each day to people stranded by the deadly storm for a total of three weeks.The official Toonami Facebook page revealed on Monday that English dub of Attack on Titan's second season will premiere at 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 22 (effectively Sunday morning), one week earlier than previously announced.
The Toonami lineup for the next two weeks is as follows:
April 15
11:00 p.m. – Samurai Jack
11:30 p.m. - Dragon Ball Super
12:00 a.m. – Sand Whale and Me (finale)
12:05 a.m. – Dragon Ball Kai
12:30 a.m. – JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
1:00 a.m. – JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
1:30 a.m. – Hunter x Hunter
2:00 a.m. – Gundam Unicorn
2:30 a.m. – Naruto Shippuden
3:00 a.m. – Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
April 22
11:00 p.m. – Samurai Jack
11:30 p.m. – Dragon Ball Super
12:00 a.m. – Dragon Ball Kai
12:30 a.m. – Attack on Titan Season 2 (premiere)
1:00 a.m. – Tokyo Ghoul
1:30 a.m. – Hunter x Hunter
2:00 a.m. – Gundam Unicorn
2:30 a.m. – Naruto Shippuden
3:00 a.m. – Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
The second series of Attack on Titan premiered in Japan on 21 networks, including Tokyo MX and MBS, on April 1. Funimation began streaming a simulcast version on the same day, and Crunchyroll is also streaming the series. Funimation announced in December that it licensed the second anime season.
Thanks to Kyle for the news tip.Injecting some additional uncertainty into the future of an organizational structure in San Jose that's already up in the air, Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman passed along an interesting rumor in his weekly 30 Thoughts column suggesting Sharks GM Doug Wilson could take on a different role with the team, with someone else filling in as general manager:
Word on potential San Jose changes could come down at any time, but a few sources indicate one of Doug Wilson’s suggestions is creating another layer between him and the coaching staff. He becomes President with a GM in the middle or something like that.
Were it to actually happen, this sort of move would be very much in line with a recent trend across the NHL that's seen respected figures like Brian Burke and Brendan Shanahan take on President of Hockey Operations roles in which they're typically responsible for overseeing an organization as a whole, including the general manager. Just last year, longtime Philadelphia Flyers GM Paul Holmgren was promoted to team president with Ron Hextall taking over in his place.
If the Sharks made Wilson team president and merely promoted one of current assistant general managers Wayne Thomas or Joe Will into the GM role, it's unlikely much would change in terms of the franchise's strategy going forward. Where things might get interesting is if owner Hasso Plattner were to bring in someone from outside the organization to serve as GM. Anyway, all of this is just speculation at this point which should be cleared up when Wilson addresses the media tomorrow.Today, we start a new series here at Theoblogy. It’s called The Questions that Haunt Christianity, and it will be my attempt — as a theologian — to address the issues that keep people from faith.
I’m not afraid of doubt. I, myself, am a doubter. But I consider a large part of my vocation as a Christian theologian to proffer intellectually honest answers to the big questions of faith.
So this series is for everyone who doubts. It’s for your friends who are agnostic and atheistic. It’s a place for them to email me a question, and get an honest answer — even if the answer doesn’t necessarily show Christianity in the best light. It’s a place for you to submit the biggest hurdle you have to fully giving yourself over to the Christian faith.
Here’s how it will work:
1) People will submit questions.
2) I will post the question here on Tuesday and open it up for conversation.
2a) Some weeks, I will appear on Doug Pagitt Radio on Wednesday to discuss the question with him and with listeners.
3) On Friday, I will post my answer.
4) Robust conversation will ensue.
So, if you’ve got a friend who struggle with the Christian faith, or if there are some hurdles you yourself have, send them in. Questions can be posted anonymously.Hillary Clinton tells Fox News Sunday she is “not looking to repeal the Second Amendment,” but she does intend to regulate it.
Host Chris Wallace asked Clinton about the existence of an individual right to bear arms, as relates to the Supreme Court’s seminal decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). Although Clinton dodged a similar question twice when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on June 5, she answered this time by saying “an individual right is in line with constitutional thinking.” However, she hedged in her answer by stressing that no right is free from government oversight and regulation.
She referenced the right to keep and bear arms, saying, “That right like every other of our rights, our First Amendment rights, every right that we have is open to and even subject to reasonable regulations.”
She went on to intimate that we have to do more than pray when a gunman opens fire in a gun-free zone, suggesting it is time for more gun laws.
Clinton said:
Everybody says, oh, let’s pray, let’s send our hearts and our feelings, and then nothing happens. We’re better than this. The gun lobby intimidates elected officials. The vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, support the kind of common-sense reforms that I’m proposing.
On October 16, Clinton held a town hall at Keene State College and said an Australian-style gun ban is “worth looking at” for gun policy in the U.S.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.comAs told by: Me. Maria.
Active protester of Pluto's planetary status by day, and by night….I still am a active protester of Pluto's planetary status, which, BTWs…was reinstated as planet again. So haters…you are just peanut butter a jealous.
So what to say about me? Well, there is a lot. :)
Here is a little preview:
I still and always will believe that Pluto is a planet.
I absolutely love and adore puns. The more ridiculous, the better.
In my opinion, laughing is the best medicine. So do it as much as you can.
I love the sun and everything that comes from it: sunlight, energy, warmth, tans, and yes, even the sunburns.
I probably was suppose to be born a cat, but the universe had other plans for me.
I'm a big fan of random dancing when a good song comes on, especially out of nowhere. Oh, and if you can't accept the fact that I will occasionally break out singing lyrics to something that related to what you or I just said, then I don't know if we can be friends. It's kind of a deal breaker.
I'm a big Egyptology nut and can name for you pretty much every deity in Ancient Kemetian mythology, and what they are worshiped for.
No joke. Seriously. Just ask.
I LOVE to write and I don't plan to ever stop.
Major: English, graduated from Cal, want to go back someday to get my Masters in Egyptology. Gonna do it too.
Age: Legal to get away with anything, except homicide.
Sign: Pisces
Current Residence: My Imagination...because here, my sanity is never questioned. ;)
My blog All of Tumblr
Follow on Tumblr
FollowingA local authority has met with a surveillance company run by former soldiers to discuss ways to monitor water charge protesters after council workers were subjected to a spate of “bullying and harassment” attacks.
Officials from Dublin City Council’s water works department met with Risk Management International (RMI) last month in a move that has been heavily condemned by protesters.
Details obtained by People before Profit councillor John Lyons and confirmed by the council show that, on Thursday, April 16, up to 15 supervisors from the department held a meeting with RMI, which has previously performed surveillance work for Irish Water and which was involved in the recent jailings of water charge protesters.
The discussions — which took place at the council’s water division offices on Marrowbone Lane and led to RMI offering “surveillance expertise” — took place after the local authority raised concerns over a number of “incidents of bullying and harassment” linked to water charge protests.
During the meeting, RMI offered its services to the local authority to help address what a council spokesperson said are “health and safety” issues.
However, while the council ultimately rejected the deal, water charge protesters have claimed the meeting shows they are being unfairly targeted by State institutions.
In a statement to the Irish Examiner, a Dublin City Council spokesperson said: “There has been an increase in the number of incidents of bullying and harassment associated with anti-meter installation protests reported by Dublin City Council employees working in the delivery of drinking water services.
“Dublin City Council discussed this, as it is obliged to, with Irish Water under the Service Level Agreement.
“Irish Water suggested that their specialist adviser could meet with Dublin City Council to provide some advice as to how best to mitigate the risks to the health and safety of the workforce.”
While RMI has previously performed work for Irish Water, this is the first known instance of the company meeting directly with a State body — a development Mr Lyons said is “disturbing”.
News of the meeting comes as the Right2Water campaign holds a national conference today for anyone who wishes to be a general election candidate for the umbrella group.Perched atop the stone fireplace, an Atlanta Hawks logo presides over Shawn and Carol Teague’s living room. The bird’s claws puncture a basketball, it’s wings outstretched and etched white onto a spherical piece of glass. It’s one of five identical trophies acknowledging the Co-Eastern Conference Players of the Month from January 2015, when the couple’s son, Jeff, Kyle Korver, DeMarre Carroll, Paul Millsap and Al Horford quite literally dominated the NBA.
Atlanta’s perfect 17–0 slate set a record for the most prolific month in league history. The team’s Twitter profile began adding W’s to elongate its “ATLHawks” handle in lockstep with their franchise-record winning streak. Wins piled so rapidly, the gimmick was only curtailed by the social network’s pesky character limit. “It was five guys that enjoyed playing with another and all wanted to win,” Teague told The Crossover. “It wasn’t about stats or anything.”
Yet triumph can be fickle and success in the NBA can prove especially fleeting. A team’s window for contention may only creak open for a moment, like the seconds before a defense—such as those Hawks—collapses on a penetrating point guard. In the blink of an eye, a world-beater starting lineup can be dispersed across an entire conference.
Teague’s award arrived in Indianapolis this summer when he was traded to his hometown Pacers in June. His Indiana team is engaged in a first-round battle with Korver, dealt in January, and the Cavaliers. The winner will likely face Carroll’s Raptors. On the other side of the Eastern bracket, Horford’s top-seeded Celtics could draw Millsap—the lone-remaining starter—and the Hawks in round two. “I would have never imagined it,” Horford said. “It’s a little strange,” said Atlanta coach Mike Budenholzer. “It seems like it’s years and years removed,” said reserve forward Thabo Sefolosha.
The business of basketball can be cruel, turning players into mere names on a transaction log. Only relationships can withstand the carousel that often dizzies and derails rosters. It was Korver and Millsap’s bond that originated Atlanta’s prominence, after all. Following three years together in Utah, the sharpshooter phoned Millsap early into his free agency in 2013. As Atlanta parted ways with Josh Smith, the Hawks fixated on Millsap’s versatile skillset to compliment Horford in Budenholzer’s spacious offense. “He just talked about Coach Bud, what type of style of play we was gonna play,” Millsap remembered. “It sounded great.”
The Hawks installed Horford as its bedrock with No. 3 overall selection in 2007. Teague, the 19th pick in 2009, joined two years later. Korver arrived via a July 2012 trade with the Chicago Bulls. After Millsap’s marquee signing, Carroll, another Jazz teammate, followed in August 2013. Atlanta didn’t rise from a splashy off-season rebuild. The Hawks’ flight to prominence cultured within Budenholzer’s petri dish.
Hawks Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
It happened almost by accident. With Horford shelved for the season due to a torn pectoral muscle, Pero Antic filled his void in the 2014 playoffs against the Pacers. Antic’s shooting ability allowed Atlanta to stretch Indiana’s bunkered defense, coaxing Roy Hibbert away from the paint and freeing endless action towards the rim. A dichotomy of styles clashed and allowed an inferior talent to last seven games. The lineup boasted a 12.1 net rating in 114 postseason minutes. “The group moved on and they figured it out,” Horford said. Yet the Hawks sputtered to start the 2014–15 campaign, dropping three of their first four contests. The rhythm was clunky. The ball stopped whizzing around the perimeter.
“I wasn’t up to speed with the guys and what we needed to do,” Horford admitted. In late November, Budenholzer summoned the center to his office. He was out of sync on pick-and-rolls with Teague. The Hawks’ defensive rotations stalled, its coordination in transition collapsed and Horford was responsible. “He just kept challenging all of us,” Horford said. “And I think that at that point, we really started to play better as a unit and we really took off from there.” Atlanta subsequently compiled nine-straight wins to open December and dropped only two more games before Feb. 2.
“We had a stretch there where everything was clicking,” Korver said. “I’ve always been kind of a purist in that way; enjoying the cutting and the ball movement; the passing, the screening, the shooting; finding ways to get easy shots, you know? All five guys are on a string, and I felt like that was probably the best basketball that I’ve ever been a part of in that way.”
The Hawks arrived in your hometown, entered your arena and methodically dismantled you. Then they jetted for the next city, engaging in heated games of UNO 39,000 feet in the air. On a whim, Teague purchased a pack of the rainbow card game from a gas station before a road trip that fateful January “and it kind of took on its own life,” he said. “Then all of a sudden,” said Horford, “Jeff, Dennis [Schroeder], Kyle, me, we were the ones that first started it and then we kept adding guys in.” By combining multiple packs, the Hawks would unleash a series of Draw 4s like a barrage of three-pointers.
Horford also engaged Millsap in a fiery Chess with Friends rivalry. “He’s very methodical. He plays pretty slow,” Millsap said. “I’m more aggressive. I trade pieces in a minute. I’m a straight to the point kind of guy.” The varied personalities of Atlanta’s starting unit helped their chemistry. “Jeff was probably the instigator of the group,” Korver told The Crossover. “Kyle is a thinker and he was definitely one of our leaders,” said Horford. “The heart of that group would probably be DeMarre,” Teague added.
As the Hawks soared to the top of the Eastern Conference standings, Horford, Millsap, Teague and Korver all earned All-Star nods, with Budenholzer on the bench. “We all knew that it was because of the team that we were all there and that made it really special,” Korver said.
David Goldman/AP Images
But the magic disappeared against Cleveland in the conference finals. Carroll sprained his left knee in the fourth quarter of Game 1. He returned two days later, but lacked the power and strength to stymie LeBron James’s bulldozes to the rim. And in the third quarter of that second game, Matthew Dellavedova’s awkward fall onto Korver’s leg caused a high ankle sprain and sidelined the All-Star for the remainder of the postseason. “We went that whole year without injuries,” Teague said. “We got to the conference finals and it finally got us.”
It was over before it ever began. Budenholzer’s harmonious starting lineup began to dissipate like Marty McFly’s family photo. Carroll departed to Toronto in free agency that July. “I don’t think the Hawks have been the same since,” said Teague. The next season, a tug-of-war emerged between Teague and Schroeder during a campaign that culminated in another sweep at the hands of Cleveland. Teague met Budenholzer for lunch shortly after the series. In between bites, both coach and point guard made it clear they were open to change. The front office had grown increasingly bullish on Schroeder’s future. “You could feel it. I’m sure everybody felt it,” Teague said. “It was bittersweet, but I knew it was coming.”
Horford spurned Atlanta for Boston just a few weeks following Teague’s trade to Indiana. When the Celtics first visited Bankers Life Fieldhouse this season, Teague asked his former teammate why he departed the only professional city he had ever known. “The group wasn’t there,” Horford whispered. “It wasn’t the same.” Suddenly, only Korver and Millsap remained, striving to resuscitate a contender. “We always reflected on that year,” Millsap said. The weirdest stroke of fate, Korver’s trade to Cleveland, of all destinations, left Millsap alone.
Atlanta has returned to the playoffs for the 10th straight season, the second-longest streak in the league. Millsap has shouldered the franchise while surveying his former teammates’ success. “I’m always keeping track of that, looking at the scores, seeing what they’re doing,” he said. A member of that 60-win team will likely represent the East in the Finals, emerging from at least one battle against a former ally. “We’re friends until we step on the court,” said Carroll.
The stage will be bright. The history will stand forever. The taste of the title, however, can disappear the moment it hits your lips.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A petition has been started with a view to having the British Olympics Association boycott the Russian Winter Olympics next year, in the wake of the passage of anti-gay legislation.
The petition, which has been signed by over 3,000 people so far, calls on the British Government to advise the Association not to take part in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
It reads: “With the increasingly homophobic stance being taken by the Russian government and parliament, including calls to arrest LGBT tourists. I call upon the UK Government to strongly advise the British Olympic Association to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.”
Earlier this week, responding to human rights groups, the International Olympic Committee released a statement calling for the acceptance of all athletes in the wake of Russia’s recently passed anti-gay legislation.
The statement was released in the face of concern from human rights groups that LGBT people will not be safe in Russia for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
“The International Olympic Committee is clear that sport is a human right and should be available to all regardless of race, sex or sexual orientation,” it said.
“The Games themselves should be open to all, free of discrimination, and that applies to spectators, officials, media and of course athletes. We would oppose in the strongest terms any move that would jeopardize this principle.”
The upper house of the Russian Parliament voted last month to approve both a bill banning adoption of Russian children by foreign same-sex couples and the nationwide anti ”propaganda” bill banning the promotion of “non-traditional” relationships to minors.
Earlier, the Duma, or lower parliamentary house, unanimously voted 443-0 to approve the draft law on adoption, as well as related amendments to Russian family law.
The bill, which has since been signed by President Vladimir Putin, bans foreign same-sex couples and unmarried individuals in countries where same-sex marriage is legal from adopting Russian children.
Under the laws, foreigners can be arrested, and detained for up to 15 days, as well as being subject to fines, and deportation.
Last week, speaking exclusively to PinkNews, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg urged Russia to protect the rights of LGBT citizens following concerns about gay athletes and spectators attending the 2014 Winter Olympics.The last of the original protesters who is still refusing meals has been allowed to remain in the general population, but facility personnel are monitoring him closely, a federal spokeswoman wrote of the strike that began Monday.
A hunger strike to protest conditions at the 1,500-bed Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma has significantly abated, the federal agency that oversees the contract facility said Friday.
All but one of the original protesters resumed eating regular meals, Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said in an email.
“The sole detainee who is continuing to refuse meals has been allowed to remain in the general population, but the facility personnel are monitoring him closely,” Kice wrote of the strike that began Monday.
Kice said about one-third of the civil detainees — who are awaiting immigration hearings or deportation — refused meals but, citing fluctuating numbers, did not provide exact numbers of those who participated in the strike. As of Friday morning, the population count at the facility was 1,401.
Maru Mora Villalpando, a spokeswoman for the anti-detention group NWDC Resistance, earlier said as many as 750 detainees were refusing meals at the privately run detention center operated by the GEO Group.
On Thursday, about 40 female detainees at the center joined the action and began refusing meals, ICE said in a statement. The number had dropped to 22 on Friday, with all still having access to the commissary, ICE said.
Staff planned to meet with the women to discuss their concerns and counsel them about the medical risks associated with refusing food, according to the statement.
“They will also be advised about the protocols that will be instituted should the threshold for a hunger strike be met,” ICE said, referring to the 72-hour period to refuse food or nine meals in row that trigger a hunger-strike protocol and a medical response.
Negotiations have taken place between ICE, GEO and the detainees, who reportedly have been protesting the quality of food, facility hygiene, access to medical care, lack of recreation and what they allege are exorbitant commissary prices. The detainees also are seeking an increase in the $1 a day they are paid for performing menial jobs around the detention center.
The strike has been led by the NWDC Resistance, which is composed of detainees and seeks to end all immigration-related detentions.
Kice, the ICE spokeswoman, said in an email her agency would “like to think our ongoing dialogue with the detainees contributed” to the drop in participants, while adding, “I wouldn’t want to speak for them.”
Villalpando said she heard detainees were offered more menu options but attributed the drop, among various things, to threats to transfer inmates to other facilities and take away the commissary.
GEO said Friday it has long offered detainees a wide variety of menu items.Egypt Court Rules in Favor of Cairo University Ban on Niqab-Clad Professors
Egypt’s Administrative Court has upheld a ban on women professors wearing the Islamic niqab at Cairo University, state media Ahram Online reported.
The Tuesday ruling was on a lawsuit filed against the university’s president, Dr. Gaber Nassar, by Ahmed Mahran, the head of the Cairo Center for Political and Legal Studies. Mahran represented 77 women faculty members |
programs when the economy sours, then lets them expire when it improves. Democrats say that with an unprecedented 3.9 million Americans unemployed six months or longer, it's too soon to drop the benefits.
But they haven't found a way to win Republican support. Before Thursday's vote, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged the bill had little chance of advancing. "Sadly, we're going to face another filibuster," he said.
Durbin listed some of the ways Democrats say they've tried to compromise, including by offsetting the cost of the bill with cuts to other parts of the budget and allowing Republicans to offer amendments during a vote last month. (Republicans have said the offsets were gimmicks and the amendment votes were rigged.) Durbin said that left only one possible explanation.
"The real reason the [Republican] political leaders in the Senate want to stop unemployment benefits is they believe unemployed people are lazy," he said.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) is one of the Republicans who has been open to restoring the compensation. On Thursday he voted against it.
"I like the millionaires provision and I have concerns about the pension smoothing," he said before the vote. "Always have."
Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Dean Heller (Nev.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) voted with Democrats to advance the bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Senate would try again.
"We are not going to give up on the unemployed," he said.
Last week, Reid told the story of a 57-year-old Nevada woman who'd written him to say that since her unemployment benefits stopped, she's been couch surfing at friends' houses. He revisited the story at a press conference on Thursday.
"She couldn't pay her rent," he said. "I hadn't heard the term, some of the younger people probably have -- she's been couch-surfing. She's been going from friend to friend to sleep on their couch. She said, 'How do you think it makes me feel?'"
Reid repeatedly referred to the woman while answering reporters' questions on Thursday.The access-all-areas backdoor password hidden in some Juniper Networks' Netscreen firewalls has been published.
Last week it was revealed that some builds of the devices' ScreenOS firmware suffer from two severe security weaknesses: one allows devices to be commandeered over SSH and Telnet, and the other allows encrypted VPN communications to be monitored by eavesdroppers.
An analysis by security firm Rapid7 of the firmware's ARM code has uncovered more details on that first vulnerability – specifically, a hardcoded password that grants administrator access. And that password is: <<< %s(un='%s') = %u.
On the face of it, this skeleton key looks like a harmless printf() format string for writing some text and an integer to a diagnostic log file – it would be lost among the rest of the firmware's data.
However, the string is actually used during login checks. When the magic text is presented as a password over SSH or Telnet, the firmware grants total access to the equipment: regardless of the username given, it allows anyone to bypass authentication, and the password is hardwired into the operating system.
The Rapid7 team found more than 26,000 internet-facing Netscreen systems with SSH open.
"We were also unable to identify the authentication backdoor in versions 6.3.0r12 or 6.3.0r14. We could confirm that versions 6.3.0r17 and 6.3.0r19 were affected, but were not able to track down 6.3.0r15 or 6.3.0r16," said Rapid7's chief research officer HD Moore.
"This is interesting because although the first affected version was released in 2012, the authentication backdoor did not seem to get added until a release in late 2013 (either 6.3.0r15, 6.3.0r16, or 6.3.0r17)."
That date is important because it potentially derails a rumor that has been floating around the internet over the weekend: that the backdoor was created as part of a top-secret NSA plan to hijack Juniper's kit for spying purposes.
FEEDTROUGH tech... One of the slides leaked from the NSA boasting the ability to hijack Juniper gear
This rumor spread after people fished out an NSA document published by Der Spiegel in which the intelligence agency claimed to have full control over Juniper's Netscreen firewalls.
But that slide was made in 2008. That's five years before this particular backdoor was added to ScreenOS. It's possible another backdoor was present in earlier builds, but no one has evidence of that.
Also, the NSA slide focuses on implanting surveillance malware in a device, rather than compromising the firmware's source code to introduce a hidden skeleton key. The backdoor found by Rapid7 seems too heavy-handed for the US spy agency. It's possible FEEDTROUGH exploited a vulnerability to install its malware, but only after a hole was discovered – and in any case, it couldn't have been this particular password vulnerability (unless, of course, the NSA has a TARDIS.)
If anything, ScreenOS's use of the Dual EC DRBG random number generator in its encryption is more worrying, and points to potential NSA interference. That algorithm is the same engine that was championed by the NSA even as independent security researchers pointed out that it was seriously flawed.
So where does all this leave Juniper's customers? The company has released a patch for the affected systems, but a fair few annoyed IT managers might be leaving Juniper off their lists the next time it comes to hardware upgrade time. ®[van id=”world/2017/05/23/ariana-grande-manchester-arena-incident-latest.cnn”]
MANCHESTER — An explosion struck an Ariana Grande concert in northern England late Monday, May 22nd, killing at least 19 people and injuring dozens in what police say they are treating as a terrorist attack.
Greater Manchester Police said 19 people were confirmed dead and roughly 50 were injured by the explosion at Manchester Arena. Emergency vehicles were helping the injured and bomb disposal units were later seen outside the venue.
There was mass panic after the explosion at the end of the concert, which was part of Grande’s The Dangerous Woman Tour. The singer was not injured, according to a representative.
Britain’s terrorist threat level has been set at “severe” in recent years indicating an attack is highly likely. Police said the explosion is being judged a terrorist attack unless new information proves otherwise.
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Latest statement on incident at Manchester Arena @CCIanHopkins pic.twitter.com/GEABqAk5rr — G M Police (@gmpolice) May 23, 2017
DHS Statement on Incident at Manchester Arena → https://t.co/GOnxIvEf2p pic.twitter.com/B9NlUipLfD — Homeland Security (@DHSgov) May 23, 2017
Witnesses reported hearing two loud bangs coming from near the arena’s bars at about 10:35 p.m. but there were few further details.
If you look towards the left you see the explosion and hear the bang. I hope to GOD everyone is ok, and so glad Jess and Em are. #manchester pic.twitter.com/q81KHGEJ6E — Joe Gregory (@JoeAaronGregory) May 22, 2017
“A huge bomb-like bang went off that hugely panicked everyone and we were all trying to flee the arena,” concertgoer Majid Khan, 22, told Britain’s Press Association. “It was one bang and essentially everyone from the other side of the arena where the bang was heard from suddenly came running towards us as they were trying to exit.”
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EXPLOSION AT MANCHESTER ARENA AND EVERYONE RAN OUT SO SCARY😭 pic.twitter.com/pJbUBoELtE — ♡♡ (@hannawwh) May 22, 2017
Added Oliver Jones, 17: “The bang echoed around the foyer of the arena and people started to run.”
Video from inside the arena showed concertgoers screaming as they made their way out amid a sea of pink balloons.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said the government is working to establish “the full details of what is being treated by the police as an appalling terrorist attack.”
She said her thoughts are with the victims and the families of those who have been affected. The government is expected to call an emergency Cabinet meeting.
The chaos outside #manchesterarena when we were all trying to get out😫I hope everyone is okay ❤️ #Manchester pic.twitter.com/ISgx3AzJTF — jordan mcbrearty (@JSMcbrearty) May 22, 2017
If the incident is confirmed as a terrorist attack it would be the most deadly in Britain since the London subway bombings in 2005.
Police advised the public to avoid the area around the Manchester Arena, and the train station near the arena, Victoria Station, was evacuated and all trains canceled.
PHOTO GALLERY
Joseph Carozza, a representative from Grande’s U.S. record label, said the singer is OK and they are investigating what happened.
The Dangerous Woman Tour is the third concert tour by Grande and supports her third studio album, “Dangerous Woman.”
Panicking at Victoria Station after @ArianaGrande concert. Hope everyone is all safe and well. pic.twitter.com/6Q5WNXFkFO — Zach Bruce (@Zach_bruce) May 22, 2017
Grande’s role as Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon’s high school sitcom “Victorious” propelled her to teen idol status, starting in 2010.
The 23-year-old Grande, with her signature high ponytail, went on to also star in spinoffs that included “iCarly,” as she worked to develop her recording career.
The tour began in Phoenix in February. After Manchester, Grande was to perform at venues in Europe, including Belgium, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and France, with concerts in Latin America and Asia to follow.
TMZ is reporting Grande is “in hysterics” after this deadly incident. Sources in contact with the singer told TMZ Grande is devastated that young people who came for a good time are now lying dead and injured. TMZ was told her next concert — Thursday in London at the O2 Arena — is now up in the air for two reasons: It may constitute a safety threat, but also, as one source put it, “She’s in no condition to perform.”
According to TMZ, Grande on Monday night “indefinitely suspended” her tour.
Monitor FOX6 News and FOX6Now.com for updates on this developing story.Warring factions within factions, conflicting back-channeling, intense media scrutiny, questionable foreign influences and a capricious leader whose jarring moves leave everyone in a state of perpetual uncertainly.
The Trump administration, right?
Well, yes, but also Uber, as it nears its much anticipated decision on who will be its next CEO.
And, according to sources, that top leader is not going to be a woman, as the board of the car-hailing company struggles to move forward.
To add to the drama: Some directors worry that its former CEO Travis Kalanick — who was ousted — is trying to game the outcome in his favor, after he told several people that he was “Steve Jobs-ing it.” It is a reference to the late leader of Apple, who was fired from the company, only to later return in triumph.
That’s why, while I am always loath to dump a kitchen sink’s worth of reporting in one story, it’s hard not to since this particular pile of dirty dishes is so stuck together at Uber that it’s almost impossible to pry them apart.
“If there was no hair on this dog, this would be a no brainer for anyone to take this job,” said one person close to the search of Uber’s next leader. “But this is the hairiest company anyone has ever seen.”
Ew. But pretty much true.
So, in what is probably a vain attempt to clarify the situation, here’s the state of what is a very confused play.
Boys club
With the exit of Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman from consideration, several sources with knowledge of the situation said the group of four final candidates being considered are all men and all CEOs. (Also: Only one of those is a person of color.)
Among those choices is outgoing GE CEO Jeff Immelt. But Immelt is not, said several sources, the top choice of several members of the search committee and also within Uber’s top ranks. Some are worried that — while he is obviously a very experienced manager — he lacks the entrepreneurial drive to take the company to the next level.
In other words, he’s too much a corporate suit and not enough a geek pirate. (Anywhere else but in tech, this is not seen as a bad thing, but here we are.)
Immelt aside, sources said that the inclusion of more women in key decision-making roles at Uber will come via the addition of more independent board members and top execs rather than as its main leader.
That, of course, will be a major disappointment to some, especially given major problems at Uber involving sexism and sexual harassment. While gender of a leader should not matter to dispatching such appalling behaviors, the symbolism over the appointment of a female CEO at Silicon Valley’s most toxic-bro startup is unquestionable.
But there are also not that many top women CEOs to pick from. Execs like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and General Motors’ Mary Barra were not interested, said sources, and others pursued, like EasyJet CEO Carolyn McCall, did not pan out.
It had been hoped that the decision on who will be the next leader of Uber would be completed within the next week, but trouble getting the board to coalesce and trust each other has complicated and continues to complicate the effort.
In addition, sources said that not all board members had met all the top candidates as of this weekend, so that no vote on any one of them had been planned or is planned immediately. (Uber’s board now meets regularly every two weeks, so that could change.)
That lack of cohesion impacted the courting of Whitman, which never resulted in any vote (and which had never been scheduled at all, despite one report that it was). This was largely because she had not met with all directors before she suddenly pulled her name out of consideration late last week.
Sudden indeed. Whitman was expected this past weekend to meet in person with more directors, including Wan Ling Martello of Nestlé and Arianna Huffington, which never happened.
Whitman out!
Whitman’s departure from the Uber fray was considerably more complicated than has been previously reported. The well-known exec, who is also one of the most prominent women leaders in tech, was indeed interested in the job. That included having several substantive discussions with directors, where she made a series of suggestions on how to fix Uber.
Still, sources close to Whitman said she was never formally offered the job by Uber’s board, even though she certainly was intrigued by the possibility.
And why not? Such a role would have been the capstone of a long and largely successful career, most especially in growing eBay to its heights from a small startup. Turning around Uber and taking it public would have been the ultimate addition to her legacy.
But board disagreements, worries about whether all the myriad of problems at Uber had surfaced and concerns about the continued involvement of Kalanick, as well as the public disclosure of Whitman as a possible candidate, ended that possibility.
“Uber’s CEO will not be Meg Whitman,” she tweeted on Thursday, days after media reports on Tuesday by Recode and Bloomberg that disclosed Uber’s interest in her. That then put pressure on Whitman, a situation made worse by another report in Axios that indicated that she was not a unanimous choice of the board.
Such mishegas irked Whitman, who expected a more — ahem — professional process. “What a mess,” said one person. “Why should she get dirtied by their playground antics? It’s like a sandbox over there.”
Well, to be fair, more like a really nerdy version of “Game of Thrones,” with 100 percent less dismemberment but 53 percent more intrigue.
Still, as Recode previously reported, Whitman was an early investor in Uber and has helped out with coaching from time to time, especially with Kalanick, so she did have some familiarity with the unusually juvenile management style there.
But sources said she did not like the process, and gave the board a 48-hour deadline to decide if they seriously wanted her to be CEO. While some on the board wanted to move forward immediately, others — Huffington, for example — did not since she had not met them all in person.
“It was artificial urgency, even if Whitman might be the right choice,” said one source.
No matter! Whitman out!
We have to talk about Travis
That might not have mattered, as Whitman was also worried more specifically about further disclosures to come from the company related to its lawsuit with Alphabet’s Waymo, especially how involved Kalanick was in the allegations leveled against Uber.
“Who knows what could fall out of the closet over there?” said one person, reflecting the concerns of many candidates who have spoken to Uber, including Whitman. “There could be even more skeletons.”
Kalanick’s continued role figures large in the mind of every person I spoke to who has been contacted about the CEO job.
What’s the biggest problem at Uber? I asked.
“Travis,” said one
“Oh, Travis,” said another.
“Man, he’s brilliant and so important, but who wants to deal with Travis?” said yet another.
If that sounds like a real sad country song, titled “The Travis Blues,” you are not far off the mark.
This was certainly not the plan when Kalanick was dispatched to Tahiti to sail around in a glamourous yacht — owned by media mogul Barry Diller, with fellow guests like CNN’s Anderson Cooper — to cool off after he was forced out at Uber.
He initially had agreed to take just a temporary leave, a move that became permanent after a group of key investors — including Benchmark — demanded his full departure a week later.
But once he returned from the South Seas, his ardor for meddling in the company did not end. According to numerous insiders, the pugnacious entrepreneur has continued to try to involve himself in daily operating decisions, so much so that top execs have been mulling how to get help from the board to rein him in.
“It’s not stopped,” said one top exec about Kalanick up in the grill of the operating group that is running Uber. “None of us know what to do since it is Travis.”
In addition, to cut off Kalanick’s access, the Uber board has reinforced a policy that all directors get the same limited access to information about Uber’s ongoing operations. “We have had to put guardrails on him,” said one person involved. “Even if he keeps trying to break through them.”
Indeed, Kalanick was considered by many directors and investors to be obstructive to the process of finding a COO before his departure as CEO.
And there have been more signals that he has been unhappy about this status. Since he left, Kalanick has told numerous people, including at least one job candidate, that he was “Steve Jobs-ing it,” an apparent reference to the purge and later return of the legendary Apple founder at the company.
(As I have said before, I knew Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs was a person I wrote about and — you got it — Travis Kalanick is no Steve Jobs. But I digress!)
But the key tenet in this comparison is that the tarnished tech hero leaves the scene to wander in the desert for years before the triumphant return. Instead, what has been described to me by many is an entrepreneur who cannot let go and, in fact, has been trying to plot ways to increase his grip.
Why? “If you think about it, Uber has been his life and it’s only more so with his terrible personal situation,” said one person, who is fond of Kalanick, referring to the recent tragic death of his mother and the serious injuries sustained by his father in a boating accident. “Giving up Uber is not easy.”
As the board turns
And being with each other in a cohesive manner is not something Uber’s current board seems capable of either, given all the odd back-channeling and frequent miscommunications that seem to crop up.
While there was a recent dinner at San Francisco’s Garabaldi’s restaurant that included Huffington, Ling and two other Uber board members, TPG’s David Trujillo and Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, to try to create some level of comfort, there is a lot to repair.
Here’s a clue to how much: The continued media leakage from the CEO process. While this is not completely uncommon — the Microsoft CEO search got a lot of ink — what is unusual is how varying the accounts of the same meetings or circumstances are at Uber. In fact, they are often diametrically opposed to each other.
This is something that many who have been in touch with Uber have experienced. “Consensus is not something you are feeling is happening there,” said one person, which makes every possible move seem suspect.
(Have you seen the really complexly plotted spy thriller “Atomic Blonde,” where everyone seems to be lying and then lying about lying? Uber is more confusing.)
That’s why a recent attempt to discuss a funding offer involving both secondary sales and a new investment from Japanese investor SoftBank has been so riven. While I will not get into the particulars in this hairball of a story here — unless you really want to hear about transfer restrictions, tender offers and more right now — suffice it to say that it has turned into a drama about whose side SoftBank leader Masa Son will land on.
Let me be clear, this is before any investment, which really should not take place without the cooperation of the new CEO, even if there is some urgency in making sure SoftBank’s $100 billion fund does not favor only Uber’s rivals. Since it just made a big investment in Southeast Asia’s Grab, many at Uber remain fretful.
Also, a related cause of tension was a Bloomberg report that Benchmark was mulling selling a chunk of its 10 percent stake in Uber to SoftBank. While the venture firm might sell some of its stake if any transaction takes place, sources said Benchmark was wary that such a story was meant to weaken it.
That might not be so far-fetched given the deep tension between Benchmark’s Bill Gurley — who left the Uber board in favor of his partner Cohler — and Kalanick and the level of mistrust that has developed over time.
“Every single act feels like it might have another meaning,” said one person familiar with the situation. “Even if it does not.”
What is all boils down to is the deep concerns around control of Uber’s fate: Who has it and who is angling for it.
That distrust has left the board at times in a kind of odd face-off that appears to be more perception than reality, once you really plumb the depth of the concerns.
Consider the possible return of Kalanick as CEO, which most will finally admit is overblown unless he decides to go full throttle and end up in a legal fight with the company he founded. In reality, without the support of board members Ryan Graves and Garrett Camp, Kalanick has none of the kind of leverage that has been reported.
“Travis would have to blow it up completely to get his job back,” said one major investor familiar with the cap table of Uber. “And maybe he is crazy enough to do that, but he’d better bring a lot more ammo.”
What I can say for sure is that the entire company is leaking like a sieve and that the Trump White House has a tighter press ship. Which brings us back to the beginning: If Uber wants to move forward, it had better lose that meme and get back to building the kind of company its employees so desperately want to.
Said one of those top execs to me tonight: “When is this going to stop so we can do our jobs?”
It’s a very good question for the Uber board. Whether they can do their only real duty as directors — hiring a CEO — and make that happen soon is unclear.
One silver lining: Anthony Scaramucci is currently busy with another gig.Archer fans now have a female-led animated series to look forward to on FXX! Archer creator Adam Reed is teaming up with Modern Family writer Megan Ganz on a new animated series called Cassius and Clay, which stars Kaitlin Olson (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Lake Bell (Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp) and Susan Sarandon (you should totally already know who she is, y’all).
Cassius and Clay is an action-buddy comedy set in the post-apocalyptic American South in a town called Wilke, and follows two female bandits. Olson plays Ordwood Cassius, a hard drinker who can’t seem to stop racking up debt; Bell plays Shopcarter Clay, the fastest gun in the South who never looks for trouble, but always seems find it while palling around with Cassius; and Sarandon plays Connie Mack, who runs the town only saloon/brothel and runs the town’s alcohol, the girls – pretty much the whole town.
In addition to those amazing series regulars, Cassius and Clay also has some amazing guest voices lined up, including JB Smoove as town doctor, Doc Benz, who happens to have no legs; Kevin Michael Richardson (The Cleveland Show) as Smiffy, the town blacksmith who also carries Doc Benz around; Jeffrey Tambor (Transparent) as Waitstill Weeks, the mostly-ignored mayor of Wilke; Stephen Root (King of the Hill) as Preacher, a good-natured man of God; Katy Mixon (Mike & Molly) as “sister-whores” Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey; and Robert Patrick (Scorpion) as Reever Grint, the most crooked of all sheriffs.
Archer‘s seventh season is going to be moving to FXX from FX (so many X’s!) to accompany Cassius and Clay when its 10-episode first season premieres in 2016.
So, are you down with female bandits in the post-apocalyptic deep-fried South? What do you think of Cassius and Clay?
(via The Hollywood Reporter)
—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—
Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?A teenager from Louisiana will require surgery after being attacked by a group of men who had harassed her while she was wearing a bikini.
Jessica Byrnes-Laird, 18, was sitting in her car while her boyfriend entered a store in Shreveport after the pair had spent the day swimming.
The four men started harassing her and fought with her boyfriend after he emerged from the shop.
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.
As the boyfriend broke away from the scuffle, one of the men threw a brass pipe through the open passenger door window, striking the teenager in the mouth, the KTSB channel reported.
“I looked down and saw my teeth in my hand and I immediately gushed blood,” said the teenager, who said she was badly shaken up by what happened.
She added: "There's a little bit of fear, honestly, because going through this make you realize how delicate life is, and you never know what can happen. Things happen so suddenly, without warning."
The teenager said she had been told she will require surgery and multiple tooth implants. The cost of the treatment could be more than $12,000, according to a GoFundMe fundraising page, that has so far raised around $18,000.
Police said they are still searching for the men who carried out the attack. They have released surveillance video from the scene of the incident.
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 nowForget fetching sticks.
This musically-minded dog would rather be playing piano sonatas.
Sadie the German Shepherd was filmed at home in Alberta, Canada, switching on an electric organ with her nose and sitting down to play some tunes.
Footage shows her plonking her front paws down along the keyboard, as she sits with her back legs positioned on the piano stool.
Instead of classical music, Sadie appears to recite a minimalist piece with clashing notes and no time signature.
After a confident start, the pup takes a pause and looks towards the camera.
'Oh, did you make a mistake?' her owner says while filming.
Signaling a brief moment of musical frustration, Sadie puts one paw to her head before returning to tickle the ivories.
Musically minded: Sadie the German Shepherd was filmed at home in Alberta, Canada, switching on an electric keyboard with her nose and sitting down to play some tunes
Born to perform: Footage shows her plonking her front paws down on the keyboard, as she sits with her back legs on the piano stool
After a 20-second rendition, she decides she's had enough for one day and turns around to take a bow.
To date, the video of Sadie playing the piano has been watched more than 12,000 times. Many viewers have given her paw-formance the thumbs up.
'Cute video, gorgeous and smart dog!'one fan wrote.
Sadie, aged six, was apparently adopted from an animal rescue shelter in 2009.
Her owner adds: 'She loves learning new tricks and recently learned to play the piano.'Skye Gould/Tech Insider
"Deadpool" has been an unexpected box-office hit. Fox's R-rated Marvel movie has already brought in more than $491 million worldwide at theaters.
That's pretty impressive given the fact that "Deadpool" has been banned in China — the world's second largest theatrical market— and was made on a pretty meager budget.
"The budget was much, much smaller relatively than to other big, huge superhero movies," screenwriter Paul Wernick recently told Tech Insider. "Ryan [Reynolds] jokes that we made this movie on the budget of other superhero movie's laser hair removal budget."
We looked at other origin superhero movie budgets to compare to "Deadpool" and Wernick is right.
According to Box Office Mojo, the estimated budget for "Deadpool" is $58 million. Today, the average superhero movie budget is north of $100 million. Granted, "Deadpool" is an R-rated movie whereas most superhero movies are rated PG-13 to cater to a larger demographic. So there is a bigger risk to take
Still "Deadpool" has already made more than some origin superhero movies including 2005's "Batman Begins" ($374 million), 2011's "Thor" ($449 million), and 2011's "Captain America: The First Avenger" ($370 million).
Take a look to see how the "Deadpool" budget compares to other superhero movies.A look at the latest on the Twins..
The Twins have made a two-year offer to Mike Pelfrey, according to Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com. However, there's still a gap in salary that needs to be bridged. Pelfrey returned from Tommy John surgery in 2012 to post a 5.19 ERA with 6.0 K/9, 3.1 BB/9 and a career-low 43.2 percent ground-ball rate in 152 2/3 innings. Pelfrey's FIP (3.99) and xFIP (4.54) both suggest that his ERA could have been lower were it not for a.337 BABIP and 67.2 percent strand rate.
, according to Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com. However, there's still a gap in salary that needs to be bridged. Pelfrey returned from Tommy John surgery in 2012 to post a 5.19 ERA with 6.0 K/9, 3.1 BB/9 and a career-low 43.2 percent ground-ball rate in 152 2/3 innings. Pelfrey's FIP (3.99) and xFIP (4.54) both suggest that his ERA could have been lower were it not for a.337 BABIP and 67.2 percent strand rate. More from Heyman, who writes that the Twins have inquired on top starters like Ervin Santana and Ubaldo Jimenez as well as several others lower on the free agent list, including Phil Hughes and Scott Feldman. The club has been most heavily linked to guys like Bronson Arroyo, Ricky Nolasco, and Matt Garza to date. Minnesota starting pitchers combined for a league worst 5.26 ERA in 2013.
and as well as several others lower on the free agent list, including and. The club has been most heavily linked to guys like,, and to date. Minnesota starting pitchers combined for a league worst 5.26 ERA in 2013. Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN previews the Winter Meetings agenda for the Twins. Minnesota has Nolasco atop their free agent wish list, but they'll move on if it's not at the right price. They also like Arroyo and a source says he's seeking a three-year deal in the $27-$30MM range.
The Twins have told agents that they don't plan on sacrificing their second-round pick in June's amateur draft to sign a free agent, despite a public declaration stating otherwise, Wolfson writes. That would mean that Santana and Jimenez aren't in their plans. Santana's reps already have meetings set up with teams in Orlando and the Twins, as of this morning, are not on that list.
On the trade front, the Twins are fond of Homer Bailey, according to Wolfson. Wayne Krivsky, special assistant to GM, knows Bailey well from his days with the Reds. Krivsky took over as Cincinnati's GM two years after Bailey was drafted and was in that role when Bailey made his big league debut.
, according to Wolfson. Wayne Krivsky, special assistant to GM, knows Bailey well from his days with the Reds. Krivsky took over as Cincinnati's GM two years after Bailey was drafted and was in that role when Bailey made his big league debut. A Twins official "scoffed at" the idea of trading for Tigers right-hander Rick Porcello but was more receptive to the idea of a Jeremy Hellickson acquisition when asked by Wolfson about both each right-hander.SWEETENING THE DEAL
With a few days left in our campaign, we will sweeten the MaxProLogic deal. We will now offer our newly developed BLE Board. This board includes the Texas Instruments CC2640 chip along with a 2.4GHz antenna and matching network. This board plugs directly into MaxProLogic. It communicates with the FPGA over a UART serial link. The CC2640 runs proprietary firmware along with the radio control code. The CC2640 communicates with a custom app on the Android phone. We will be adding Apple iOS compatibility in the future. The MaxProLogic has a proprietary Verilog interface running in the FPGA that allows full bidirectional communication with the Android phone. You can use the BLE board to experiment with wireless communications or create a custom weather station. This BLE board is added as a $12 option to the MaxProLogic, JTAGBlaster, and VisiPort reward.
The CC2640 BLE Developers Board provides an ARM M4 microcontroller with 128KB of flash and a 4.2 BLE radio.
THE PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC WORLD!
Students and Hobbyists are migrating into the world of Programmable Logic in a big way in 2017. The appetite for FPGA Development boards is growing exponentially. The FPGA chip vendors are responding to this appetite by creating larger, MORE powerful and cheaper chips. Earth People Technology has created a new FPGA Development board that takes advantage of these newer devices: The MaxProLogic. Our most powerful and least expensive FPGA development board.
WHAT IS THE MAXPROLOGIC?
The MaxProLogic is an FPGA development board that is designed to be user friendly and a great introduction into digital design for anyone. The core of the MaxProLogic is the Altera MAX10 FPGA. This powerful chip has 4,000 Logic Elements and 200 Kbits of Memory. The MAX10 is easily scalable from the entry level college student to the most advanced projects like an audio sound meter with FFT. Among the many great features of the MaxProLogic is the MAX10 chip; ths a built in Flash for configuration and incorporates 8 channels of Analog to Digital Conversion. These two features alone create a far superior FPGA chip than any competitor on the market. It allows the user to create more diverse projects.
MAX 10 10M04SA FPGA FROM INTEL/ALTERA 4,000 Logic Elements;
2.2 Mbit On chip Flash; 189 Kbit On Chip SRAM 8 Analog Input
Channels; 12 bit; 1MSamples/Second 65 Available I/O’s at connectors
65 Inputs/Outputs available at connectors on board
8 Green User configurable LEDs 1 Power Pushbutton Switch; 1 User Configurable Pushbutton Switch
On Board MicroSD Card Slot
Two Power options: Standard USB (+5V @ 2Amp) Using Micro-B connector; 5mm Barrel Connector Accepts +12V @ 3Amp
Switching Power Supply, Provides stable output under high load stress
On/Off controller uses push button, optional bypass mode to allow board power up without On/Off control
Two Clocks: 50MHz Oscillator; 32.768KHz Oscillator
On board interface to Standard USB to Serial Adapters
Temperature Sensor with +/-0.3C Resolution
Standard Programming Connector fits any Altera USB Blaster
WHY THE MAXPROLOGIC?
The MaxProLogic is designed to make digital design easy and cost effective. At Earth People Technology we have years of experience helping students and hobbyists get started with FPGA design. We know that the learning curve in getting started can be a time consuming and frustrating process so we have created a User Manual that walks the user step by step from unpacking to completing an initial project to creating an epic application that will be worthy of wide attention |
a simple problem, close the garage door after sunset, when it has been left open.
We have a garage in the basement, which is used not only for car parking, but gardening tools and machines, bicycles, etc are stored there plus there is a workplace. Since there is only one entry into the basement via garage door, normally we leave it open for daily hours and close only in the evening. But sometimes we simple forget to close it and remains open for a night long and giving the chance for un-wanted visitors.
2. Scope
Close the garage door after 8PM, if it has been left open.
However the high level scope is very simple, but there shall be some sdditional logic taken into account.
a). When I'm opening the door after 8PM it must be ensured that it won't be closed automatically in few seconds, there shall be some time given (e.g. 15 minutes), until I surely parked and left the place. Of course in the morning the logic shall not close the door automatically anymore, only between 8PM and 6AM.
2. The door opener box is having an input which is working in the following way. When the button on the wall switch is pressed the motor starts to move the door into opposite direction as it was moving last time, so if the door was open then after pressing the button it will move to close. Additionally when the button is pressed during the door is moving then it stops immediately. It means, using this interface of door opener, the logic shouldn't know, how door was moved last time. It must only find the position "CLOSED".For many, there is one particular scene in Pather Panchali (1955), stark in black and white, that strikes a powerful chord. Durga leads Apu out of their ramshackled house to the lush field of kaash flowers. They halt for a while, marvelling at the sight of the towering power line, a structure alien to their rural surroundings. The soundscape is a vacuum but for the haunting cadence of the heaving winds, against which the grass sways gently. The two jump to their feet when they hear a strange chugging sound, and the world looks at a train through their eyes, the dark serpentine force cutting its way through the field, black smoke billowing out and fading into the sky.
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This iconic scene is one of the many that put the film, along with its creator, then first-time director Satyajit Ray, on the map of world cinema. Much before he translated Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel on to the screen, the auteur underwent an intensive process of adapting the text. There was no formal script, for it was all in his head, he would later write in a piece for The Statesman. Instead, he made 58-page panels in his sketchbook in ink and pen. With fluid strokes and a quality of precision for every character and scene, Ray would never be this elaborate in his process as he was with his first film. Sixty years since the film’s release, the sketches have surfaced in their entirety for the first time. The Pather Panchali Sketchbook (Harper Collins, Rs 1,699), a compilation of those pages, among others, looks back at the film through Ray’s panels before global recognition would make him a more confident filmmaker.
“He made sketches especially for Pather Panchali,” says Sandip, his son, also a member secretary of the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives. “Later on, he would do storyboards but they were also not as elaborate as Pather Panchali. Those sketches happened because he wasn’t known back then. He had to convince the producers by showing them the sketchbook. It was quite elaborate, with the framing and the lighting. The producers were not convinced at all despite this and that’s when the West Bengal government’s support helped him.”
Ray had originally donated the sketchbook to the Cinematheque Francais archives in Paris. Years later, when the family contacted them to procure it, they were informed that the copy is lost. “We were shocked and I couldn’t convey the message to my father because he was so ill at the time. But they sent us the scanned pages, which were in a good condition,” says Sandip, adding that he has yet to know what became of the original. Apart from the sketches, Ray was further involved in the promotion of the film, designing posters, booklets and advertisements, which are included in the book, along with letters of invitations for special shows, a series of draft scripts, photographs, stamps and illustrations that Ray made for the original book by Bandyopadhyay. Edited by Sandip, the book also comprises notes and essays by actor Dhritiman Chaterji, Ray’s wife Bijoya, cinematographer Subrata Mitra, and art director and production designer Bansi Chandragupta, among others.
The sketchbook is a study in itself, a vivid depiction of the world Apu and Durga inhabited, one that would be transported from paper to motion picture. The train sequence, for instance, comes alive in outlines in pen sketches, dramatic, swift, thick strokes of ink. A panel shows the siblings running against the wind towards the approaching train. In another, Durga runs out in the rain, the black, thundering clouds in black ink looming over her. In scenes inside the house, his strokes are more nuanced, minimal as he played with light and shadow.
Ray’s innate sense of precision reflected in his films, too. “His method was impeccable. He was very economical in approach. There was no such thing as going over budget. That’s what I learnt from him. You have to be ruthless with your work,” says Sandip, who worked alongside his father as a still photographer on the sets and began assisting him in the mid-’70s. This dedication to detail is further visible in the sparseness of words or dialogues in the sketches, and the film too. He constantly progresses from one scene to another with either a “Dissolve to” or a “Fade out”. “His aversion to the dialogue-heavy, overly ‘literary’ Bengali cinema of the time is well-known. Was outlining a film in pictures rather than in words a way of reminding himself that cinema stays true to a work of literature not by translating it, but by transforming it?” notes Chaterji, who began his acting career as the protagonist of Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970), in the foreword of the book.
Apart from Ray, the film had many other firsts too. Most of the crew, for instance, were new; and Subir Banerjee was cast as Apu without a screen test. Even the music was lent by Pandit Ravi Shankar, who was yet to achieve international fame. It was, perhaps, this inexperience that lent the film an edge, unseen in entertainment-riddled Indian cinema until then. “In fact, he wasn’t very satisfied with the first half, but he approved of the second half. He didn’t have the time to come back to the film later. Then again, one must never tamper with the classics,” says Sandip.
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Ray, who passed away in 1992, had an overwhelmingly poetic and complex approach to filmmaking, yet it was shrewdly cinematic. His sketches reveal an artist who viewed filmmaking as an intensely personal experience. “It is astonishing to see how clear he was about what he wanted, despite being a first-time director,” notes veteran actor Sharmila Tagore in the book, “The sketchbook is a veritable manual for the aspiring filmmaker, particularly for those who wish to express themselves through images while liberating scenes from excessive dialogues.”IRVING, Texas -- When Jerry Jones said Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas that he felt the Dallas Cowboys were close to being a contender, the reactions were predictable.
Jones is delusional, one said on Twitter. Another said Jones had lost his marbles. Another called for a boycott of Cowboys merchandise to wake up Jones. Another came up with the always entertaining thought of firing himself as the general manager.
More than anybody else, Jones knows the Cowboys’ 4-11 record does not give him a lot of credibility when it comes to deciphering where the team is or isn’t currently in the NFL pecking order.
But if you strip away the venom that is always directed Jones’ way and look at the Cowboys' roster, there really isn’t a wide gulf between where they are and the conference’s best.
They have one of the best left tackles in football in Tyron Smith. They have one of the better offensive lines in football with Smith, Travis Frederick and Zack Martin. Jason Witten continues to perform, and an argument can be made he has been underutilized this season.
A healthy Dez Bryant and Tony Romo will go a long ways in getting the Cowboys back on track. Rob Foldy/Getty Images
And then, of course, the Cowboys should have a healthy Tony Romo and Dez Bryant in 2016.
On defense, they have an up-and-coming pass-rusher in DeMarcus Lawrence, who has seven sacks in his past seven games. They have a playmaking weakside linebacker in Sean Lee. Byron Jones has the looks of a fine free safety.
Do they have questions? Sure they do. Every team does. They will have key players injured next season as well, such as Romo, Orlando Scandrick and Lance Dunbar were this season, but they will have to handle those absences much better.
The Cowboys have to find better answers in 2016 but this is not a team that has to start over.
In fact, a case can be made they will be the NFC East favorite to open 2016.
The Washington Redskins have won the division with eight wins. While improved, they are not exactly a juggernaut. They also have to find a way to pay Kirk Cousins and continue to build their roster. The best thing the Redskins have going for them is general manager Scot McCloughan, but they are not a team built to last yet.
The Philadelphia Eagles have been a mess all season and fired Chip Kelly on Tuesday. It must be worse there than we know with Kelly for him to be fired with one game to go. Is Sam Bradford their quarterback? Fletcher Cox is tremendous but the defense has holes.
The New York Giants could have a new coach as well if Tom Coughlin walks away or is asked to walk away. The offensive line continues to be a problem. The defense has a ton of holes.
The schedule should be more favorable to the Cowboys in 2016 than it was this season, when they had to play the Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers based on last year’s first-place finish. Next year they will be matched up with either the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or New Orleans Saints and San Francisco 49ers with their last-place finish in the division, in addition to games against the NFC North and AFC North.
None of that matters right now, of course. All that matters is four wins, 11 losses and expectations not met. The mountain the Cowboys have to climb looks to be gigantic.
This has been an awful season. You can call it one of the worst of the Jones era if not the worst because of where the expectations were back in September.
But by next summer the expectations will be raised once again. Romo will be healthy. Bryant will be healthy. The Cowboys have been wiser in their free-agent approach in recent years and they have drafted better as well.
Plus, the scars of 2015 will be used as motivation for 2016.
Maybe (gulp) Jones will be right.Chelsea Victoria Clinton (born February 27, 1980) is the only child of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.S. Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She was a special correspondent for NBC News from 2011 to 2014 and now works with the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. Since 2011, she has taken on a prominent role at the foundation and has a seat on its board.[1]
Clinton was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, during her father's first term as governor. She attended public schools there until he was elected President and the family moved to the White House, where she began attending the private Sidwell Friends School. She received an undergraduate degree at Stanford University and later earned master's degrees from University College, Oxford and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and a Doctor of Philosophy in international relations from the University of Oxford in 2014. Clinton married investment banker Marc Mezvinsky in 2010. They have a daughter and a son.
In 2007 and 2008, Clinton campaigned extensively on American college campuses for her mother's Democratic presidential nomination bid and introduced her at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. She assumed a similar role in her mother's 2016 presidential campaign, making over 200 public appearances as her surrogate and again introducing her at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
Clinton has worked for NBC, McKinsey & Company, Avenue Capital Group, and New York University and serves on several boards, including those of the School of American Ballet, Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, Common Sense Media, Weill Cornell Medical College and IAC/InterActiveCorp.
Early years
Clinton was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on February 27, 1980. Her name was inspired by a visit to the Chelsea neighborhood of London during a Christmas 1978 vacation. Hillary said that upon hearing the 1969 Judy Collins recording of the Joni Mitchell song, "Chelsea Morning", Bill remarked, "If we ever have a daughter, her name should be Chelsea."[2][3][4]
When Chelsea was two years old, she accompanied her parents as they campaigned throughout Arkansas for her father's gubernatorial race.[2] She learned to read and write at a very young age. Chelsea claims that she started reading the newspaper by the age of three and also wrote a letter to President Ronald Reagan when she was only five years old.[5] In the letter, which was photocopied and preserved by her father, she asked President Reagan not to visit a military cemetery in West Germany, where Nazi soldiers were buried.[5] Chelsea attended Forest Park Elementary School, Booker Arts and Science Magnet Elementary School and Horace Mann Junior High School, both Little Rock public schools.[6] She skipped the third grade.[7]
As a young child, Clinton was raised in her father's Southern Baptist faith, and later attended her mother's United Methodist church.[8]
White House years
On January 20, 1993, the day of her father's first inauguration, Chelsea moved into the White House with her parents and was given the Secret Service codename "Energy".[9] The Clintons wanted their daughter to have a normal childhood, and they hoped to shield her from the media spotlight.[10]
Hillary Clinton followed the advice of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on raising children in the White House, and asked the press to limit coverage of Chelsea to her participation in public events such as state visits.[3] Margaret Truman, daughter of former president Harry S. Truman, supported the Clintons, and in March 1993 wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times about the damage that could be done if the press made Chelsea a subject of intense coverage.[11]
Journalists debated the issue of allowing Clinton to retain her privacy. Most media outlets concluded that she should be off-limits due to her age, although Rush Limbaugh[10] and Saturday Night Live both broadcast material mocking her appearance.[12] During this phase of her life, her father said, "We really work hard on making sure that Chelsea doesn't let other people define her sense of her own self-worth... It's tough when you are an adolescent... but I think she'll be ok."[13]
The Clintons' decision to remove Chelsea from public schooling and send her to Sidwell Friends School, a private school in Washington, D.C., drew criticism.[10] While several children of sitting presidents have attended Sidwell, the most recent prior child, Amy Carter, had gone to D.C. public schools. In a 1993 CBS This Morning town meeting, Bill defended the choice, stating that Chelsea did not like "getting a lot of publicity" and would have "more control over her destiny" at Sidwell. Bill explained that they made their decision in an effort to protect Chelsea's privacy; they did not "reject the public schools."[14] Sidwell's students and staff remained silent regarding Chelsea, declining to discuss her publicly.[10] A veteran of Model United Nations,[15] Clinton was a 1997 National Merit Scholarship semifinalist.[16] She graduated from Sidwell Friends in 1997; her father spoke at the graduation ceremony.[17]
Following Chelsea's high school graduation, media speculation regarding her choice of college resulted in heavy press coverage. She ultimately chose to attend Stanford University. During her father's eight years in office, there were 32 stories in The New York Times and 87 network news stories about Chelsea. Of all presidential children preceding her, she received the most television coverage.[18]
Although her father is a Southern Baptist, Clinton was raised in her mother's Methodist faith.[19] She attended Foundry United Methodist Church on 16th Street, NW in Washington and met with other teens on Sunday mornings to examine questions of faith, philosophy, and issues of concern to her age group. Her parents joined her at the youth group's parent-teen round tables. An adult group leader thought Clinton to be "a terrific kid" and observed that she was treated as an equal in the group. Away from church, her social activities included visits to a Planet Hollywood restaurant with friends and sleep-overs in and out of the White House. President Clinton sometimes joined her and her sleep-over friends for breakfast.[10]
At age four, Clinton had begun taking dance classes in Arkansas,[20] and she continued her dance training at the Washington School of Ballet for several years. In her book, It Takes a Village, Hillary wrote that Bill was disappointed when Chelsea quit softball and soccer to concentrate on ballet, but he was nonetheless supportive, regularly attending her performances.[10] She was cast in the role of the Favorite Aunt[21] in the 1993 Washington Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.[10][22]
In early 1999, the Clintons learned of an article being planned by People that examined the First Family's relationships in the wake of scandals and the impending vote on President Clinton's impeachment. The Secret Service told the magazine that they had concerns that the story could compromise Chelsea's security. People decided to run the story anyway, and Bill and Hillary issued a statement expressing their regret and sadness. Carol Wallace, People managing editor, affirmed the magazine's sensitivity to the Clintons' concerns, but felt 19-year-old Chelsea was "an eyewitness to family drama and historical events" and thus "a valid journalistic subject". The article, entitled "Grace Under Fire", was published in February 1999 with a cover photo of Chelsea and Hillary.[23]
During the last year of her father's presidency, Chelsea assumed some White House hostess responsibilities when her mother was campaigning for the U.S. Senate, traveling with her father on several overseas trips and attending state dinners with him.[24]
Education and academic life
Stanford University
Clinton in 1996
Clinton entered Stanford University in the fall of 1997 and majored in history.[25][26]
The week before she arrived on campus, her mother published an open letter in her syndicated column asking journalists to leave her daughter alone. Chelsea arrived at Stanford in a motorcade with her parents, Secret Service agents, and almost 250 journalists. For her security, bullet-proof glass was installed in her dorm windows and surveillance cameras were placed in hallways. Secret Service agents in plain clothes lived in her dorm.[27] With the exception of an occasional tabloid story written about her, Chelsea's four years at Stanford remained out of public view.[28]
Clinton obtained a B.A. degree in history, with highest honors, at Stanford in 2001.[25][28] The topic of her 167-page senior thesis was the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, advised by Jack Rakove.[28][29] At the time of Chelsea's graduation, her father issued a statement: "Hillary and I are grateful for the friendships and great learning experiences Chelsea had at Stanford, and we are very proud of her on this special day."[30]
University of Oxford
In July 2001, former President Clinton announced that Chelsea would be pursuing a master's degree at University College of the University of Oxford later that year – the same college where he studied studied politics between 1968 and 1970 on a Rhodes Scholarship;[31] Chelsea did not apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. Lord Butler of Brockwell, the Master of University College, said: "Her record at Stanford shows that she is a very well-qualified and able student. The college is also pleased to extend its link with the Clinton family." Upon the recommendation of British and American advisers, the university implemented security measures,[32] and fellow students were asked not to discuss her with the press.[33]
Arriving at Oxford just after the September 11 attacks, Clinton was drawn to other American students who were also feeling the emotional after-effects of the trauma. She told Talk magazine:
Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. Over the summer, I thought I would seek out non-Americans as friends, just for diversity's sake. Now I find that I want to be around Americans – people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am.[33]
Clinton was criticized for those remarks in the London press and by the newspaper Oxford Student, which angered the university by directly attacking her in an editorial. However, people who met Clinton at that time described her as charming, poised and unaffected, and she seemed to be adjusting successfully to life abroad. During her time at Oxford, Chelsea adopted a more sophisticated look, reportedly assisted by a family friend, Donatella Versace, whose couture shows she attended in early 2002. Geordie Greig, the editor of Tatler, ranked her number five on the magazine's 2002 "Top 10 Girls" list.[33]
In 2003, Clinton completed an MPhil degree in international relations at Oxford.[34] Her 132-page thesis was titled The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria: A Response to Global Threats, a Part of a Global Future, supervised by Jennifer Welsh and Ngaire Woods.[35] Following her graduation, she returned to the United States.[25]
In 2011, Clinton transferred back to University College, Oxford, from the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University to complete her DPhil degree in International Relations.[36] She stated this was to be under her preferred doctoral advisor, Ngaire Woods.[37] She finished her dissertation from New York City where she resides[38] and was awarded the degree in May 2014.[39] Her 356-page dissertation was titled The Global Fund: An Experiment in Global Governance.[40][41]
Columbia University
In the spring of 2010, Clinton also completed an MPH degree at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University[42][43] and she began teaching graduate classes there in 2012.[44]
New York University
Starting in 2010, Clinton began serving as Assistant Vice-Provost for the Global Network University of New York University, working on international recruitment strategies.[38] She is the co-founder of the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership at NYU and serves as its co-chair.[45] By 2010, she was also pursuing PhD coursework at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, but later transferred back to Oxford in 2011 to complete her dissertation.[37][46]
In 2012, Clinton received an award from the Temple of Understanding for her "work in advancing a new model of integrating interfaith and cross-cultural education into campus life," together with Imam Khalid Latif and Rabbi Yehuda Sarna.[47]
Professional life
In 2003, Clinton joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in New York City,[25] and she went to work for Avenue Capital Group in late 2006. She served as co-chair for a fund-raising week for the Clinton Foundation, and subsequently became Vice Chair for the foundation.[39] She serves on the board of the School of American Ballet[25] and on IAC's board of directors.[48][49]
In November 2011, NBC announced that they had hired Clinton as a special correspondent. One of her roles was reporting feature stories about "Making a Difference" for NBC Nightly News and Rock Center with Brian Williams. It was a three-month contract and allowed her to concurrently continue working for the Clinton Foundation and pursue her education.[50][51] Clinton's first appearance was on the December 12, 2011, episode of Rock Center.[52] Although she received some negative critical reviews for her work, Clinton's contract with NBC was renewed in February 2012.[53][54] Rock Center ended in May 2013, and she left the network in August 2014.[55][56] Clinton reportedly earned an annual salary of $600,000 for her work at NBC.[57]
In September 2015, Clinton wrote her first book, It's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired and Get Going!, published by Philomel Books. The 400-page book is aimed at middle school students (ages 10 to 14) and introduces them to a range of social issues, encouraging them to take action to make the world a better place.[58] The Today Show gave Clinton a full segment in which to discuss the book with her former colleagues at NBC.[59] The book received mixed reviews from critics, who lauded Clinton for her effort but "lament[ed] its didactic tone".[58][60][61]
In March 2017, Clinton was named to the Board of Directors of Expedia Group.[62]
In May 2017, Clinton published another children's book entitled, She Persisted. (See Nevertheless, she persisted.) Upon its release, the book became a bestseller.[63]
Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign
Clinton campaigning for her mother
In December 2007, Clinton began campaigning in Iowa in support of her mother's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.[64] She appeared across the country, largely on college campuses.[65][66][67] By early April 2008, she had spoken at 100 colleges on behalf of her mother's candidacy.[68]
While campaigning, Clinton answered audience questions but did not give interviews or respond to press questions,[69] including one from a nine-year-old Scholastic News reporter asking whether her father would be a good "first man".[70] She replied, "I'm sorry, I don't talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you're cute."[71] Philippe Reines, her mother's press secretary, intervened when the press attempted to approach Chelsea directly.[70]
When MSNBC reporter David Shuster characterized Clinton's participation in her mother's campaign as "sort of being pimped out", the Clinton campaign objected. Shuster subsequently apologized on-air and was suspended for two weeks.[72][73]
The first time she was asked about her mother's handling of the Lewinsky scandal at a campaign stop Clinton responded, "I do not think that is any of your business."[68] As she became a more experienced campaigner, she refined her responses and deflected questions on the issue with comments such as, "If that's what you want to vote on, that's what you should vote on. But I think there are other people [who are] going to vote on things like healthcare and economics."[68][74]
At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Chelsea called Hillary "my hero and my mother" and introduced her with a long video tribute.[75]
Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign
Clinton speaking at a campaign rally for her mother in the 2016 presidential election.
As she did in 2008, Clinton again took an active part in her mother’s presidential campaign in 2016,[76] expanding her role as surrogate at more than 200 public events across the country, including and beyond college campuses.[77] In July 2016, she introduced her mother at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia,[78] in a personal, emotional tribute[77] recalling her own upbringing and describing her mother's commitment to issues and to public service.[79]
Throughout the primary and general election campaigns, Clinton spoke about her mother's lifelong work on behalf of women, families, and children, highlighting her positions on healthcare,[80] affordable college tuition and reduction of student debt,[81][82] climate change,[83] women’s reproductive rights,[84] immigration reform,[85] gun violence,[84] and the importance of voter turnout.[82][83] Clinton gave birth to her second child during the campaign, five weeks before the convention, and she frequently spoke about motherhood and the issues women face in balancing work and home, including the challenges of breastfeeding.[76]
Even prior to her mother's receiving the nomination, Clinton frequently spoke out against candidate Trump's positions and rhetoric, explaining to reporters in Indianapolis in April that she does so because "I think it's important [for] all of us who feel like Mr. Trump's rhetoric of sexism and racism and Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hatred and stance has no place in our country."[77] Later, at a September general election campaign stop in Arizona she further said, "I never thought I would see in my lifetime the almost daily diet of hate speech coming out of Donald Trump... that too often goes unanswered and unrepudiated by the Republicans. The racism, the sexism, the Islamophobia, the homophobia, the jingoism, the demeaning rhetoric against Americans with disabilities, the disrespect for our veterans, the disrespect for a Gold Star family"[82] also calling his stand against Constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship "un-American".[82] At one appearance in September 2016, while answering a question about her mother's position supporting medical marijuana research, Clinton got some attention for an inaccurate comment she made regarding drug interactions with marijuana; she walked back the comment a few days later, acknowledging that she misspoke.[86].
Clinton Foundation
Chelsea Clinton speaking at the 2013 Zerokonferansen convention as a representative of the Clinton Foundation.
Since 2011, Clinton has taken a prominent role at the family's Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation,[87] and has had a seat on its board.[1] As part of her work, she gives paid speeches to raise money with her fees going directly to the foundation, whose goals relate to improving global health, creating opportunities for women, and promoting economic growth. A spokesperson for the foundation told The New York Times in 2014 that her speeches "are on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, and 100 percent of the fees are remitted directly to the foundation".[88][89]
Personal life
On July 31, 2010, Clinton and investment banker Marc Mezvinsky[90] were married in an interfaith ceremony in Rhinebeck, New York; she is Methodist and he is Jewish.[91] Mezvinsky's parents are former members of Congress, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky and Edward Mezvinsky, who were raised in the Conservative Jewish tradition. The senior Clintons and Mezvinskys were friends in the 1990s and their children met on a Renaissance Weekend retreat in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.[92] They first were reported to be a couple in 2005, and became engaged over Thanksgiving weekend in 2009.[90]
Following their wedding, the couple lived in New York City's Gramercy Park neighborhood for three years [91] and later purchased a condominium in the NoMad district of Manhattan for $10.5 million.[93] Their first child, a daughter, was born in September 2014,[94] and their son was born in June 2016.[95][96] Shortly after her son was born, the family moved to the nearby Flatiron District.[97] In January 2019, she announced her pregnancy with her third child, due that summer.[98]
Her estimated net worth is USD $15,000,000.[99]
In popular culture
Clinton is portrayed in the film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, where Butt-Head flirts with her; she responds by tossing him out of a window.[100] In Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, a Disney Channel Original Movie set in the year 2049, Clinton is the President of the United States.[101][102] This joke was also made in an episode of Clarissa Explains It All.[103]
In January 2015, Chelsea Clinton appeared in a Sesame Street skit with Elmo, advocating the importance of reading to young children.[104]PC manufacturer OriginPC today announced a pair of Chronos Steam Machines during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, piling on top of the already-announced systems from iBuyPower, CyberPowerPC, and Digital Storm.
OriginPC made clear that specifications for both the Standard and the SLI Editions of the Chronos Steam Machines are fully customizable, so you won't be locked into the specs listed below. In addition, the specs for both units listed below are subject to change, the company said.
Both units will be available starting in "early 2014," but pricing was not announced. However, looking at the specs, the machines are more than likely to carry price tags above the current going rate for the Xbox One or PlayStation 4.
In addition to Valve's own system, at least a dozen Steam Machines from third-party manufacturers are expected to be announced this week at the 2014 CES. We'll have a round-up of the systems--and further editorial analysis of the machines--as the week progresses.
Standard Edition Chronos:
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus VI Impact
ASUS Maximus VI Impact Optional Custom Paint With Automotive Finish
Liquid-Cooling: ORIGIN FROSTBYTE 120 Sealed Liquid Cooling Systems
ORIGIN FROSTBYTE 120 Sealed Liquid Cooling Systems Processor: Up to an Intel Core i7 4770K Quad-Core at 4.0-4.5GHZ with ORIGIN PC Professional CPU Overclocking
Up to an Intel Core i7 4770K Quad-Core at 4.0-4.5GHZ with ORIGIN PC Professional CPU Overclocking Power Supply: SG08 600 watt
SG08 600 watt Graphics Card: Up to Single 3GB NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti with Professional GPU Overclocking
Up to Single 3GB NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti with Professional GPU Overclocking Memory: Up to 16GB 2133Mhz (2x8GB)
Up to 16GB 2133Mhz (2x8GB) OS: Steam OS (Will Include Optional Dual Boot to Windows 7 or Windows 8 Home or Pro)
Steam OS (Will Include Optional Dual Boot to Windows 7 or Windows 8 Home or Pro) Hard Drive 1: Up to Dual 1TB Samsung 840 Evo Series
Up to Dual 1TB Samsung 840 Evo Series Hard Drive 2: 4TB Western Digital Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache
4TB Western Digital Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache Optical Drive: 6X BD-R Slim Blu-ray Burner/8X DVD+/-R/2.4X +DL
6X BD-R Slim Blu-ray Burner/8X DVD+/-R/2.4X +DL Audio: ROG SupremeFX High Definition 7.1 Channel
ROG SupremeFX High Definition 7.1 Channel Network: Built in Wi-Fi
SLI Edition Chronos:This Wednesday, May 1oth, Justice League of America #6, written by Steve Orlando with Ivan Reis and Joe Prado on art, hits newsstands, the second part of “Mythic”! Expect lots of heroism, mayhem, and… well, look at that cover! Check out these preview pages that DC Comics was kind enough to share!
What the Justice League of America creative team manages to accomplish month-in and month-out is raise the stakes and make readers feel a sense of urgency and concern for the characters. Batman and company took on the seemingly Sisyphean task of showing humans their inner heroes and how they took can step up in the name of good. Orlando matches the plots to that mission statement, showing groups of antagonists who claim to humanity’s best interests at heart, but are led astray by anger or pride or doubt. By juxtaposing examples of how not to act with how the JLA operates–as in the current “Mythic” storyline–we’re seeing that mission statement in action. With Reis and Prado on art duties, the result is a dynamic, action-filled tale that engages, educates, and inspires.
Justice League of America #6, written by Steve Orlando with Ivan Reis and Joe Prado on art, is on sale Wednesday, May 10th, from DC Comics.
From the official issue description:By the time that the fifth square is reached on the chessboard, the board contains a total of 31 grains of wheat.
The wheat and chessboard problem (sometimes expressed in terms of rice grains) is a mathematical problem expressed in textual form as:
If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?
The problem may be solved using simple addition. With 64 squares on a chessboard, if the number of grains doubles on successive squares, then the sum of grains on all 64 squares is: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 +... and so forth for the 64 squares. The total number of grains equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, much higher than most expect.
This exercise can be used to demonstrate how quickly exponential sequences grow, as well as to introduce exponents, zero power, capital-sigma notation and geometric series. Updated for modern times using pennies and the hypothetical question, "Would you rather have a million dollars or the sum of a penny doubled every day for a month?", the formula has been used to explain compounded interest.[1][2]
Origins [ edit ]
The problem appears in different stories about the invention of chess. One of them includes the geometric progression problem. The story is first known to have been recorded in 1256 by Ibn Khallikan.[3] Another version has the inventor of chess (in some tellings Sessa, an ancient Indian Minister) request his ruler give him wheat according to the wheat and chessboard problem. The ruler laughs it off as a meager prize for a brilliant |
says I will never walk as I have gone on to run 10k in 40 mins,' said the 26-year-old.
'At the moment I am just two minutes off a record for the 10k for a single leg amputee and I have that in my sights.
'It is bizarre and I just laugh about it. But it adds to my story I guess.
'The fact is that regardless of what the words says, the operation allowed me to walk and run and do so much else. You have got to see the funny side of it.'
As well as completing several runs Mr Grant won gold medals at the Invictus Games and has abseiled down the shard.
Mr Grant (right) recalls the conversation with his surgeon Commander Anthony Lambert (left) after the operation when he told the former Royal Marine that his tattoo had been changed following the amputation
The tattoo, originally reading 'You'll Never Walk Alone' now reads 'You'll Never Walk', which the father of three said he finds funny and has used to inspire him to try and complete record-breaking runs
Mr Grant had the operation four years ago and endured vigorous rehabilitation sessions for 18 months.
In 2009 he was serving with 45 Commando when he accidentally stepped on an IED. This severed his femoral artery and took out a 'big chunk' of his thigh.
He broke both the fibula and tibia in his right leg and lost 6cm of bone.
But two years after he decided to have his right leg amputated after watching comrades with similar injuries enjoying activities with their prosthetic legs.
He can still recall the conversation he had with surgeon Anthony Lambert when he woke up.
Mr Grant suffered was a 20-year-old commando in Afghanistan when he stepped on the IED
The blast severed Mr Grant's femoral artery, took out a section of his thigh and broke bones in his lower leg
Mr Lambert told him: 'Well, we had to raise a flap of skin on your leg to cover the bone ends... and it's meant that your Liverpool Football Club tattoos are a bit messed up.
'The Liver bird is a bit all over the place, and your tattoo now says "you'll never walk."'
The date of his blast, February 3, and the date of his amputation, November 25, are both anniversaries that Andy marks.
He said: 'I am very proud of my achievements and like to turn my story around to try and inspire other people about what they can achieve in the face of adversity.
Mr Grant had the amputation in 2010 and now competes in 10k races and does motivational speaking
The former Royal Marine is a Liverpool fan and is pictured with one of his idols, Robbie Fowler (right)
The Liverpool motto 'You'll Never Walk Alone' appears on the gates at Liverpool's ground at Anfield
'I am all about looking forward. I cannot undo what happened and I have no regrets. I am all about making the best of a bad situation.'
Mr Lambert now works as an inspirational speaker, going to events around the world. He has also determined to keep up his fitness.
He added: 'I have three children and an amazing family, I'm looking to row across the Atlantic, and I'm hoping to be picked for the Paralympics next year.
'My life has moved on in an amazing way and it's all down to what happened.John Wooden's statue outside Purdue's Mackey Arena. Purdue Athletics
John Wooden is forever known, first and foremost, as the coach who led UCLA to 10 NCAA titles. But the Indiana born-and-bred basketball legend has strong ties to the Hoosier State still to this day. He was a tremendous player -- people forget this; Wooden was a three-time All-American and one of the first true stars of college basketball -- while playing for the Boilermakers, including winning the Player of the Year in 1932.
Wooden's playing days came before there was an NCAA Tournament. But in 1932, the Boilermakers were awarded the national championship by the Helms Athletic Foundation.
On Saturday, Purdue formally dedicated a statue to Wooden, who died in June 2010 when at 99 years old, outside its basketball venue, Mackey Arena. It's one of the better statutes you'll see. Visually, it gets Wooden just right, in terms of who he was when he was a young man. The statue isn't huge, and the presentation is an appropriate mix of deference and humility.
Check out the new statue outside Mackey Arena of the 1932 National Player of the Year! #BoilerUphttps://t.co/0Ouk3UBUam — Purdue Hoops 🚂⬆️ (@BoilerBall) September 24, 2016
"The statue is gift of alumnus Jim Hicks and was designed by Julie Rotblatt-Amrany of Highland, Illinois, portraying Wooden during his playing days," per Purdue's press release. "Hicks, a 1961 Purdue graduate, and his wife, Neta, donated $2 million to establish the Jim and Neta Hicks Endowment for Leadership in Agriculture at the university. Part of the gift was used to fund the Wooden statue."
The great touch with the statue is how Wooden's iconic Pyramid of Success is displayed behind him.
Let's take a closer look at this statue. Wooden is jacked!
This is now the kind of thing you'll see coming back from commercial pretty much any time Purdue plays a game on national television. Wooden's legacy at Purdue will forever endure.Messi: I have no ego…
By Football Espana staff
Barcelona’s Lionel Messi has offered brief sentiment this week on his personal life and on if his current standing in the game has affected him.
The 25-year-old recently won a record fourth consecutive Ballon d’Or title and last calendar year broke a world record for goals scored.
Having also recently surpassed 300 career goals at Barca, the Argentine chatted briefly to Esquire magazine for their latest issue.
“I have no ego,” he answered, when asked of his personality away from the field.
“Or at least I feel like I do not. I still have to improve on everything.”
The Argentine also briefly commented on his personal life and how he views it.
“I will never write my memoirs because I want my private life to be just that, private.
“My newborn son? I am happy to know that he is there at home after practice and games.
“I am not obsessed for him to become a footballer. Whatever he will do in life, I will support him.”Everton manager Ronald Koeman says Wayne Rooney is fit enough to play back-to-back matches on a three-day turnaround.
The 31-year-old, who re-joined boyhood club Everton from Manchester United in July, has started every match of the season so far, playing the full 90 minutes in five of the Toffees' six fixtures and 86 minutes of the sixth.
The former England captain was a bit-part player at Manchester United last season, starting just 15 Premier League matches, with many of those appearances coming at the end of the campaign when manager Jose Mourinho was focusing on the Europa League.
But Koeman says Rooney is raring to go after a full pre-season campaign, and will be fit enough to start against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, just 63 hours after the full-time whistled sounded on their 1-1 draw with Hadjuk Split in Croatia.
"It is not surprising for me," Koeman said.
"He did the biggest part of the pre-season with the team and that is really good. If he came in a situation like Gylfi [Sigurdsson, who joined Everton from Swansea this week] maybe it would have been more difficult.
"He did good training and played the friendlies and that is what players need. He has good fitness."
And, when asked whether Rooney would be fit to face the Premier League champions on Sunday, Koeman replied: "I think so. Good players know to play the ball to the right colour and don’t need to run so much."
Koeman also says Rooney spoke with him before announcing his retirement from international football this week, but he left the decision down to the player.
"It is a feeling from inside when it is enough. That comes from the player. If he asked me I would give advice, but he did not ask yes or no," the Dutchman continued.
"He said he would have a discussion with Gareth Southgate and discuss his future and I said 'okay, I understand and if your feeling is yes, so yes, and if no, say no'. That was the best way to make a decision.
"Now he has a tough season with the league and cup games so it is a good break for him, which is what he needs. To relax and to recover."
You can watch all of Everton's Europa League campaign on the eir Sport package. The Toffees will face French side Lyon, Serie A club Atalanta and Apollon Limassol of Cyprus.in Group E.
Photo Inpho/ Mark Robinson
eir Sport channels are available across the eir Vision, Sky and Vodafone TV platforms as well as on the eir Sport app. All 7 channels in the eir Sport pack are available for free if you are a residential eir broadband customer.We’re pleased to bring you the premiere of Chicago punk rockers Tens‘ new song “Eternal Palms” (listen below). The song is taken from the band’s forthcoming self-titled full-length album, being released June 10th and will be made available through their Bandcamp.
Mike Petruccelli comments on the song:
“‘Eternal Palms’ is the first and only song about infidelity I’ll ever write. It’s written from the height of dealing with the emotions and people involved at the time. It highlights the internal conflicts with forgiveness in an observational way, but doesn’t shy away from the more unforgiving feelings I had in the moment. Things worked out in the end though and this song serves as a reminder of that more than anything.”
Tens feature Mike Petruccelli (Rapids), Kyle Manning (Fuck You Idiot, City Mouse, Costanza) and Ryan Smith (Two Houses, Texas Chainstore Manager). They are upbeat, catchy, loud punk rock; the kind you find yourself having a great dance to and singing your heart out along with at shows.
Upcoming Shows:
June 10 – Chicago, IL at Auxiliary Art Centre (Release Show) w/ Big Night In, Mecha Shiva and Otto Mann
June 11 – Chicago, IL at Saki Records w/ The Cellphones and Dog & WolfBook by Milton Mayer
Review by Thom Hartmann, originally published at buzzflash.com on November 7, 2005.
"They Thought They Were Free" is an intensely personal book for me. Although I was born after Hitler was five years dead, the horrible dance between fascism and democracy has fascinated me since childhood. And, through a series of odd coincidences, my adult life has been heavily intertwined with those of both Nazis and the victims of Hitler's Nazis.
Throughout my life, I've had several close friends who lost family members in the Holocaust. I've spent a lot of time in Israel, sobbed at Yad Vashem, and my wife Louise and I played a role in two of our closest friends, Hal and Shelley Cohen, starting Orr Shalom, which is now one of the largest Jewish programs for abused children in Israel. Before I learned English as a baby I was speaking Yiddish, learned from our Holocaust-survivor neighbors in Detroit who cared for me when my parents worked, and so can today recite both Hebrew prayers and speak German with accents and inflections more characteristic of a first than a second language.
On the other side of the coin, this Sunday morning I'm having breakfast with an old and dear friend, Armin Lehmann. At the age of sixteen, Armin was the Hitler Youth courier who handed to Adolf Hitler the papers that caused Hitler to commit suicide two days later. Armin was there when the suicide happened. He was there when Josef and Magda Goebbels poisoned their six children and then committed suicide. He watched it all. If you see the movie "Downfall," you'll see a teenage actor depicting my friend Armin.
Armin and I first met in 1984 when we were paired up by a marketing/training company to lecture in Amsterdam (and, later, many other cities) to teach advertising, marketing, and communications for American Express and KLM. I had no idea he had been Hitler's last courier, or that he would later write a book about it titled In Hitler's Bunker: A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer's Last Days. We were friends for 15 years before he told me of his experiences. Armin is now a tireless campaigner for world peace.
Armin's revelation to me about his past came when an old friend of mine and I set out to write a book about the religion -- the cult -- of the Nazis. Scott and I traveled all across Europe, interviewing people from Dr. Wilfried Daim, the author of the ground-breaking book Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab ("The Man Who Gave Hitler The Idea") about Georg Lanz von Liebenfels, to the hereditary ruler of one of Europe's smaller constitutional monarchies who shared shocking but background-only stories with us. We snuck into and photographed the altar in an old castle where Hitler initiated his inner circle, still kept pristine but largely unknown in Germany, near an SS cemetery where every week fresh-cut flowers appear and the tombstones are regularly polished to a high gloss. We infiltrated a meeting of aging SS members, complete with black candles and wreaths hung from the ceiling, near Wewelsburg, a city in Germany that Hitler intended to turn into his Vatican for his Thousand Years of Peace. On our way into the meeting, we passed a house decorated with ancient runes and human skulls. When discovered, we fled fearing for our lives. (Scott and I ended up not finishing the book after several unsettling and threatening experiences. I decided it would be less dangerous and more productive to investigate and write a book about the Kennedy assassination.)
Years before that (1978), I'd met a former Nazi who so impressed me with his commitment to peace and his deep spirituality (much learned from his Hasidic mentor, a Polish Jew who
survived the Holocaust) that I wrote a book about him titled "The Prophet's Way." (It's also available in German.) In the years I lived in Germany (1986/87), I met and got to know at least two-dozen elderly Germans who hated Hitler, who loved Hitler, and every shade in between.
I preface this review of Milton Mayer's book with all this personal and historical/reference information by way of hopefully establishing enough credibility in your mind to make a simple statement:
It could happen here, too.
This was also Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Nazis. An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant reporter, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 Nazis. This book is, in large part, his story of that experience. Intertwined through it -- written in 1955 -- are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans -- us, today.
Mayer opens the book by noting that he was prepared to hate the Nazis he would meet. But, he wrote, he discovered they were just as human as the rest of us:
I liked them. I couldn't help it. Again and again, as I sat or walked with one or another of my ten [Nazi] friends, I was overcome by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before [in the 1930s]. I liked Al Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her better than I treated mine.
He writes about how if he were to die tonight, at least he could look back on some good he had done. But his Nazi friends would never be able to die in peace, knowing the evil they had participated in, if even by acts of omission, could never be wiped clean. And he dreaded that Americans would ever feel the same for the acts we may one day commit as a nation.
Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany - not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came home a little bit afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under combined pressure of reality and illusion. I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.
If I - and my countrymen - ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.
One of his closing chapters, "Peoria Uber Alles," is so poignant and prescient that were Mayer still alive today I doubt he could read it out loud without his voice breaking. It's the story of how what happened in Germany could just as easily happen in Peoria, Illinois, particularly if the city were to become isolationistic and suffered some sort of natural or man-made disaster or attack that threw its people into the warm but deadly embrace of authoritarianism.
The [Peorian] individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought - and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, it's first function the preservation of all its members. Every normal personality of the day becomes an 'authoritarian personality.' A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens - 95 percent or so of the population - duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly, but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.
Among Mayer's stories are some of the most telling aspects of how the Nazis came to take over Germany (and much of Europe). I first quoted them a year ago in a Common Dreams article linked from BuzzFlash titled The Myth of National Victimhood. I noted that Mayer told how one of his friends said:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....
As a friend of Mayer's noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter....
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
In this conversation, Mayer's friend suggests that he wasn't making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but simply pointing out an undisputable reality. This, he suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.
"Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic....
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God."...
Mayer's friend pointed out the terrible challenge faced then by average Germans, and today by peoples across the world, as governments are taken over by authoritarian, corporatist -- fascist -- regimes.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?" Mayer's friend asked rhetorically. And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, he had to candidly answer: "Frankly, I do not know."
This was the great problem that Mayer's Nazis and so many in their day faced.
As Mayer's Nazi friend noted, "I do not see, even now [how we could have stopped it]. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - 'Resist the beginnings' and 'consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?"
And here we are.
Sinclair Broadcast Group runs right-wing editorials on its stations over public airways with no pretense of balance.
Former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen tells me that he was ordered to always have at least two conservatives on the Donahue show whenever one liberal appeared, "and three conservatives to Michael Moore."
Hundreds of hours a day of right-wing programming pour out of radio stations nationwide, and conservative extremists are the most common "guests" and "experts" on network news and weekend political TV shows.
The 2004 election may have been stolen with massive nationwide fraud -- the statistics in New Mexico, Ohio, and Florida are truly startling -- and Alliance for Democracy lawyer Cliff Arnebeck has filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al, suggesting that Kerry actually won Ohio. The story was only covered in any depth by C-SPAN (Real Media).
The possibility that the election of 2002 was also stolen -- particularly in Georgia, where Max Cleland losing his seat to Saxby Chambliss gave Republicans control of the Senate -- has never been seriously investigated. There is no paper trail from that election, as it was entirely done on paperless voting machines.
And when a consortium of news organizations recounted the Florida 2000 vote and it was found that Al Gore actually won the entire state -- and thus the presidency -- no matter what standard was used to count the ballots, the corporate news organizations of America buried the story (although the New York Times and Washington Post at least did report it).
Our Attorney General calls the Geneva Conventions "quaint"; our Secretary of Defense stands accused of ordering torture; our President and Vice President knowingly lie to us and the world in order to lead an election-year preemptive war; and Congress passes the PATRIOT Act without reading it -- eerily like the German Parliament passed the Enabling Acts after the Reichstag was burned.
So how to counter it?
As Mayer so movingly narrates, the experience of 20th century Europe demonstrates that those abusing power must be confronted with equally vigorous power.
In the 1930s, Germans who believed in republican democracy were overwhelmed before they realized how completely their civil liberties and national institutions had been seized.
We must not allow it to happen in our nation. Read "They Thought They Were Free" and awaken as many as you can.So it's not all sweetness and light. Firefly romance is risky. For the most part, these adult fireflies don't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores, but somewhere along the line, one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins. This evolutionary flaw, which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner, has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent. Dubbed "femme fatales" by Jim Lloyd, another colleague, these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species. So the hunt begins with the predator — she's shown here in the lower left — where she's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey, and here's how it might go. First the prey male flashes, "Do you love me?" His own female responds, "Maybe." So then he flashes again. But this time, the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said. She's not looking for love: she's looking for toxins. If she's good, she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him, and he's not just a light snack. Over the next hour, she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains. Unable to make their own toxins, these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals. So a firefly vampire, brought to you by natural selection.Help us map out Chicago's Poké Stops and gyms that are part of the mobile game. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Ariel Cheung
CHICAGO — Maybe you've heard of this thing called Pokémon Go?
The new smartphone game that sends out intrepid collectors into the real world to catch those lovable virtual Nintendo creatures called Pokémon has made waves worldwide and in Chicago.
Whether you are on Team Valor, Team Mystic or Team Instinct, we're creating a map to help you nab Pokémon within Chicago city limits.
Help us fill it out by telling us where you found a Poké Stop, gym or a stray Pokémon. The form's below the map.
While DNAinfo has attempted to confirm the accuracy of the location information provided by our users, it’s possible that reported information is wrong, outdated or located in an unsafe place. Please use good judgment, have fun and play safe.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:This story was written and reported by an investigative reporting class at the University of Cincinnati. Reporting by Morgan Batanian, Katie Coburn, Fernanda Crescente, Taylor Jackson, Tyler Kuhnash and Camri Nelson. Research contributed by Taylor Hayden, Talis Linauts, Kayleigh Murch, Matt Nichols, Malia Pitts and Lauren Smith.
Kevin Leugers pays the University of Cincinnati to provide him with a quality education.
The second-year student majoring in marketing and philosophy had no idea officials had quietly funneled tens of millions of dollars from students to the athletic department in recent years to cover the difference between revenue and expenses.
“It seems to be a corruption of education, in all honesty,” says Leugers, a University Honors Program student and Kolodzik Business Scholar. “Athletics is being given priority over education, over the professors, over the students. I just think that’s wrong.”
In 2013, UC officials provided the athletic department with a $21.75 million subsidy, records show, using student fees and money from the school’s general fund, which is primarily funded by tuition. The total subsidy amounts to $1,024 out of the pocket of every full-time undergraduate student on UC’s main campus. The four-year price tag costs each student more than $4,000.
The money represents 20 percent of the $20,000 Leugers plans to borrow to finance his education.
The athletic department’s four-year hidden tax may very well exceed $4,000 per student. In 2014 the subsidy rose to more than $27 million, a 25-percent increase.
Since 2007, University of Cincinnati trustees and administrators have used more than $127 million in student fees and general fund money to subsidize deficits in the athletic department, according to UC’s NCAA Revenue & Expense reports.
Thomas Humes, UC’s board chair and a trustee since 2007, says the $127 million sports subsidy is a necessity to keep pace with other programs.
“I think it is a requirement,” says Humes, a developer and former UC administrator.
Humes says sports are “a good investment for the university as a whole” and that the board decided every dollar given to the athletic department was money well spent.
“There has been a decision that whatever that investment number is that it is a positive investment for the university,” he says. “I don’t view it as a concern.”
The investment certainly brought a high return in 2014 to some UC coaches, particularly compared to the university’s 334 student-athletes. The university provided the students with $5.99 million in scholarship aid, less than 11 percent of the $55.4 million in athletic expenditures, according to UC’s NCAA report.
That same year, UC paid a dozen coaches on the football and men’s basketball teams more than $10.5 million, 19 percent of total spending. At the top was Tommy Tuberville, UC’s head football coach, who received $3.8 million.
The situation at the University of Cincinnati is not unique. A CityBeat investigation of the eight largest public universities in Ohio in the Football Bowl Subdivision found that with one exception, college administrators and trustees impose hidden fees and invisible taxes on thousands of working-class students who pay tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to keep money-losing athletic departments afloat.
“It’s Robin Hood in reverse,” says Jeff Smith, a college sports subsidies expert who teaches management at the University of South Carolina Upstate. “These schools are imposing a regressive tax on those students least able to afford it. If I were a student, I would be screaming about this.”
Many of these same schools are cutting faculty jobs and slashing academic spending. Between 2005 and 2013, academic spending per full-time undergraduate student at UC, adjusted for inflation, dropped 24 percent, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a national group of current and former college presidents seeking to reform college athletics using research studies and, more recently, online databases.
In other words, over the past decade UC leaders have used student fees and tuition to cover a nearly five-fold increase in the athletic department’s annual deficit while cutting academic spending per student by almost 25 percent.
CityBeat asked UC President Santa Ono, whose Twitter hashtag is “HottestCollegeinAmerica,” for an interview to discuss these findings. Ono's official biography says he “has gained a reputation as a chief executive who is accessible and responsive to the university’s wide range of constituents.” He declined to be interviewed.
Like UC, most Ohio public universities have an open checkbook for sports and a tightfisted approach to academic spending. For example:
• Over the past decade, annual sports spending — and subsidies — at the University of Akron more than doubled. During these years, students paid more than $130 million in athletic fees, records show. In 2014, Akron Athletic Director Tom Wistrcill used $13,000 to purchase bobble-head likenesses of then-President Luis Proenza to express his appreciation to the president for having “ensured that the university provides our student athletes and coaches with first class facilities.” Meanwhile, trustees have raised tuition and slashed academic spending, including the elimination of more than 100 jobs. Wistrcill told CityBeat the university is giving students what they want. “We get institutional support both from the students and from the campus to make our budget work, and we feel like we provide a great part of the student experience to the non-athletes,” he said.
• Miami University is the most expensive four-year public college in the nation, according to a 2014 U.S. Department of Education report. One reason: sports subsidies. In 2013, each full-time undergraduate student provided the athletic department with $1,266, the highest subsidy among Ohio’s eight largest FBS public schools. That same year, the university’s Board of Trustees and President David Hodge were so pleased with the athletic department’s performance they gave Athletic Director David Sayler a five-year extension.
Sayler declined comment for this story. While annual athletic spending increased 44 percent over the past decade, the president and trustees made $50 million in budget cuts outside athletics. The Knight Commission database shows that between 2005 and 2013, inflation-adjusted academic spending — including faculty salaries, department research and student services — for each full-time undergraduate dropped 6 percent at Miami University, a school that advertises itself as “Ohio’s Public Ivy.” Alexa Brown, a third-year art education student, says officials should back up their slogan with action: “If we’re trying to be Ivy League, we should focus more on academics rather than trying to be like the Big Ten.”
• At Bowling Green State University, each full-time undergraduate student paid almost $1,000 to subsidize sports in 2013. Since then, the BGSU Board of Trustees has cut 130 faculty jobs, according to David Jackson, an associate professor of political science and president of the BGSU Faculty Association. The trustees did significantly raise funding in one area ostensibly related to academics: They increased President Mary Ellen Mazey’s compensation 40 percent to $600,149, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“University administrators tend to take care of themselves and make sure that they are very well paid,” Jackson says.
Kevin Leugers, second-year marketing and philosophy student at the University of Cincinnati
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Students at each of these schools told CityBeat they were unaware they were subsidizing the athletic department.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” says Ellyn DeLisle, a second-year fashion merchandising student at the University of Akron. “I don’t know how else they can get funds, but I feel like there has to be a way other than charging students and not telling them.”
David Ridpath, an associate professor of sports administration at Ohio University, is familiar with DeLisle’s plight. After spending years studying athletic subsidies at public universities throughout Ohio, he found most school officials try to hide the diversion of money.
“They don’t want people to see it,” Ridpath says. “Universities don’t respond until they get embarrassed.”
[Follow the money: Examine your school's academic spending over time and compare with other schools by using the Knight |
the Economic Development Corporation that Governor Chafee attended that he had neither seen nor heard about anything relating to our reports. He had been provided everything he could have wanted or needed to be informed, yet beyond of the name of our company he knew nothing.”
While it is easy to lay blame on Chafee, Schilling, and others for the failures of 38 Studios, the ultimate demise of the company and Project Copernicus was likely set in stone years before. The extra spending and over-zealous ambition of Schilling certainly contributed to the fall of the company, but the end-goal was nearly impossible to achieve right from the start. Project Copernicus now serves as a cautionary tale for new developers, and the rise and fall of 38 Studios a curious moment of gaming history. As for Kingdoms of Amalur, it is the only doorway into Schilling’s vision and now serves as a lasting legacy of a failed game company.
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!A former maths and economics teacher at one of Auckland's top schools funded a gambling addiction by getting credit cards in the name of a missing man and running up thousands of dollars in debt.
Photo: AFP
Rafe Callum Fannin appeared in the Auckland District Court today, where he was sentenced to nine months' home detention after earlier admitting charges of obtaining by deception and using a document for pecuniary advantage.
Judge David Harvey described the crimes as identity theft.
Fannin - who worked as a maths and economics teacher at Auckland Grammar - used Facebook to get the date of birth and name of Jamie Stephen Herdman, who disappeared in the Australian Northern Territory back in 2006.
He initially used Mr Herdman's details to get a driver's licence but, instead of a photo of Mr Herdman, he included one of himself.
The 36-year-old then applied to a number of banks and got credit cards, which he used to run up thousands in debt.
Judge Harvey said it was calculated offending that involved a significant amount of pre-meditation.
There was also a level of self-deception, he said, with Fannin telling himself he was just borrowing the money and would one day pay it back with his winnings.
The judge said, when it came to intelligence, Fannin was by no means a babe in the woods.
He said he would have been well aware that, when it came to gambling, the house always won.
Fannin also used the identities of his work colleagues.
He used the drivers' licences of two teachers he worked with and racked up thousands more in their names.
In total, he notched up $67,408 in debt.
Judge Harvey has ordered him to pay the money back.
Fannin was able to pay a lump sum of $1500 and $20 a week after that, because he was still supporting his wife and three children.
That meant the debt would not be paid off until the year 2078, by which time Fannin would be 99 years old.
Fannin still held a teaching certificate but was no longer working at Auckland Grammar and would serve his home detention in Whangarei.Media playback is not supported on this device Manchester United: Louis van Gaal is the new manager
Louis van Gaal has been named as Manchester United manager, with Ryan Giggs as his assistant.
Van Gaal, 62, has signed a three-year contract to succeed David Moyes.
The Dutchman, who has won titles with Ajax, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and AZ Alkmaar, will take charge at Old Trafford after leading the Netherlands at this summer's World Cup in Brazil.
I have managed in games at Old Trafford before and know what an incredible arena Old Trafford is and how passionate and knowledgeable the fans are Louis van Gaal
"This club has big ambitions. I too have big ambitions," he said. "Together I'm sure we will make history."
Van Gaal said he had always wanted to work in the Premier League.
He added: "To work as a manager for Manchester United, the biggest club in the world, makes me very proud.
"I have managed in games at Old Trafford before and know what an incredible arena Old Trafford is and how passionate and knowledgeable the fans are."
After ending the reign of Moyes in April after a troubled 10 months, United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward is convinced he has appointed the right man this time.
"His track record of success in winning leagues and cups across Europe throughout his career makes him the perfect choice," said Woodward.
Glory for Van Gaal National titles: Ajax (1993-94, 1994-95, 1995-96), Barcelona (1997-98, 1998-99), AZ Alkmaar (2008-09), Bayern Munich (2009-10)
Champions League: Ajax (1994-95)
Uefa Cup: Ajax (1991-92)
"In Louis van Gaal, we have secured the services of one of the outstanding managers in the game today.
"Old Trafford provides him with a fitting stage on which to write new chapters in the Manchester United story."
It seems Van Gaal has wasted no time in making his intentions clear.
"Louis has already communicated some great ideas for how the club can move forward," said United co-chairman Avie Glazer.
"The board is right behind him in his plans and everyone here is already looking forward to the start of next season."
Giggs, 40, who took charge for the final four games of the season following the departure of Moyes, met Van Gaal in the Netherlands last week to talk about his future.
Louis van Gaal is a world-class coach and I know I will learn a lot about coaching from being able to observe and contribute at such close quarters Ryan Giggs
His appointment as assistant marks the end of an illustrious playing career during which he won 34 major trophies in 802 starts and 161 substitute appearances.
"I am thrilled to have the chance to serve as assistant manager," said the Welshman.
"Louis van Gaal is a world-class coach and I know I will learn a lot about coaching from being able to observe and contribute at such close quarters.
"Manchester United has been a huge part of my life and I'm delighted to be able to continue that relationship in such a key role."
In addition to Giggs, it has also been confirmed Frans Hoek, the current Netherlands' goalkeeping coach who was instrumental in the development of Edwin van der Sar, will become Van Gaal's assistant coach, specialising in goalkeeping, whilst Marcel Bout has joined United as assistant coach, specialising in opposition scouting.
United finished seventh in the Premier League, after a title defence that featured one-sided defeats by Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea.
They have failed to qualify for the Champions League for the first time since 1995-96 and are out of European football entirely for the first time in 25 years.
Club legend Giggs, Real Madrid boss Carlo Ancelotti and Borussia Dortmund manager Jurgen Klopp had been linked to the post, but Van Gaal is the man trusted to restore the club to the top of the domestic and European game.
Former United assistant manager Mike Phelan told BBC Radio 5 live said: "He's got a big personality, but for a club like Manchester United that's what is required. You have to get on with the job and hit the ground running and I'm sure he will do that."
Known for employing an attacking style and his demands for discipline from his players, he came to prominence when he guided a young Ajax team, featuring Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids and Patrick Kluivert, to a Champions League final victory over AC Milan in 1995.
Second time around? Van Gaal claimed in his 2009 autobiography he had been lined up to replace Sir Alex Ferguson at United in 2002, but the Scot changed his mind to continue at the helm for another 11 years.
He won two Spanish league titles with Barcelona, but failed to qualify for the 2002 World Cup with the Netherlands.
Van Gaal returned to Barca, but left the Catalans only three points above the relegation zone in La Liga when he was dismissed after half a season.
He revived his reputation back in his homeland, leading AZ Alkmaar to only the second Dutch title in their history, and then, in his first season in charge, took Bayern Munich to the German title and the Champions League final in 2010.
He was dismissed after results tailed off in the following campaign but laid the foundations for Bayern's current domination of German football by promoting young players such as midfielder Thomas Muller.
He has a strong relationship with United striker Robin van Persie, whom he installed as Netherlands captain in June 2013, and is expected to be given significant transfer funds to bring in new players as the club plot their path back to the top.
"I have been extremely impressed by his intelligence, thoughtful approach to the role and his diligence," said Woodward. "I am looking forward to working with him."
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho praised Van Gaal's credentials and character.
"He is a great football manager and I am happy he joins me in the same country and the Premier League," said the Portuguese.
"But more important than that, he's a great guy, a great man and I wish him well."The Kraft family, which owns the New England Patriots and New England Revolution, is working with investment banking giant Goldman Sachs to finance a soccer stadium in Boston. Representatives of the Krafts most recently met with city officials in early July.
Goldman Sachs has developed a reputation in sports circles as a hub of venue financing deals. Before he got to Goldman Sachs, the leader of its stadium financing team worked with the Krafts to help finance Gillette Stadium, according to a January profile by Bloomberg.
Goldman Sachs helped the Yankees finance a controversial and complex stadium deal in New York, and the company has been involved with venue financing for the Orlando Magic, Sacramento Kings, European soccer teams, and more.
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As Major League Soccer has grown, most clubs have begun playing in soccer-specific stadiums, seating 30,000 or fewer fans. Urban settings with public transit access are considered ideal for attracting soccer fans. The Revolution have been touting an urban stadium as a goal since 2006. They currently play at Gillette Stadium, which seats more than 65,000 and is located in suburban Massachusetts.
Since last year, the Krafts have had their eyes on a parcel of land owned by the city on the South Boston/South End border.
The Krafts shared simple renderings of the stadium site with state officials last year. MLS Commissioner Don Garber said last week that he had seen more recent renderings. The Revolution have also in the past looked at sites in Roxbury, Revere, and Somerville.
Kraft representatives met most recently with city officials on July 8. That meeting was attended by the city’s CFO, David Sweeney, and Mayor Marty Walsh’s chief of staff, Dan Koh, according to a city spokeswoman. The two sides had previously met in December and March.
Goldman Sachs has been working with the Krafts on the stadium plan since at least the December meeting.
The city received a packet of documents prepared by Goldman Sachs at the July 8 meeting. Most of the pages provided to Boston.com through a public records request were redacted. In non-redacted portions, the packet noted Goldman Sachs’s intentions of “serving as underwriter on a future transaction.’’
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A section about how the new Yankee Stadium was paid for in the Bronx was also left un-redacted. The financing mechanism in New York was tricky, and replicating it in its exact form may no longer be an option for cities and sports teams.
The team and the city found a loophole, allowing the Yankees to finance the stadium with low-interest, tax-exempt bonds issued by a public economic development agency, similar to the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
The Yankees are covering that debt with private money, but by using the low-interest bonds available to the city, they save a whole lot of money on interest compared to other forms of debt.
The stadium land is owned by the city, and the structure itself is owned by the economic development agency. The Yankees set up a new corporation to operate the stadium and make payments to the city through stadium revenues, which are then put toward paying off the debt.
New York used similar strategies to help finance the new Mets baseball stadium and the Brooklyn Nets basketball arena.
The Yankee Stadium deal was criticized by some as a taxpayer subsidy for the stadiums; even if the Yankees cover all the costs of the stadium, the tax-exempt bonds carry a federal cost.
The loophole was made harder to thread by the IRS in 2008, with new, more stringent, regulations on these sorts of deals.
It’s not clear why the example was included in the packet—whether Goldman Sachs is proposing a modified version, or whether the example was included just to show examples of its prior work financing stadiums. Anything specific about how Boston or the Krafts would pay for a soccer stadium was removed prior to being provided to Boston.com.
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City Hall declined to discuss the contents of the Goldman Sachs packet, with a spokeswoman saying: “The city is in preliminary conversations on this proposal and it’s too early at this point to discuss specifics.’’ Stacey James, a spokesman for the Krafts, also called the discussions “preliminary’’ in a brief phone call.
The Boston Globe previously reported that the Krafts once proposed having the city pay for the stadium, with the Krafts paying the debt off through a tax on ticket sales. City Hall has been said to be cool to the idea.
The city’s recent rebuff of a 2024 Olympic bid—for which the proposed Olympic stadium was competing for space with the Krafts’ soccer venue plan—also showed a region that has little patience for the idea of publicly financed sports venues.
Robert Kraft is no stranger to stadium struggles in Boston. His efforts to bring the Patriots to town in the 1990s were fruitless, leading him to build Gillette Stadium near the team’s old stadium site in Foxborough.
Meet the future of U.S. men’s soccerImage caption Europol says cross-border specialised teams are needed to tackle card fraud
Data breaches in the US account for most of the credit card fraud affecting the EU, a new police report says.
Criminal gangs are making about 1.5bn euros (£1.2bn; $2bn) annually from such fraud, the EU police agency Europol says, regretting that compliance with new security features remains patchy.
In 2011 nearly all fraud involving EU cards took place outside the EU. Chip-and-PIN security used in the EU is not yet global, Europol notes.
Such fraud cases overseas have risen.
Besides the US, the fraud networks are also very active in Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Russia, Europol says.
"So far most of the credit card numbers misused in the EU have come from data breaches in the US," Europol says, adding that most illegal face-to-face card transactions with EU-issued cards also happened in the US.
In 2011 alone nearly 727m payment cards were issued in the EU.
Fraudulent "card-not-present" transactions, where personal data is stolen on the internet, account for about 60% of the losses from credit card fraud, according to Europol.
The agency is launching a new Cybercrime Centre in The Hague this week, dedicated to fighting such crimes.
Europol notes a range of problems in tackling credit card fraud:We wrote about this tour last year and are happy to see it coming around again. Though the stops are the same, Esotouric's Kim Cooper told LAist to expect more videos than in previous versions of the tour, plus an expanded presentation on The Bags, the punk rock outfit that got into a fight with Tom Waits at Canter's.
If you've ever wanted to experience L.A. like Tom Waits—who hasn't, right?—then this Saturday is your chance. It's time for Esotouric Tours' annual Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits' L.A. Bus Tour.
Led by San Francisco pop critic David Smay, the tour begins downtown and winds through Hollywood and Silver Lake before returning to its origin in the Arts District.
Esotouric Tours are a little different than the ones constantly being hawked on Hollywood Blvd. Kim Cooper and Richard Schave lead tours of a forgotten, seedier Los Angeles. Cooper describes their tours as "a sophisticated spin on the idea of the guided L.A. bus tour: true crime, social history, literary lore, architecture, urban theory, spirituality and a little bit of rock 'n roll." Waits-expert Smay has been working with Cooper for a long time, co-editing two music history works, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth and Lost in the Grooves. Smay wrote a 33 1/3 book called Swordfishtrombones about the Waits album of the same name, and Cooper said she "immediately saw the narrative potential for the book to become a bus tour." This worked out for Smay, who had done a lot of research that he couldn't fit into the book.
This year's tour will be the group's seventh Waits-themed tour, giving a historical and musical depiction of what life was like in downtown L.A. and Hollywood in the '70s.
"There's no songwriter from L.A. that covers L.A. the way Tom Waits did," Smay says. "The Doors, The Birds, etc. They're not talking about La Cienega and Cahuenga. He was really as close to a poet laureate that you get, along with Bukowski."
As downtown changes, so does the tour. Smay says they used to begin at King Eddy's, but it no longer opens early enough. They used to end at Clifton's, but the famous diner is currently closed for renovations.
"We started giving the tour when downtown was still perceived as being dirty and scary and a place many of our passengers were not familiar with," Cooper says. "Now, we regularly have downtown loft dwellers getting on the bus, and our guests don't think twice about meeting the bus in the Arts District. And of course, many old buildings along our route have been lost to redevelopment or altered beyond recognition. Happily, that hasn't happened to any of the core tour locations… yet."
Passengers can expect to learn about Skid Row and SRO Housing in reference to the Ralph Waite film On the Nickel, for which Waits wrote and performed the soundtrack. They'll also visit legendary recording studio Sunset Sound; see where Waits' former home, the Tropicana Motel (now a Ramada); learn about the time Tom Waits got in a fight with a punk band at the Troubadour; and visit spots from Waits' "In the Neighborhood" video in Silver Lake. The bus is also equipped to play music and video clips to help illustrate the narrative.
Smay says he looks forward to the tour every year, as he gets to meet new Tom Waits fans with their own experiences. "It's just fun to bring a lot of depth and context to something you're already interested in," he said.
Guests should expect the tour to last about four hours, with occasional stops, including one at Canter's for complimentary coffee and cookies. Bring a snack, wear comfy shoes and get ready to learn everything you ever wanted to know and more about Waits and his L.A.‚ or what Smay refers to as "an inexhaustible subject." Tour information and tickets ($63) can be found here.
If you can't make this tour, look out for the 'Echo Park Book of the Dead,' which Cooper described as a true-crime tour that's going to be "completely unhinged." They also conduct tours on the life of Beth Short (the Black Dahlia), and Raymond Chandler (with added bonus information about secrets cults and a real-life Philip Marlowe). Their tours were the result of The 1947 Project, which documented one entire year of true crime in L.A. 1947 was an eventful year, featuring one of history's most notorious and mysterious murders, The Black Dahlia case.The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have hired John Garrett as their wide receivers coach, according to reports by Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times and Pewter Report. Garrett will replace P.J. Fleck, who left to become the head coach of Western Michigan. Fleck oversaw Vincent Jackson's addition to the offense, who promptly had the best season of his career, while Mike Williams rebounded from a poor 2011 effort.
More: McNulty hired as QB coach | Raiders hire Greg Olson as OC
Garrett was most recently the passing game coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys, while being their tight ends coach for four previous seasons. Garrett is Dallas head coach Jason Garrett's brother. It's not clear whether John Garrett was let go, encouraged to seek other employment or some other euphemism for "you're fired", but the Cowboys fired several assistant coaches this offseason. A not so flattering quote on his time with the Cowboys, courtesy of the Dallas Star-Telegram:
According to multiple sources, John Garrett was not well liked by other staffers at the team's Valley Ranch headquarters. There has also been a lack of tight end development behind Pro Bowler Jason Witten during his tenure.
Of course, such rumors are fairly common when coaches are fired.
Garrett coached Jason Witten and notably Martellus Bennett during his time in Dallas. Bennett never lived up to his potential under Garrett, but Witten turned into the league's best tight end with the coach's guidance, producing all of his 1,000-yard seasons with Garrett as coach. Garrett's connection with Martellus Bennett may help the Bucs persuade the tight end to come to Tampa, if they choose to pursue the impending free agent.
Garrett himself spent one season as a wide receiver in the NFL with the Cincinnati Bengals, producing a whopping two catches for 29 yards in 1991. He became a front office assistant with the Buccaneers from 1992 to 1994 before starting work as a coach with the Bengals. He has held jobs as a receivers coach, tight ends coach, quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator throughout his career, and at the very least has plenty of experience as a coach.
The Bucs now have one opening on their coaching staff, but it's an important one: defensive backs coach. The Buccaneers had an awful secondary last year, and while part of that may be due to
You can follow us on Twitter (@Bucs_Nation) and like us on Facebook.The Twitter hashtag, “YouAintFromDetroit,” erupted today with some insights, some insults and some laughs.
At one point, more than 60 people were tweeting the hashtag every minute.
Here’s a sampling.
#YouAintFromDetroit if the Police Come On Time — ✈️✈️✈️ (@__sheCHOSEme) June 19, 2014
If you've never taken bottles to the store to pay for something #YouAintFromDetroit — Steve Patton (@StevenPatton) June 19, 2014
#YouAintFromDetroit if you have t seen this bitch on every bus and billboard pic.twitter.com/6AH3v2R3Pl — 1 of 1 (@heated_feet) June 19, 2014
#youaintfromDetroit if you aint ate spaghetti and Chicken at every baby shower and funeral — Trap Fag (@AmsFresh) February 9, 2011
#YouAintFromDetroit if you ain't trying to make it out this bitch — W A Y N E (@SussexWayne) June 19, 2014
#YouAintFromDetroit if you ain't wonder how they put the jerseys on the Spirit of Detroit pic.twitter.com/g5a7T6SnaK — $av. (@KaePH_) June 19, 2014
#youaintfromdetroit if you elementary school or middle school still open lmfao — 41Celino (@CoolestLame) June 19, 2014"DPR' obstructing OSCE freedom of movement. Truck & driver with OSCE camera equipment is detained for 7+ hrs @ Olenivka," the OSCE SMM wrote on Twitter on August 1.
“DPR” obstructing #OSCE freedom of movement. Truck & driver with #OSCE camera equipment is detained for 7+ hrs @ Olenivka. #SupportSMM — OSCE SMM Ukraine (@OSCE_SMM) 1 августа 2017 г.
"[The] truck carrying OSCE camera equipment crossed @ Olenivka after [being] held for 7.5 hrs by 'DPR' – violation of Minsk & OSCE mandate."
Truck carrying #OSCE camera equipment crossed @ Olenivka after held for 7.5 hrs by “DPR” – violation of Minsk & OSCE mandate. #supportSMM — OSCE SMM Ukraine (@OSCE_SMM) 1 августа 2017 г.
"OSCE must have full/unhindered freedom of movement to do work – [the] sides have obligation to protect SMM freedom of movement," the OSCE tweeted.
#OSCE must have full/unhindered freedom of movement to do work - sides have obligation to protect SMM freedom of movement #supportSMM — OSCE SMM Ukraine (@OSCE_SMM) 1 августа 2017 г.
As UNIAN reported earlier, the Russian-backed militants in Donbas are reported to be preparing a series of terrorist acts against OSCE representatives in order to later blame the Ukrainian army for this.Roger D. Fisher (May 28, 1922 – August 25, 2012)[1] was Samuel Williston Professor of Law emeritus at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Background [ edit ]
Fisher specialized in negotiation and conflict management. He was the co-author (with William Ury) of the book Getting to Yes, about "interest-based" negotiation, as well as numerous other publications. After serving in WWII as a weather reconnaissance pilot, Fisher worked on the Marshall Plan in Paris under W. Averell Harriman. After finishing his law degree at Harvard, he worked with the Washington, DC, law firm of Covington & Burling, arguing several cases before the US Supreme Court and advising on several international disputes. He returned to Harvard Law School and became a professor there in 1958. After having lost many of his friends in the war and seeing so many costly disputes as a litigator, Fisher became intrigued with the art and science of how we manage our differences. Fisher and his students at the Harvard Negotiation Project (founded in 1979) began interviewing people who were known as skilled negotiators in order to understand what made them effective. And he started his study of conflict with the question, "What advice could I give to both parties in a dispute that would be helpful and lead to better outcomes?" This work led to the draft, "International Mediation: A Working Guide" (April, 1978), and, eventually, to the international best-seller, Getting to YES.
In the late 1960s, Fisher conceived of a court-style debate show that handled one contemporary policy issue each week.[2] The Advocates premiered in October 1969 on WGBH-TV.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Roger Fisher and his colleagues taught courses on negotiation and conflict management at Harvard, but they also worked as advisors on real negotiations and conflicts of all types, worldwide; including peace processes, hostage crises, diplomatic negotiations, and commercial and legal negotiations and disputes. Fisher believed that keeping one foot in the real world helping people with real disputes was critical to producing theory and tools useful in the real world. This tradition at the Harvard Negotiation Project produced a community of thinkers and practitioners that now spans the globe.
Fisher continued to teach and write through his sixties, seventies and eighties. Follow-up books expanded his thinking about dealing with relationship challenges (Getting Together with Scott Brown), preparing effectively (Getting Ready to Negotiate with Danny Ertel), tools for dealing with bad actors and challenging parties (Beyond Machiavelli with Elizabeth Kopelman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider), galvanizing a group to do effective problem-solving (Getting It Done: How to Lead When You're Not in Charge with Alan Sharp and John Richardson), and the role of emotions in working relationships (Beyond Reason with Daniel Shapiro). In addition, colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project expanded the tradition Fisher founded and led. William Ury published Getting to Peace (1999), Getting Past No (1993), The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop (2000) and The Power of a Positive No (2007). Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen produced Difficult Conversations: How to Talk About What Matters Most (1999).
Fisher's 2005 work, Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate (with co-author Daniel Shapiro, a Harvard psychologist) identifies five "core concerns" that everyone cares about: autonomy, affiliation, appreciation, status, and role. The book shows how to use the core concerns to stimulate helpful emotions in negotiations ranging from the personal to international. In Beyond Reason, Fisher documents many of his first-hand experiences negotiating around the world, from his involvement in negotiating the Iran hostage crisis to his advisory role in helping Jamil Mahuad, President of Ecuador (1998–2000), resolve a long-standing international border dispute.
Fisher received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1943 and his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1948. He taught at Harvard from 1958-1992.
In 1984, Fisher founded the Conflict Management Group (CMG) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. CMG specialized in facilitating negotiations in conflicts worldwide. CMG merged with the Mercy Corps humanitarian group in 2004. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the International Editorial Board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
International work [ edit ]
Throughout his career Fisher made significant efforts to seek peace in the Middle East. Among these efforts included his involvement in Sadat's trip to Jerusalem and the [Camp David] summit that led to an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.[3] In this latter case, he helped devise a process called the one-text, where a facilitator shuttled back and forth between the parties, refining a proposed document until it could not satisfy the parties interests more effectively at which point the parties either approve the document or agree to start from scratch. President Carter and Secretary of State Vance created 23 drafts in 13 days before they had a proposal to which both sides could say yes.[4]
He advised both the Iranian and United States governments in negotiations for the release of the American hostages in 1981 where his work helped lead to the breakthrough that enabled the resolution.[5][6]
In the 1980s Fisher worked to bring peace to El Salvador. Later in his career, he helped resolve the longest-running war in the western hemisphere between Ecuador and Peru. Jamil Mahuad, the president of Ecuador and a former student of Fisher's asked for Fisher's advice soon after taking power in 1998.[7] Fisher, worried that domestic hardliners could cause either President to use the negotiations to posture advised President Mahuad to avoid the typical photograph of the two presidents shaking hands and instead get a photo of the two leaders sitting side-by-side working off a common document. This photo (copy can be seen here [1]) helped signal to the public in each country that the presidents would not be taking an adversarial approach to the negotiation and helped lower rhetoric on both sides.[7][8] In South Africa Fisher worked on the negotiations and constitutional process that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa. From the 1980s through mid 1990s Roger Fisher and his colleagues at the Conflict Management group, at the direction of then Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Joseph Seoka, the African National Congress, the National Party, the Dutch Reformed Church, AZAPO, and the Inkatha Freedom Party taught interest-based negotiation process to the leaders of all the factions as well as advised them and their negotiators. The lead constitutional negotiators, Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer later stated in an interview that the cooperative interest-based negotiation process taught by Fisher and his team was the approach that they, their principals, and their constituencies used to hammer out the new constitution and democratic elections process.[9]
Preventing nuclear war [ edit ]
Fisher was known for a unique idea towards nuclear deterrence. In a March 1981 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, while discussing the importance on reaching a "wise decision", especially in terms of nuclear arms, he suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes in a volunteer. If the President of the United States wanted to activate nuclear weapons, he would be required to kill the volunteer to retrieve the codes.
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, "George, I'm sorry but tens of millions must die." He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It's reality brought home. When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button. Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981[10]
See also [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Fisher, Roger, and Daniel Shapiro (2005). Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate. New York: Viking/Penguin.
New York: Viking/Penguin. Fisher, Roger; Bill Ury (1981). Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-31757-6.
Fisher, Roger; Danny Ertel (1981). Getting Ready to Negotiate. Boston: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-023531-0.
Fisher, Roger, Alan Sharp and John Richardson (1999), Getting It Done: How to Lead When You're Not In Charge. New York: Harper Business.
. New York: Harper Business. Fisher, Roger, Elizabeth Kopelman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider (1996), Beyond Machiavelli: Tools for Coping With Conflict. New York: Penguin Books.
New York: Penguin Books. Fisher, Roger and Danny Ertel (1995), Getting Ready to Negotiate. New York: Penguin Business.
New York: Penguin Business. Fisher, Roger, and Scott Brown (1988). Getting Together: Building Relationships As We Negotiate. New York: Viking/Penguin.
New York: Viking/Penguin. Fisher, Roger (1981). Improving Compliance with International Law. The University Press of Virginia.
The University Press of Virginia. Fisher, Roger, William Ury and Bruce Patton (1979). Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. New York: Viking/Penguin.
New York: Viking/Penguin. Fisher, Roger (1978). Points of Choice: International Crisis and the Role of Law. Oxford University Press.
Oxford University Press. Fisher, Roger (1972) Dear Israelis, Dear Arabs;: A Working Approach to Peace.
Fisher, Roger (1969) International Conflict for Beginners (foreword by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, illustrations by Robert C. Osborn).
(foreword by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, illustrations by Robert C. Osborn). Fisher, Roger (ed.) (1964) International Conflict and Behavioral Science: The Craigville Papers. New York: Basic Books, Inc.golongpoll v1.1.0 released
The golang longpolling library that I maintain has a new release out today. Check it out at: https://github.com/jcuga/golongpoll
If you write applications in golang and need server-to-browser events, this library can make notifications and web pub-sub quite easy. If you don’t, stick around and learn a little about longpolling.
What is longpolling?
Longpolling is a technique for sending server events to web clients. This technique is unidirectional, sending events only from the server to the client. Use cases include:
notifications (think facebook)
event streams I’ve used longpolling to track networking events in some proxy/content-blocking software. This was in fact the impetus for creating the golongpoll library.
general pub-sub use longpolling for browsers to subscribe to server events, if browsers need to publish events, just make a normal HTTP handler in addition to longpolling.
For the nitty-gritty details about longpolling (and other server-push techniques), see the excellent answer to the StackOverflow question: What are Long-Polling, Websockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE) and Comet?
Why longpolling?
Longpolling traditionally has a bad rap. The technique is thought to be a bit of a hack and difficult to scale in production. These opinions do have some truth to them, but these were issues mostly with web frameworks written in Java, Python, or PHP. Each of these have their limitations to how HTTP requests are handled which makes longpolling expensive and clunky. For example, in most Python web applications, the code is running in a WSGI container which has hard limitations on how long requests can last and there is a non-trivial amount of overhead in keeping each request open waiting on longpoll events.
Enter golang. Go has a much different approach that allows for ultra-lightweight thread-like things called goroutines. You can spin up thousands upon thousands of goroutines and keep them running for long periods of time on modern machines without breaking a sweat, especially if most of the goroutines are in a waiting state until an event occurs. So many of the performance and scalability issues with other web platforms go away when using Go.
This leaves a number of advantages to using longpolling over other alternatives like websockets and Server-Sent Events:
longpolling is plain old HTTP, and is supported by even the oldest browsers. Websockets is a completely separate protocol and only works on modern browsers. Also being plain HTTP means no troubles moving through arbitrarily many proxies and infrastructure that may filter or modify content. Also things like VPN web-clients (for example: Juniper SSL VPN / Pulse Connect products) will have an easier time digesting longpolling versus websockets.
longpolling can be very simple to implement on both the client and server ends. Just use my library 🙂
Easier debugging. Just look at firebug/dev console in your browser and the HTTP logs on your webserver. Longpolling traffic is just like any other web traffic.
Server-Sent Events is promising, but not |
the US, would receive a trial that is not only fair, but a model of due process. Media interest would be off the charts. That would maximize transparency in all court proceedings--which, in turn, would pressure prosecutors to exercise restraint.
Snowden would have the very best criminal defense lawyers in the country (regardless of his ability to pay them). And those lawyers would make the most of the government's dilemma: having to prove harm to national security, but without revealing sensitive information that could cause still more harm to national security.
Snowden's lawyers will also insist that he cease all public comments. No more press conferences via Skype, no Twitter or email, no calls with reporters. Total silence, giving his lawyers control over his message and image. For Snowden, who clearly loves the sound of his own voice and delights in dealings with the media, such muzzling may be hard to abide. Still, it's not a reason for staying on the lam.Today’s Pokémon news (Round 2!): TOHO becomes the latest Pokémon GO sponsor in Japan, but also…
Pokémon Shuffle
Pokémon GO
Before Pokémon GO launched in Japan, it was announced that McDonald’s would a sponsor. Basically, all the McDonald’s restaurants in Japan are either a Gym or a PokéStop, which is something that dramatically increases foot traffic.
And today, a second sponsor for Pokémon GO in Japan was announced: TOHO Cinemas. Similar to the one with McDonald’s, this new sponsorship will see (almost) all TOHO theatres in Japan become PokéStops. Naturally, that doesn’t include the area where movies are screened (so as not to bother people who came to watch movies, not catch Pokémon).
The starting date for this Pokémon GO collaboration will be announced at a later date, via the official website of TOHO Cinemas.
Source: TOHO Cinemas
Pokémon Shuffle
Pokémon Shuffle was launched in February 2016, and it’s been pretty successful so far. Today, it was announced that the game had been downloaded over 6 million times on Nintendo 3DS. To celebrate, players can get various goodies each until August 22nd, with the latest Daily Login Bonus.
Here’s the lsit of bonuses:
August 9th: 1 000 Coins
August 10th: 10 Hearts
August 11th: 1 Disruption Delay
August 12th: 1 Jewel
August 13th: 1 Mega Start
August 14th: 1 Moves + 5
August 15th: 1 Time + 10
August 16th: 1 Skill Swapper
August 17th: 1 Skill Booster M
August 18th: 1 Raise Max Level
August 19th: 1 Exp Point Booster S
August 20th: 1 Exp. Points * 1.5
August 21st: 1 Attack Power
August 22nd: 1 Mega Speedup
Source: Famitsu
Translation: SerebiiItaly's, from left, Francesca Schiavone, Flavia Pennetta, Sara Errani, Karin Knapp and Roberta Vinci celebrate with the trophy after winning the Fed Cup tennis final match against Russia, in Cagliari, Italy, Saturday, Nov. 3, 2013. Italy won a fourth Fed Cup title with a whitewash 4-0 victory over Russia on Sunday as seventh-ranked Sara Errani cruised past Alisa Kleybanova before Flavia Pennetta and Karin Knapp won the dead doubles rubber. (AP Photo/Max Solinas)
Simona Halep of Romania, right holds her trophy after defeating Samantha Stosur of Australia, left, at the awarding ceremony on the final of the WTA Tournament of the Champions in Sofia, Bulgaria, Sunday, Nov. 3, 2013. (AP Photo/ Valentina Petrova)
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 03: Rafael Nadal of Spain discusses tatics with his coach Toni Nadal during a practice session prior to the start of ATP World Tour Finals Tennis at O2 Arena on November 3, 2013 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 03: Roger Federer of Switzerland during his press conference prior to the start of ATP World Tour Finals Tennis at O2 Arena on November 3, 2013 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
PARIS, FRANCE - NOVEMBER 03: Footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic watches on as David Ferrer of Spain plays Novak Djokovic of Serbia in the final during day seven of the BNP Paribas Masters at Palais Omnisports de Bercy on November 3, 2013 in Paris, France. (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)
PARIS, FRANCE - NOVEMBER 03: Novak Djokovic of Serbia is congratulated by David Ferrer of Spain in the final after Djokovic won in straight sets during day seven of the BNP Paribas Masters at Palais Omnisports de Bercy on November 3, 2013 in Paris, France. (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)In years past, I was about as patriotic an American as ever you would find.
Heck, as a kid I put up an American flag in my room and pledged allegiance to it every day, school or no school.
But those days are long past, and for the first time this year, I won’t be celebrating July 4th because, honestly, I just don’t see my country the way I used to.
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We’re no longer the “Land of Opportunity.”
According to the Brookings Institution, 42 percent of babies born in the bottom fifth of the economic strata in the US will remain there as adults, and only 8 percent will ever make it to the top fifth.
In European countries, the first number tends to be 25 percent to 30 percent and the latter 11 percent to 14 percent.
We aren’t even among the world’s strongest democracies.
In fact, according to the Economist’s Democracy Index, the U.S. is a “flawed democracy.” Frankly, they’re being lenient.
When one takes into account gerrymandering, the Electoral College, voter disenfranchisement, shadow organizations like ALEC drafting legislation for legislators, and the amount of money that is now being allowed to affect our politicians, it is evident that we are considerably worse than simply flawed.
We’re certainly not a dictatorship; but our institutions have been undermined, our freedom of speech is under attack from our own president and from corporations (through restrictive employment contracts and excessive litigation – consider, for instance, the case just brought against John Oliver for his mocking of Robert Murray), there is a tremendous wealth gap, and our justice and patent systems are largely determined by the financial resources of those involved.
We have a mass incarceration problem, an opioid epidemic, a woefully inadequate educational system, and a government that, according to an exhaustive study by Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page, is more of an oligarchy than a democracy, with the government considerably more responsive to the rich.
This past election also revealed a great deal of racism, bigotry, and misogyny lurking beneath the surface of a country that has prided itself on being multicultural and accepting of others. Over 60 million people were willing to vote for a white supremacist who led the racist birther movement, proposed banning all Muslims, regularly insulted Hispanics, bragged about sexually assaulting women, and willfully courted white anger.
It’s hard for me, as someone who believes in loving and respecting all people, to put out the American flag and act as if I’m proud of my country. In fact, I’ve noticed what I call the Patriot Rule: the more American flags someone has out and the louder they are in their patriotic fervor, the less accepting of others they tend to be.
A friend recently stated to me that such jingoistic displays strike her as symbols of intolerance, and I’m prone to agree.
If we were great, our politicians would put country over party; if we were great, we would have a healthy opposition demanding electoral reform; if we were great, we would have healthcare for all and not let people die simply because they don’t have enough money; if we were great, the wealthy would not have such an inordinate influence on our politics; if we were great, over 30,000 people wouldn’t die from guns each year; and if we were great, we would not have a white supremacist and habitual dissembler as president.
This Fourth of July should be met with protests, not pride. Anyone who truly believes in the tenets of freedom and republicanism shouldn’t be lighting fireworks, but lighting a fire beneath our politicians, demanding change.
It was people like Martin Luther King, William Lloyd Garrison, and Alice Paul who improved this nation – those that demanded reforms when reforms were necessary.
And there is no doubt that if Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, or Cesar Chavez were alive today, they wouldn’t be sitting idly, playing on their iPhones and watching stupid videos; they’d be speaking up, and rather vociferously.
This year, let’s skip the pomp and circumstance; it’s not befitting.
Ross Rosenfeld is a political pundit who has written for Newsday, the New York Daily News, Charles Scribner's, MacMillan, Newsweek.com, Primedia and The Hill.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the sacrifices of the many who gave their lives to ensure my freedom; I do. It’s just that I can’t pretend any longer that we are the bastion of hope and freedom that I once thought we were.The female menopause marks the end of the female reproductive cycle. However, men experience a range of symptoms and changes while growing older, which some people compare to the effects of menopause.
The condition appears in some literature as "andropause". However, this label is misleading and the definition of the symptoms, causes, and treatments is still unclear.
According to an article in the journal Social History of Medicine, the male menopause, or andropause, was a much-discussed topic from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, but modern researchers advise that without clear boundaries, andropause is not a useful diagnosis.
However, aging still produces effects within the male body, including testosterone levels that regularly reduce.
In this article, we examine the effects of aging on hormones in men and steps that can be taken to reduce the impact of aging on men's health.
Is "male menopause" real?
Men experience a range of physical changes when aging, but they do not qualify as a form of menopause. Men experience a range of physical changes when aging, but they do not qualify as a form of menopause.
While advancing in age does have effects on the levels of sex-specific hormones in men, relating the process to female menopause is not accurate.
Some researchers instead associate the symptoms with a condition called androgen decline in the aging male (ADAM), or late-onset hypogonadism. This occurs naturally when the gonads, or organs that produce sex cells, begin to age and lose function.
The condition affects only 2.1 percent of males, while menopause is a natural part of female sexual development. This prevalence increases with age but is still not a standard step in male development.
A doctor will suggest a diagnosis of late-onset hypogonadism when a man demonstrates three sexual symptoms and has androgen levels lower than 11 nanomoles per liter (nmol).
Symptoms
Menopause in women marks a sharp drop in estrogen and progesterone, the main female reproductive hormones, decline considerably in a relatively short period of time.
The symptoms of conditions that people often label as male menopause emerge more slowly and subtly and less severely than in menopause.
The decrease in the levels of male hormone, or testosterone, is less severe than the drop in hormone levels for women throughout menopause.
The varied signs and symptoms some people attribute to male menopause include:
hot flashes
moodiness and irritability
fat build-up around the abdomen and the chest
loss of muscle mass
dry, thin skin
excessive sweating
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) identifies the most common symptoms of male menopause as decreased libido, a lower frequency of morning erections, and erectile dysfunction.
The study lists other symptoms that include a loss of energy, an inability to walk more than 1 kilometer, or 0.62 miles, and difficulties completing strenuous physical tasks, such as running or lifting heavy objects.
Kneeling, bending, and stooping might also become more difficult.
Depression and fatigue might also set in as a result of the change in male hormone levels.
Causes
After a man reaches the age of 30 years, testosterone levels gradually decrease, falling an average of one percent each year.
However, doctors do not believe that the normal, age-related decline of testosterone levels is at the center of male menopause symptoms. Were this related to the symptoms, every man would experience them, which is not the case.
A lack of exercise can lead to decreasing testosterone in older men. A lack of exercise can lead to decreasing testosterone in older men.
This condition is complex and can produce different symptoms in different people. While these symptoms often occur in older men with declining testosterone levels, they tend to occur in older males with heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes.
This suggests that changing levels of male hormones are not the sole contributor to this condition.
Other risk factors include underlying health problems, such as:
lack of exercise
smoking
alcohol consumption
stress
anxiety
sleep deprivation
Erectile dysfunction may be the result of changes in the blood vessels or a nerve problem.
Some men experience the psychological impact of a "mid-life crisis," in which they become concerned about professional and personal milestones. This can be a cause of depression, which can trigger a range of factors leading to the physical symptoms of ADAM.
A lack of sleep, poor diet and lack of exercise, smoking and alcohol consumption, and low self-esteem may also contribute.
Hypogonadism is a condition in which the testes do not produce enough hormones. In younger males, this can lead to delayed puberty. If it develops at an older age, possibly linked to obesity or type 2 diabetes, the symptoms of ADAM may occur.
Diagnosis
One study describes how the male menopause became medicalized, not as a result of scientific research but "a model perpetuated by lay people and medical popularizers."
A physician is not likely to diagnose male menopause. It represents a set of symptoms on which there is little agreement.
These symptoms may occur due to a range of lifestyle factors or underlying diseases.
Treatment
Since the condition has no clear definition, men who experience these physical changes will receive treatment according to their symptoms.
A person with obesity will receive support for weight management and an exercise regimen. They might also have to adjust their food intake and engage with a well-balanced and nutritious diet.
Careful dietary management can reduce the effects of aging in men. Careful dietary management can reduce the effects of aging in men.
People with diabetes and cardiovascular disease will require appropriate management for the underlying condition. Controlling blood glucose levels appears to reduce symptoms.
The doctors will carry out a detailed check-up on discovered symptoms such as erectile dysfunction and fatigue to detect any cardiovascular disease, including blood tests and scans.
They may refer an individual with signs of depression or anxiety to a psychologist or psychiatrist, who can prescribe antidepressants, psychotherapy, or both.
A doctor may recommend testosterone therapy but the effectiveness of this treatment is not clear. Testosterone therapy might increase the risks of a blockage in the urinary tract and prostate cancer. It may also aggravate ischemic heart disease, epilepsy, and sleep apnea.
The FDA ruled in 2015 that many testosterone and vitamin supplements claiming to support male menopause often do not contain the advised components and may increase the risk of developing prostate cancer and cardiovascular issues.
Speak to a doctor about managing the symptoms of aging and age-related disease.
Takeaway
Insufficient evidence is available to define "male menopause" as a diagnosable medical condition.
However, ADAM is a deficiency of testosterone, a male sex hormone, that can have similar effects to "male menopause". Conditions involving low testosterone levels can be complicated and show differently for different people.
Doctors do not diagnose male menopause.
However, a lifestyle involving a balanced diet, regular exercise, and minimal tobacco and alcohol use is likely to boost a sense of wellbeing and reduce the physical symptoms of aging in men.
Treating underlying conditions can also reduce the effects.His is one of the great faces in baseball, as comfortable as a broken-in mitt. There are timelines on it dating back at least 50 years, crow's feet from 200,000 suns, wrinkles etched by the cost of victory and the acceptance of loss. The eyes belong to a 69-year-old maestro who has seen everything, but they twinkle like they did when he was a 19-year-old bonus baby seeing things for the first time. That flattened nose tells you he'll fight like hell, and the bright smile tells you he'll fight for you.
When the Nationals pulled that old glove down from the attic last year, people scratched their heads, wondering if the club had picked someone the game had passed by. As it turns out, they needn't have worried. Davey Johnson is right where he's always belonged, sitting on the bench of a dugout, managing a first-place club, bridging a generation gap and having the time of his Gumpian life.
As a player, he got the last hit off Sandy Koufax (1966), congratulated Hank Aaron at home plate after he broke Babe Ruth's career home run record ('74) and batted behind the man, Sadaharu Oh, who passed Aaron's record ('75-76). As a manager, he jumped for joy in the dugout when the ball went through Bill Buckner's legs ('86) and ran from the dugout in outrage when Jeffrey Maier turned Derek Jeter's fly out into a home run ('96).
Where was he when Washington general manager Mike Rizzo called his special advisor to ask him to replace Jim Riggleman, who quit after 75 games last year?
"I was on a fishing trip with John Havlicek on Martha's Vineyard," Johnson said.
It's not just that Johnson has been there, done that. He's been everywhere from Atlanta to Zuiderzee, and done everything from batboy for the old Washington Senators to skipper of the first baseball team to (likely) win anything in the capital since the Senators in 1933. Along the way, he had to pick up the poop that Schottzie left behind on the Riverfront Stadium turf, but that's another story.
"I'm a happy man," he said. "Happy to be involved in a game that I love, and lucky to be pretty good at what I do. Heck, I could've found a talent that wasn't so good for society, like robbing banks."
He's good at managing, all right. He's won with power teams, racehorse teams, old teams, young teams. He's won with lunatics in the clubhouse (Mets) and the owner's box (Marge Schott with the Reds, Peter Angelos with the Orioles).
"Oh, Marge was something," Johnson said. "I used to get these little notes from the St. Bernard before a game: 'Better pull this one out tonight -- Woofs and licks, Schottzie.' One night, she invited Sue and I up to her dining room for some wine -- screw-top Gallo, by the way. All of a sudden, the dog jumps on the table and starts licking the bowl of mayonnaise. Marge just says, 'Oh, that's OK,' and stirs the bowl up with a spoon as if nothing had happened."
This time around, Johnson loves working for the Nats' 86-year-old owner, Ted Lerner, alongside Rizzo -- "We're both second basemen, you know" -- and with the youngest team in baseball.
Despite his store of anecdotes, he is not a codger stuck in the past. In fact, the other day, Johnson mentioned on a radio show that 19-year-old Bryce Harper might be his favorite player ever. (This is a guy who's managed five Hall of Famers -- six, counting Deion Sanders.) "He's a Pete Rose guy," he said about Harper on The Fan (106.7). "He's just a dandy. My guys love watching him play; and the umpires, and people around the league, they like to see it. This is old-time, hard-nosed baseball."
"That was very nice of him to say," Harper said. "He's been my only big league manager, so I can't tell you he's my favorite, but he's been perfect for me. I first met him when I was 14, and he came to speak at a showcase in St. Pete. You could just tell he loved the game. He brings a fire and a passion to the game that I really respect."
He also brings a résumé that the players respect.
Ian Desmond points to Johnson for helping him to his best year yet. Patrick McDermott/Getty Images
"I've Googled him," said shortstop Ian Desmond. "In 1973, he hit 43 homers, three more than his teammate, Hank Aaron."
A lot of pieces go into the making of a good manager, just as they do a baseball glove. For one thing, you have to be indefatigable; and if there are concerns that a 69-year-old body that has undergone life-saving heart and stomach surgeries might not be up to the task, Johnson alleviates them on a daily basis.
Take Sept. 11, the second day of the Nats' swing through New York to play the Mets last week. Early in the morning, Johnson and his wife Sue went down to the financial district to participate in Cantor Fitzgerald's Day For Charity -- Davey, along with such celebrities as Eli Manning and Mark Sanchez, manned the phones to trade bonds, with the profits going to Homes For Heroes. Then it was back to Citi Field by 3 p.m. to prepare for a game against 18-time winner R.A. Dickey that would last three-plus hours and push his bedtime into Sept. 12.
There's the patience piece, and Johnson is right up there with Job. Said first baseman Adam LaRoche, who is having one of the best seasons of his nine-year career (30 homers, 94 RBIs): "He is a true player's manager. He puts us in a position to succeed, and there's something about his wisdom and patience that makes us believe in ourselves."
His lineup for that 9/11 game is a good example. Harper had gone for 0-for-10 in three games against Dickey this season, and another manager might have chosen to give the kid the night off. But Johnson put him in his usual second spot in the order, telling reporters, "He swings hard enough -- maybe he'll find the ball with one of them." Harper responded with three hits off Dickey and four for the night to raise his average to.265. That made him the first teen with a four-hit game since Andruw Jones in 1996.
As Hank Aaron's teammate in the '70s, he saw his fair share of big moments, including Aaron's record-breaking home run. Bruce Bennet/Getty Images
Johnson also carries a certain perspective that comes down to what he recently told Paul White of USA Today: "I manage the way I live: today with an eye on tomorrow." That comes in handy when, say, Stephen Strasburg has to be shut down. While the fans and the media are second-guessing the Nats for putting a halt to the phenom's season on the eve of the playoffs, Johnson and Rizzo have been steadfast and of one mind in their decision. Indeed, the kid's velocity and ERA had been going in the wrong direction in his last few starts, and they are not willing to jeopardize his career for the short-term gratification of the fans. Besides, John Lannan, the pitcher who took Strasburg's spot in the rotation on Sept. 12, got the win in a 2-0 victory over the Mets.
Johnson's eye for today is still as sharp as ever. "He doesn't miss a thing," said Desmond, who has come into his own (23 HRs,.847 OPS) under Johnson. "If I go oh-for-two or oh-for-three, I'll wander over to him in the dugout and ask him, 'What do you see, skip?' Even though he's got a game to manage, he'll still give me just the right batting tip."
No one has ever questioned Johnson's intelligence -- at least since his playing days in Baltimore, where he won two World Series rings. A math major in college, he was a numbers and computer geek long before sabermetrics, a disciple of Earnshaw Cook, the author of the seminal "Percentage Baseball." When he was a young second baseman for the Orioles, he would tell pitchers like Jim Palmer and Dave McNally that they were in an "unfavorable chance deviation," and as such, they were better off throwing for the heart of the plate rather than the corners because the ball would hit the corner anyway. Which is how he earned the name "Dum Dum." Similarly, he would offer Earl Weaver printouts entitled "Optimize the Orioles Lineup," proving that Johnson should bat fourth, and "Earl would throw them in the garbage."
Howie Rose, the Mets' radio play-by-play man, worked with Johnson closely when Davey was managing at Shea, and Rose said, "[Johnson] was my baseball professor. Every day we would do a pregame show, and I would pick his brain. I learned so much about the game from those sessions that I can actually say I wouldn't be where I am today without his help."
Rizzo thinks of Johnson as his own mentor. "I've been in the game 30 years," said the GM, "and he's taught me so much. Just as a for instance, Davey has what we call an A/B bullpen. Instead of being locked into one guy as your closer, or your seventh- or eighth-inning guy, he makes sure he has a B guy who can step into that role in case the A guy can't go. He combines new-school, out-of-the-box thinking with old-school values."
Johnson's presence for the O's in Game 1 of the '96 ALCS ended prematurely when he protested the Jeffrey Maier play a little too vociferously. AP Photo/Rusty Kennedy
It's a long season, so it also helps to have a manager who's enthusiastic. When a Nats player goes deep, Johnson will often greet him with "Wack-o!" a word that has become something of a rallying cry for the club. It all started when Johnson was demonstrating to the players how to turn on a pitch -- Wack-o! -- because he thought they had been trying to go the other way too much.
When asked the biggest difference between managing in 2012 and managing in his previous stints, Johnson said, "Social media. Word gets out so quickly now that you don't have a chance to properly inform a player of a decision. You don't want him hearing of a move before he hears it from you."
As for the regular media, Johnson has always been adept at handling us. It's another prerequisite for the modern manager -- ask the Red Sox. Johnson is honest and sociable and quotable. And it doesn't take much to get him going on a long story. The other day, he was shown a stat sheet from his very first minor league team, the 1962 Stockton Ports of the California League, which at the time was Class C. He had joined them in June of that year after one year at Texas A&M. "I signed for $25,000, which I used to buy a waterfront lot, a new car and a new set of Haig golf clubs -- I was set for life at 19," he said. "Hey, is Bill St. Peter on that sheet? He is. OK, here's a story.
"My girlfriend came in from Houston to stay with me. When she shows up, she tells me she wants to get engaged, so I take one of my roommates, Darold Knowles, to a jewelry store because his father was a jeweler. Turned out Darold didn't know anything about jewels -- he held that eyeglass upside down. Anyway, I buy a ring for $100. But then I find out that Bill St. Peter, one of our pitchers, had been hitting on her down by the pool. Now I have to fight him, he's trying to steal my fiancée, right? Before we square off, though, Bill says, 'Davey, I was only trying to see if she really loved you.' And I go, 'Oh.' Well, she took the bus back to Houston, broke up with me and I never got the ring back."
Johnson didn't fight then, but he's not one to back down. He's certainly not afraid to challenge authority. "One of the very first shows I did with him in '87," Howie Rose said, "he wasn't happy about the way Frank Cashen, the general manager, had dealt with an injury to pitcher Roger McDowell. So right there, he says, 'And Frank Cashen did a dumb thing today.' At the end of the interview, I ask him if he wants to take it back, and he says, 'Hell, no, I said it for a f------ reason.'"
Johnson worked for Marge Schott and Peter Angelos. He can surely handle one little shouting match with Nats GM Mike Rizzo. G Fiume/Getty Images
That combativeness would cost him in New York (fired after 42 games in '90), Cincinnati (Schott told him in the middle of the '95 season, when the Reds won the NL Central title, that he wouldn't be coming back), Baltimore (Angelos fired him on the day he won the '97 AL Manager of the Year award) and Los Angeles (fired by GM Kevin Malone, with whom he did not get along, after finishing second in 2000). Nationals bullpen coach Jim Lett, who was the Reds' minor league field coordinator when Johnson was the major league manager in Cincinnati, says, "Davey's mellowed a little."
Earlier this season, he got Rays pitcher Joel Peralta ejected for having too much pine tar on his glove and called manager Joe Maddon "a weird wuss." On Aug. 23, after a fourth consecutive Nationals loss, reporters overheard Johnson shouting on the phone at Rizzo, "Why don't you come down here and manage this team!" Said Rizzo, "Forgotten right away. Just two honest guys talking to one another after being swept."
The Nats have been in first place of the NL East since May 22, and despite being swept by the second-place Braves over the weekend, their lead is at five-and-a-half games games and their magic number for clinching the division, which Johnson has begun to watch, is down to 11. Even without Strasburg, their rotation is set up well for the postseason with 19-game winner Gio Gonzalez, Jordan Zimmermann, Edwin Jackson and Ross Detwiler. The bullpen is deep, their lineup is strong and their manager, well, he's been there and done that -- only one living manager with at least 1,000 wins has a better winning percentage than Johnson, and that's his old skipper, Earl Weaver. Johnson doesn't really want to think about it, but this is the season that might put him in the company of his contemporaries who are already in the Hall of Fame, namely Sparky Anderson, Dick Williams, Tommy Lasorda and Whitey Herzog.
"I've worked with some great managers," said Rick Eckstein, the Nationals' batting coach. "Tom Kelly, Tony LaRussa. But Davey is truly the best. He knows pitching, he knows hitting, he knows fielding, he manages a game brilliantly and a season wisely. Even after 50 years, he's got so much to offer."
In '86 with the Mets, Johnson brought a World Series title to New York. AP Photo/Paul Benoit
If Eckstein, the older brother of infielder Dave, sounds effusive in his praise, well, he and Johnson have shared a lot over the past decade. He was with Johnson in the wilderness of international baseball, first when Davey managed the Dutch national team in 2003 and later the U.S. national team (2005 and 2008). They've both seen the inside of an operating room: Johnson had to have five stomach surgeries after a ruptured appendix went undiagnosed in 2004, and a heart operation in early 2011, while Eckstein donated a kidney to his other brother Ken. He's known the pain Johnson suffered, first when his 32-year-old daughter, surfing champion Andrea Lyn Johnson, died in 2005 from complications during her treatment for schizophrenia, and then last year, when his blind and deaf stepson Jake succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 34.
"You know what really makes Davey a great manager?" Eckstein asked. "It's that he cares. He cares about his players, about his coaches, about baseball, about people."
In the dugout where he belongs, before the last game in New York last week, Johnson repeated a question: "What do I see when I look in the mirror? First of all, I'm shocked. Some part of me still thinks I'm 19. How did I get to be so old? But I see a happy man. Not happy like when we won the World Series in 1966 -- that was all about me. Happy like I was in '86, when we brought joy to a city. It's much better when you share it."
Left unsaid was the thought that he could do the same for Washington in 2012. "Have to go do my job now," he said, excusing himself. But just as he hit the top step, he turned around.
"One more story," he said. "Offseason after 1987, I think. Whitey Herzog, Mel Stottlemyre and I had gone in on this fish camp near Cape Canaveral. One morning, Whitey and I are in a boat, being filmed for an outdoor show, when all of a sudden, one of those huge rockets takes off from the Cape. Whitey and I look at it, and he says, 'You know, come July or August, a lot of people are gonna wish we were on that son of a b----.'
"Gotta go."Poynt
Credit cards with magnetic strips. Cards with chips. Smartphones that use near field communication (NFC) and ones that read QR codes. The way things are going, consumers will need a scorecard to figure out if -- and how -- they can pay for in-store purchases.
Osama Bedier, who created Google Wallet and once led engineering at PayPal, thinks he has the answer: a payments machine that can handle almost any form of payment you throw at it.
His latest company, Poynt, announced a new payments terminal Wednesday, and it's poised to benefit from a huge, mandated infrastructure upgrade. By October 2015, all US merchants will have to replace their payment machines with ones that take chip-and-pin, or EMV, embedded cards designed to be more secure than the common magnetic strip found on today's credit and debit cards. That's an estimated 16 million payment devices that will need an upgrade, and Bedier is ready for it.
"The majority of retail establishments don't have smart, connected devices that our phones can interact with," he said. "The imagination is there, the hope is there, but we haven't actually seen it."
Poynt
There's a lot of technology that exists for in-store payments but isn't widespread yet, like paying for items simply by walking out of a store or receiving loyalty points automatically when you make a purchase. Bedier thinks his machine, which runs on a variant of Google's Android operating system, can help make this happen.
His new team built an all-in-one payments device, complete with touch screen, bar code scanner and printer built in. Although it's similar in shape and size to a standard payments terminal -- devices that are slightly larger than a brick and look somewhat like a large calculator that you might see at a small or midsized merchant shop -- it will come with multiple payment options and an application program interface, or API, that will allow developers to build apps for it. The device, which is also wireless, launches with three stock apps that handle transactions and do some basic analytics. Poynt plans to start shipping the $299 device to merchants in early 2015.
To be sure, Bedier has lofty goals. He wants to do what Apple's iPhone did for smartphones -- he wants to transform an entire industry with his Poynt machine. He certainly has the chops ("I was in payments before it was sexy," he jokes), and serves on the board of multiple payment companies: Qiwi, WePay, Payrange and Coin. But, there's also plenty of competition for terminals, even a few "smart" ones, and inexpensive credit-card readers from Square and PayPal.
Bedier said none of these other options is going as far as his machine. Poynt will take multiple payment technologies, including magnetic stripe cards, EMV cards, NFC (near field communications, the tech that makes Google Wallet and Apple Pay work), QR codes (what Starbucks uses) and even low-energy Bluetooth "beacon" devices that can transmit information over a longer range than NFC. Bedier is betting that these are the five payment technologies the commerce industry will reply on over the next 10 years.
Poynt is also opening up its API on Wednesday to attract developers who can add functions, like loyalty programs or more complicated analytics. Six developers -- Vend, Kabbage, Swarm, Boomtown, Bigcommerce and Intuit -- are already creating apps.
What's even more important is that Poynt has struck deals with banks to push these terminals to merchants. Because the mandate to add EMV technology comes from the banking industry, this is likely to give Poynt a distribution advantage.
His machine won't be for every merchant. Bedier thinks people who process small amounts will still prefer to rely on things like mobile credit-card readers, but people who process between $20,000 and $10 million in sales a year -- such as a local coffee chain or a dry cleaner storefront, according to Bedier -- need a machine that can do more. There |
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So the result of the most historical vote of our lifetime is in and it is Brexit. The last few months have seen the UK campaigning for our future in Europe. Do we want to stay in or come out? It has been a campaign that left the nation split and the result has certainly reflected that.
The result was known on Friday 24th June, 2016 and the Brexit campaign had narrowly won the Remain campaign with almost a 4% difference. Brexit voted 51.9% and Remain 48.1%. It shows a nation heavily divided just like it has been all the way through.
For many people, the campaign was more about in-party fighting rather than what was best for the British nation. David Cameron and Boris Johnson fighting for PM seat; both men seemed more interested in their careers rather than what was at stake.
However, whilst they were boxing each other on who is the best candidate for PM, the right-wing party UKIP stole the limelight and started their fight on immigration. In doing so, they used terrible scare-mongering tactics to make people afraid of what will happen if we remained in the EU.
Facts were made up about Turkey joining the EU and how we will be flooded with Turks. A poster of Syrian refugees fleeing war was used to scare people into believing they were coming to invade Britain and British values, when in fact they were waiting at the Serbian boarders. Words like, “take back our country” “we want to control our boarders” “we want our sovereignty back” were all used to make people believe that we were tied to EU in every decision we have ever made. It simply wasn’t the case.
The people were rebelling against the establishment. Usually in a General Election, the economy is a huge factor. In the referendum, it seems people were willing to take the risk, despite economists, the Bank of England and the IMF warning that this would have disastrous impact on the British economy.
When the Brexit result was announced, the pound dropped to its lowest rate since 1985. This is enough proof that economists were not wrong, at least on the short-term.
Leave campaign achieved its mission to make People more concerned about immigration rather than anything else. They have played on it very well to the extent that they scapegoated any foreigner for the problems we have in the country. Over-crowded schools, an NHS that is falling apart as well as unemployment; none of which had anything to do with the EU but our own Government.
On the other hand, Remain campaign did not fight strongly enough for the cause of immigration and the positive contributions it might offer to our society.
A moment of shock and uncertainty
The nation is deeply divided at this point in time. People who supported Remain are feeling very shell-shocked and heartbroken. This was a day that no one really envisaged. Everyone knew the result was tight but it was always assumed that Remain would just edge it. The mood is quite somber and people are afraid of the unknown.
Brexit are, obviously more joyous, they see it as a good opportunity to rid the country or the rules and regulations of the Eu, the red tape. Some may even be living in a dream world thinking this is going to solve all the problems our country has been suffering from. The younger generations are feeling betrayed by the older ones. They have enjoyed so many benefits from being part of the EU and the future for them now looks bleak. This could turn into resentment and anger in the next few months but only time is going to tell.
Britain has always been a diverse country, accepting many people from many different backgrounds and religions. We pride ourselves on that melting pot. We thrive ourselves on that internationalism. It is still shown in certain areas, like London, Scotland and other places that voted remain. It is something many Brits are proud of. But now, the mood has changed. It has shifted to the right-wing.
Traditional Labour seats have shifted to UKIP. Why? Is it based on religion or race? No, it is based on the fact that they have lost their jobs, the areas they tend to live in are deprived and worse off in poverty and because they see their jobs going to immigrants. Their anger is seen in the vote for leave. They are fed up. They have had enough of paying the price of austerity. They found a way to kick the establishment and they took it.
Does this mean that they are all racist and they hate immigrants? No, quite the opposite but where the likes of Labour and the Tories didn’t listen to their needs, UKIP promised to do and so, despite their “blame all foreigners rhetoric”, they won. Can you blame them? Not really when they feel they have been left unheard for many years.
What about British Muslims?
Will this impact British Muslims? It is hard to tell. The right-wing agenda creeping into our politics is uneasy. It is uncomfortable and I am sure many Muslims do not feel easy with this mood. However, the leaders of the Brexit have said they will work to make sure this divide is filled. They know that the country is a diverse country and they know they are going to have to tread very carefully with the minorities in the UK.
I am not directly impacted as I live abroad. However, I do fear for my future. What if one day we wish to move back to the UK? What if my daughter wants to live in the country of her birth? What if we visit our country and find the mood so bad that it makes us uncomfortable? It is very difficult indeed to predict how things would go. We can only watch as this all unfolds and see what will come out of it.
I believe the divide shown in this referendum is not going to be easy to fill. It has left a very bitter taste in British politics. We are going to see very big changes in a very short space of time and only Allah knows if these changes are going to be positive or not.
It is a period full of uncertainty for all Brits. The politicians have their work cut out for them. They have to bridge this gap, they have to make the people who voted Remain feel more at ease, they have to take care of the minorities and make sure they feel comfortable in their own country.
We have to keep the atmosphere of diversity and acceptance in our country. This is a time when we really do have to unite no matter what religion, skin color or background we have. If this is going to work in all of our best interests, then we have to find a way to do it together rather than divided. If we remain divided, we are just inviting hatred and racism and it is something that is not going to be easily kicked out if it creeps in.Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivers a speech during a campaign rally at the Zenith venue, vowing to defend the common man if returned to the top office (AFP Photo/Miguel Medina)
Paris (AFP) - Nicolas Sarkozy on Sunday attempted to revive his flagging campaign to reconquer the French presidency next year, vowing to defend the common man if returned to the top office.
"My aim is the resurrection of the French people," Sarkozy told a packed rally in Paris as his main rival for the conservative nomination, Alain Juppe, stretched his poll lead.
Sarkozy accused the ruling Socialists of presiding over the "downgrading" of the economy and vowed he would not "stand by and watch".
The right-winger, who showed a taste for the high life as president between 2007 and 2012, cast himself as the champion of the suffering "silent majority" against an "elite for whom everything is fine".
He promised to hold two referendums within days of taking office if elected.
The first would ask the French if they backed suspending the right for non-EU nationals to join family members in France -- one of the main channels for immigration to the country.
The second, Sarkozy said, would ask whether the state should be allowed to jail suspected Islamist radicals, without the prior authorisation of a judge.
Bordeaux mayor Juppe, a moderate who served as prime minister in the mid-90s, argues such a move would create a "French-style Guantanamo".
A poll published by France 2 television Sunday showed 61-year-old Sarkozy trailing his 71-year-old rival in the November primary.
The Odoxa-Dentsu Consulting survey showed Juppe taking 39 percent of first-round votes compared with 31 percent for Sarkozy. Juppe is also tipped to soundly beat Sarkozy in the run-off of the two frontrunners on November 27.
With the ruling Socialists in disarray the winner of the conservative primary is forecast to be the next president, with far-right National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen predicted to be runner-up.
A number of leftist voters opposed to Sarkozy's return have announced plans to take part in the primary. They have said they will back Juppe.
- Beach 'provocations' -
Sarkozy's proposal to hold referendums -- a little-used political tool in France -- contains echoes of the National Front, which has also called for more plebiscites, including one on France's membership of the European Union.
Sarkozy has been accused of aggressively courting FN voters with a campaign that plays on widespread fears about immigration and Islam following a string of jihadist attacks that have rocked France in the past two years.
On Sunday, he hit out at the "provocations" of a minority of Muslims whom he accused of trying drive an Islamist agenda in "schools, universities, companies, swimming pools, on beaches".
But in a noticeable departure from recent speeches his address focused mainly on France's economic and social malaise.
The rally followed two difficult weeks for the divisive ex-president.
A spurned ex-advisor tore into him in a tell-all book and he was hit by fresh allegations that his 2007 presidential campaign was bankrolled by Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi.
Sarkozy has persistently denied any wrongdoing.Brian Windhorst describes the effects of some NBA teams losing money last season and what changes could be made. (1:51)
Despite a flood of new national television cash, 14 of the NBA's 30 teams lost money last season before collecting revenue-sharing payouts, and nine finished in the red even after accounting for those payments, according to confidential NBA financial records obtained by ESPN.com.
The gap between the league's most profitable teams and its weaker siblings will be addressed at the league's Board of Governors meeting on Sept. 27-28 in New York. Owners have planned a half-day review of the league's revenue-sharing system, sources said.
Some teams in smaller markets struggling to keep up with a fast-rising salary cap have pushed the league's richest franchises to share more of their profits, according to ownership sources. Some have argued that the expanding profitability gap could warp competitive balance: If big-market teams can earn fat profits even while paying the luxury tax, they could in theory hoard more stars.
The nine teams that lost money, by the league's accounting for net income (which includes revenue sharing and luxury tax payments), were the Atlanta Hawks, Brooklyn Nets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, Milwaukee Bucks, Orlando Magic, San Antonio Spurs and Washington Wizards. Sources pointed out that by a different accounting measure the league tabulates -- operating income, which discards various debt obligations -- only 10 teams (rather than 14) lost money before accounting for revenue sharing.
NBA teams with reported losses (2016-17 season) Net income Net income, after revenue sharing Operating income* Bucks Bucks Bucks Grizzlies Cavaliers Grizzlies Hawks Hawks Hawks Hornets Grizzlies Hornets Kings Magic Magic Magic Nets Nets Nets Pistons Pacers Pacers Spurs Pistons Pelicans Wizards Trail Blazers Pistons Wizards Suns Timberwolves Trail Blazers Wizards *Operating income discards certain debt obligations
"Teams in small markets are told we need to run our businesses better so we can make money," one ownership source told ESPN.com. "But teams in the largest markets can run their businesses poorly and still make money."
Just how big is the revenue gap?
The NBA's new $24 billion TV deal was believed to be a potential panacea for the league's revenue disparity. But the data from the first year of the deal shows the gap between the have and have-not franchises remains extremely wide.
The range of the revenue spectrum is illustrated by the two teams at the opposite ends: the Lakers and Grizzlies. And it's stunning.
In the wake of Kobe Bryant's retirement, the Lakers were devoid of a star player attraction last season for the first time in two decades. To retain their protected draft pick, they tanked the second half of the season, their fourth straight with 27 or fewer wins.
But it was a wonderful season financially. The Lakers finished with a gargantuan $115 million profit as measured by net income even after writing a revenue-sharing check for almost $49 million, according to league accounting. That was the highest net income in the league by nearly $25 million. The biggest factor was the $149 million they took in from massive local media rights deals, primarily with Time Warner. Editor's Picks NBArank Top 10: The very best of the best Our countdown of the best ballers in the NBA continues from 10 to 1.
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Four years ago, ESPN The Magazine named the Grizzlies the best franchise in the major sports in its study of 122 franchises, and the team remains highly rated in the annual report. They have molded a strong connection with their fan base behind the "Grit and Grind" marketing campaign and playing style. The Grizzlies have made the playoffs seven straight years and counting.
But it was a tough season financially. After boosting their payroll, the Grizzlies lost nearly $40 million, earning a league-low $9.4 million in local media rights. Their losses were offset by $32 million in revenue sharing, the most in the league. The Grizzlies start a new local TV deal this season that should boost revenue, but as the smallest market in the league by Nielsen rankings, they may continue to have challenges relative to their larger peers.
"National revenues drive up the cap, but local revenues are needed to keep up with player salaries," one owner explained to ESPN. "If a team can't generate enough local revenues, they lose money."
In all, 10 teams transferred $201 million combined in revenue-sharing to 15 other teams in 2016-17, according to the documents. (Five teams -- Toronto, Brooklyn, Miami, Dallas and Philadelphia -- neither gave nor received in revenue sharing. To illustrate how complex the revenue-sharing system is, the Nets are one of the teams that don't receive, despite being among those that lost the most money.) Four teams -- the Warriors, Knicks, Lakers and Bulls -- accounted for $144 million, or 71.5 percent, of those revenue-sharing transfers.
There is broad agreement that the revenue-sharing system is, on the whole, acting as intended, as it shifts money from juggernauts that drive up the salary cap to smaller-market teams that can't approach big-city revenue but have to spend anyway. And the relationship is considered symbiotic to a large degree. According to this argument, the Lakers are a cash machine but need to play teams like the Grizzlies to keep the money rolling in, while revenue sharing helps the Grizzlies stay afloat.
Still, some teams have bristled about the current scale of monetary redistribution. "The need for revenue sharing was supposed to be for special circumstances," one large-market owner told ESPN.com, "not permanent subsidies."
None of this is to say the league is struggling. There is no lockout looming; the league's new collective bargaining deal runs through 2024. Critics of the system want to tweak it, not blow it up.
The 30 teams combined to earn more than $530 million in net income in the 2016-17 season, the documents show. What's more, these numbers focus only on basketball operations; several teams own their arenas, and revenue they generate from hosting non-basketball events is not included in the league's basic financial reporting. For example, the Nets lost about $44 million last season, the documents show, but that doesn't account for revenues from the Barclays Center, which the team's parent company owns.
And as we've seen, NBA franchise valuations continue to soar. Leslie Alexander bought the Rockets for $85 million in 1993 and sold them this month for $2.2 billion. After accounting for inflation, Alexander got more than 15 times what he paid. Driving this value is the fact that the big-market Rockets are a moneymaker; they had $53 million in net income last season, according to league figures.
The players union and its economists have long claimed that teams use accounting techniques to make them appear less profitable than they really are. The union, which is focused on basketball-related income more than teams' balance sheets because that is what determines their split, has the power to review some team's books by conducting its own audit of five teams per season. It rarely exercised that power until 2015. According to several sources familiar with the matter, the union audited five teams for the 2016-17 season. The new CBA will allow it to audit 10 teams, starting this season.
How did we get here?
The new TV deal, worth about $2.7 billion per season, created new challenges only a few teams foresaw -- challenges at the heart of the intensifying revenue-sharing debate.
The salary cap rises and falls in lockstep with overall league revenue; after years of hovering around $60 million, it leapt from $63 million to $94 million over just two seasons thanks to the new TV cash, taking overall player salaries with it.
The league and players union initially projected the cap would quickly rise toward $120 million in annual midsized jumps. Teams splurged on free agents during the unprecedented summer of 2016, when the cap jumped by $24 million, assuming those bloated contracts would be palatable as the cap ballooned.
Those projections turned out to be high. The cap sits at about $99 million for 2017-18, with a small jump to about $102 million currently projected for the following season. Teams that never expected to be around the luxury tax are staring at $100 million-plus rosters and potential tax payments over the next few seasons. Plus, teams are required to have salaries totaling 90 percent of the salary cap, which means a salary floor of $89 million for the upcoming season.
Combined revenue from all 30 teams determines the salary cap, and the biggest teams make the most money -- and therefore drag the cap up for everyone else. Consider the Warriors, who have become a business juggernaut. (They had $92 million in net income last season despite playing in the oldest arena in the league and sending $42 million out in revenue sharing.)
Every Golden State home playoff game generates revenue -- about $15 million a pop in the NBA Finals last season, sources say -- that nudges the cap up a notch for the rest of the league. The Warriors don't get to keep all that money, as playoff revenues are shared with the league, but the documents show they netted $44.3 million from just nine playoff games last season, more than twice as much as the second-place Cavs, who netted $20 million.
The biggest local TV deals also raise the cap level for everyone. The Lakers and Knicks both made more than $100 million from local media deals last season. Only four teams even came within $100 million of the Lakers' local media revenue. The Knicks alone made $10 million more from TV than the six lowest-earning teams combined.
Even Golden State's $20 million-per-year deal (reported by ESPN last week) to wear jersey patches from Rakuten, easily the league's largest such deal so far, has a small impact on the overall salary cap. (The Warriors keep only 25 percent of that money; half goes to the players and 25 percent is shared with the other teams.)
Every team shares equally in the national TV money bonanza, so that has helped offset increased costs. But key sources of local revenue have remained stagnant in some markets, creating an unexpected money crunch. Hence the larger-than-ever revenue sharing, and the tension over that increase.
Is expansion or relocation inevitable?
At least one owner raised the idea of expansion in a recent Board of Governors session, citing the massive expansion fee the 30 current teams would split, sources say. The concept of an expansion fee of potentially more than $1 billion can be tempting because it is not subject to splitting 50/50 with the players.
Adam Silver, the league's commissioner, has repeatedly said the league has no short-term plans to expand, though he labeled expansion at some point "inevitable" during a recent interview in The Players Tribune.
Meanwhile, some profitable teams have bristled at the notion they should share more, and even suggested that teams that lose money every season -- and depend on revenue-sharing to stay afloat -- should consider relocating to stronger markets, sources say.
The concept of changing the placement of teams could become more of a focal point as Seattle nears its decision on a plan to renovate KeyArena or clear the way for a new building to be constructed in the city's SoDo district. A decision could come by the end of the year. If a viable building emerges in Seattle, it could kick-start a deeper expansion/relocation debate within ownership.
Relocation of a different sort is taking place in Detroit. The Pistons lost $63.2 million before collecting revenue sharing last season, the largest loss by a wide margin, despite being one of the NBA's larger markets. (The team received $17.6 million in revenue sharing to help offset the losses.)
Such shortfalls help explain why the Pistons wanted to move out of a building their parent company owned far into the suburbs and relocate to a new arena in downtown Detroit this season, hoping that it helps boost revenue.
And the LA Clippers, in contrast to the Lakers, with whom they share Staples Center, are looking to move locally as well. According to the NBA documents, the Clippers made just $2.1 million in net income last season despite a new media rights deal that paid them $51 million, in part because they make a lot less in arena income (based on tickets and other revenue) than the Lakers.
That was the impetus for owner Steve Ballmer's recent deal with the City of Inglewood to develop a new arena plan if he can't get more favorable lease terms at Staples (the current pact is up in 2024).
Local movement aside, will relocating teams from small markets to larger markets like Seattle clear up some of the NBA's revenue-sharing issues? Will expansion be part of the solution? For now, both ideas appear to be only hypothetical.
Where do we go from here?
While some of the gripes about the revenue-sharing system come from the large-market teams, they are outnumbered, and they're not driving most of the conversation.
There was much jealous eye-rolling around the league when the Warriors announced they would sell their version of personal seat licenses as a barrier of entry to their new arena, which is set to open in 2019.
Some owners have argued that teams should share enough that all 30 finish in the black. Paul Allen, the owner of the Blazers and the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and one of the world's richest people, is among the loudest voices urging more robust revenue-sharing, sources say. One owner even pitched the idea at a recent meeting of the Board of Governors session in Las Vegas that all teams should be guaranteed $20 million in profit, sources said.
There will be pushback to those ideas.
"This is a club where everyone knows the rules when they buy in," one owner told ESPN.com.
Some have even floated the idea of shrinking the amount a team can receive in revenue sharing if it has taken in such payments for several consecutive years, sources say.
Five teams -- Memphis, Charlotte, Indiana, Milwaukee, and Utah -- have received at least $15 million in each of the past four seasons, the documents show.
The revenue-sharing formula is a byzantine maze of calculations based on market size, expected revenue for each team, expense levels and other variables. It includes adjustments that can reduce a team's payout based on various performance criteria. Complicating matters further, team fortunes can fluctuate wildly from year to year.
For instance, the NBA documents showed the remarkable LeBron James effect. In their last season without James, 2013-14, the Cavs received $10.8 million in revenue sharing. Over the past three seasons, the Cavs have paid a total of $29 million into the system. The Cavs made $21.7 million in net income before revenue sharing last season but moved into the red after paying $24.8 million in luxury taxes and $15.2 million in a revenue-sharing check they wrote.
If a team overperforms expectations based on market size and past data, it effectively forfeits some of its revenue-sharing bounty.
That is how the Thunder, playing in one of the NBA's smallest markets, have paid into the system for six consecutive seasons, records show. The Spurs have, too. Meanwhile, the larger-market Nuggets were around the break-even mark by the league's calculations but received an eight-figure check from their partners that pushed them deep into the black. The Nuggets' total expense bill, including player salaries and administrative costs, was the lowest in the league, records show.
The Board of Governors can tweak the revenue-sharing system by a majority 16-14 vote. Between 2011, when this system was installed, and 2014, any change required a supermajority of 20 of the 30 votes, sources say.
Expect several such changes to be the subject of vigorous debate later this month, and going forward.
"It will make for great theater," one team source said.Pro-ISIS groups have begun celebrating the Nice massacre which has left at least 77 people dead and more than 50 injured - but the terror group is yet to officially claim responsibility.
Scores of Bastille Day revellers were mown down by a truck after gathering to watch a fireworks display in the French city.
Eyewitnesses say there was an exchange of gunfire in the aftermath of the terror attack before the driver was shot dead. A second suspect is currently on the run according to French authorities.
One French media outlet, weekly news magazine Paris Match, is reporting that ISIS has claimed responsibility but as yet there has been no official confirmation.
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Vile: Pro-ISIS groups have begun celebrating the Nice attack which has left at least 77 people dead and more than 50 injured - but the terror group is yet to officially claim responsibility. One image posted is pictured
Sick: One of the images superimposed the head of French president François Hollande onto a man being grabbed by the throat by apparent ISIS fighters
Horrific images depicting men and women lying on the side of a road close to the Promenade des Anglais
However, pro-ISIS channels on the secure messaging app Telegram have been flooded with anti-France images celebrating the attack.
The group have mobilised to threaten France and encouraged the use of the #Nice_Attack hashtag.
Guns and grenades were later said to have been found inside the truck, which mounted the pavement at approximately 40mph and steered directly towards hundreds of people watching a fireworks display.
Anti-terror police swooped in as the city was put on lockdown and residents were warned to stay indoors for their safety.
One witness called Antoine said: 'We were at the Neptune beach and a firework display had just finished. That is when we saw a white lorry. It was going quickly at 60-70 kilometres an hour.'
French police riddled the truck with gunfire in an effort to kill the crazed driver of the truck which ran down hundreds of people
At least 77 people have been killed during a horrific Bastille Day attack in Nice, southern France
At least 77 people were killed in the southern French town of Nice when a truck ran into a crowd and targeted people on the pavement
The gunman jumped out of the truck after ploughing through the pedestrians and began opening fire, witnesses said. Officials said the driver was shot dead near the scene.
A second suspect is thought to be on the run.
Eyewitness Wassim Bouhlel said that he saw a truck drive into the crowd and then witnessed the man emerge with a gun and start shooting.While James Brown was the hardest working man in soul music, Lee Fields is the hardest feeling, dishing out emotional exorcisms with every hoot, holler, and wail.
Even the name of his backing band - the Expressions - is loaded with burning sentiment.
On Saturday, December 1, Sweat Records will bring Mr. Fields to The Stage in Miami for some good ol'-fashioned live music.
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So we here at Crossfade got in touch with him to learn a lil' bit about the spirit of soul, making EDM with Martin Solveig, and his 43-year career.
Crossfade: How is soul music in 2012 different from soul music in 1968?
Absolutely nothing. Soul comes from the spirit. I hear a lot of singers describe soul as their trials and tribulations. But soul is dealing with the spirit. And the spirit is of God. When I sing soul, I let the spirit dictate how I should say whatever I'm saying. Because the spirit knows how to connect people with people.
Is your lyrical content spiritual?
I'm a secular singer. I sing about here and now. I'm a realist. But I keep my faith and I pray.
Were you in a choir as a child? What was your experience with music growing up?
My mother had us sing on Sundays. You know, your mother has you get up early on Sunday, and makes you shine your shoes, and go to church.
In North Carolina, when I was 5 or 6 years old, my father did farm work. A decent job was very hard for a black man to find back in those days. So on the weekends, my father and mother would turn their house into a little speakeasy. In other words, they gave a lot of parties. And that's how they saved enough money to buy their first house. Back in the '60s, that was amazing.
I remember the parties and I remember the music - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly. I was watchin' the women on Fridays and Saturdays, man. And the women would be dancing like crazy, doing all of these crazy dances. And everybody's drinkin', havin' a good time. We were supposed to be asleep. But every child that closes his eyes is not asleep.
What really baffled me was we would go to church on Sunday. And now the women are dancing, but they're falling on the floor. The preacher's preachin' and they're reachin' up to the sky and falling on the floor. I became very interested in music because of that. On Friday and Saturday, they sound like they're having a party. And on Sunday, they're falling out. I knew there were two different kinds of music.
Did you have a lot of opportunities to perform in North Carolina? Or did you always know you had to leave to make it?
My brother and I started out as a team, when I was about 14. I was doing James Brown stuff and he was doing Otis Redding stuff. We had quite a few outlets to play. But I thought that in order to get great opportunities, I needed to go to New York. I was totally naive.
A gentleman had given me a card and said, "If you're ever in New York, call me. You can make it." Without a second thought, I took that serious. I hadn't called this guy, but when I was about to turn 18, I told my mother I was gonna quit school and go to New York. She cried and begged me to stay. But I had made up my mind. She gave me her last $20 and a bus ticket. And I went to New York.
I was amazed at how big the buildings were. I was like the guy Stevie Wonder was singing about, "New York, just like I always pictured it." I had to get to Brooklyn. So I asked people how to get there and they told me to take the train. "Train?!" I was totally dumbfounded. "What have I got myself into now?" I hadn't even called this guy yet.
I got a taxi. I had that $20 in my pocket and the taxi cost me $18 to get to Brooklyn. So now I got two dollars in my pocket and I don't know if this guy's home or not. I knocked on the door and he was there. But he was cleaning out his apartment because he was getting married the next day. He was so shocked to see me. He talked to the landlady, and the landlady let me stay there for $25 a week.
There's a reblooming interest in soul, funk, R&B with Daptone, Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley. What is your relationship to that wave?
I was the beginning of all of that. Before Daptone was Daptone, they were Desco. And I was [their] first [artist]. Sharon Jones was my background singer. I was on the Southern soul circuit in the '90s, opening up for people like Tyrone Davis and Bobby Blue. But I met [Daptone founder] Gabriel Roth in the mid '90s, and that's when the retro soul stuff was coming up. I attribute all of this to them, not me. They chose me to be on their label. I give all the credit to them. But I was first.
What do you think about contemporary music?
I get down with contemporary stuff. You know Martin Solveig? I had three major hits over in Europe: "Jealousy," "I Want You," and "Everybody." All of them were Martin Solveig featuring Lee Fields. He got me all over the dance scene. I was doing dance music for, like, six years. It was his show. I came out in a black suit, sang, and people went nuts. He sent me all around the world. I hear he's working with Madonna now.
Did you miss soul when you were doing dance music?
I was playing dance music. But I'm a soul man. And I was bringing it to the table like a soul man.
Lee Fields and the Expressions. With Ketchy Shuby and DJ Action Pat. Presented by Sweat Records and M.O. Saturday, December 1. The Stage, 170 NE 38th St., Miami. The show starts at 9 p.m. and tickets cost $10 via sweatshopmiami.com. Ages 21 and up.Call 305-576-9577 or visit thestagemiami.com.
Follow Crossfade on Facebook and Twitter @Crossfade_SFL.Turk Hack Team conducted several cyber attacks on top Iranian and Russian Ministry websites since the beginning of the conflict at the Syrian-Turkish border.
The famous group of Turkish hackers going with the handle of Turk Hack Team or THT has been busy conducting cyber attacks against Russia, Iran and anyone standing against the country’s policies or the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
THT made a comeback in 2015 when the group shut down Vatican City official website against Pope Francis’ remarks in which he used the word ‘genocide’ to refer to mass killings of Armenians by Turks. However, now the hackers have been targeting Russian website after last month’s incident in which the Turkish air force shot down Russian fighter jet near the Turkish-Syrian border.
Timeline of THT’s cyber attacks against Russia:
On Dec 25TH, 2015 when you were celebrating Christmas the THT attackers were defacing Russian and Iranian websites with messages against President Putin. The hackers claimed to deface 2000+ websites. The message on the sites was expressed in the following text.
Putin, knowingly and willfully planned airplane attack and the citizen on death. This has caused you to be you’re a traitor. Now the citizens of nationalist feelings of the Russian People trick. The Russian people is a people’s dignity and your bragging will be exposed sooner or later of the. When that day comes, the Russian people will cut you out of that seat.
[must url=”https://www.hackread.com/turkish-hackers-deface-russian-bank-website/”]Turkish Hackers Deface Russian Bank Website, Claim To Steal Data[/must]
[fullsquaread][/fullsquaread]
[must url=”https://www.hackread.com/russian-embassy-in-israel-website-hacked-with-turkish-flag/”]Russian Embassy in Israel Website Hacked- Hackers Post Turkish Flag[/must]
On Dec 26TH, 2015 the group conducted its second breach under the |
. Schwartz, who represents Cicinelli, labeled Orange County coroner’s pathologist Aruna Singhania “arrogant,” said her autopsy report on Kelly Thomas missed the fact that he had broken ribs and added “what else did she miss?”
A few minutes later he said, “She’s basically making things up as she goes along, and it doesn’t make sense.” He added that “even the cause of death has not been proven.”
But Rackauckas labeled Schwartz’ allegations a “substantial mischaracterization” of testimony given by Singhania and Dr. Michael Lekawa, chief of trauma and critical care services at UCI Medical Center.
Barnett blamed Kelly Thomas for his own death.
He said officers were just trying to get his cooperation and give them his name, “but Kelly Thomas, who has control of the situation, will not cooperate.” He said no evidence was presented showing Kelly Thomas was “mentally incapacitated.”
Rackauckas said the video and medical evidence show that Ramos, through gestures like “twirling” his baton while talking to Thomas, putting on latex gloves and threatening to “f— you up,” frightened Thomas.
Ramos, according to Rackauckas, “started the chain of circumstances that led to the death of Kelly Thomas.” And, he said, Kelly Thomas became brain dead from the cumulative effect of his injuries.
At times this week as many as nine TV crews had cameras stationed in the news conference area of the county courthouse in Santa Ana, a demonstration of the widespread attention paid to the shirtless, somewhat disheveled man of the streets who died screaming for help from his father and is believed to have suffered from untreated schizophrenia.
His father, Ron Thomas, has waged an unrelenting campaign to see officers involved in his son’s death sent to prison.
Despite official reluctance to move against any officers in the initial weeks following Kelly Thomas’ July 10 death, Ron Thomas and several dozen supporters demonstrated outside the Fullerton police station, set up a memorial at the Transportation Center where Kelly Thomas was beaten and ultimately saw Fullerton Police Chief Michael Sellers resign after a medical leave of absence and Rackauckas file charges against two of the six officers who were involved.
Spectators, including many Kelly Thomas supporters, filled the courtroom Wednesday, waiting for Schwarm’s decision on whether Ramos and Cicinelli would face trial.
For 11 minutes, those in the courtroom, including the two defendants, sat silently after one of the dozen uniformed sheriff’s deputies ordered all to take their seats and wait for the judge.
Cicinelli, who sat through much of the final day of arguments with his elbow on the table in front of him and his chin resting on his hand, sat with rounded shoulders waiting for the judge, his gaze fixed on the tabletop. Ramos stared straight ahead.
“I want to assure everyone I have looked at the totality of the evidence …,” Schwarm began. He then quickly read through his decision to order both men to trial on all charges, the usual outcome of a preliminary hearing.
“You did it,” a man in the crowd congratulated Ron Thomas as the audience got up to leave the courtroom.
“I can’t say that I’m happy,” Ron Thomas told a news conference a few minutes later.
He said he viewed the preliminary hearing as one battle in a war to bring legal action against the officers. More battles, including the trial, he said, are to come.
Please contact Tracy Wood directly at twood@voiceofoc.org and follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/tracyVOC. And add your voice with a letter to the editor.twood@voiceofoc.orgMedical cannabis has the potential to help military veterans find relief from war wounds, the Trump administration’s top veterans affairs official says.
“Some of the states that have put in appropriate controls, there may be some evidence that this is beginning to be helpful, and we’re interested in looking at that and learning from that,” David Shulkin, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, said in a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
“I believe that everything that could help veterans should be debated by Congress and medical experts, and we will implement that law,” he said. “If there is compelling evidence that this is helpful, I hope that people take a look at that and come up with the right decision and we will implement that.”
He was responding to a question about the American Legion’s push for cannabis to be rescheduled so that its medical benefits can be more robustly studied.
The organization, which represents more than 2 million military veterans, first endorsed rescheduling in a resolution adopted at its conference last year. In addition to relieving physical pain, a growing number of veterans are using cannabis to manage the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Last week, top American Legion officials published an op-ed laying out the group’s case for reform.
“The opioid epidemic that continues to grip veterans is yet another reason to ease the federal government’s outdated attitude toward America’s marijuana supply. The Trump administration should lead a new effort to combat opioid abuse, and it should include the elimination of barriers to medical research on cannabis,” they wrote. “The result, potentially, could provide a non-addictive solution to the most common debilitating conditions our veterans — and others in society — face… Cannabis’ Schedule I listing is disingenuous given the fact that the federal government cannot produce any research or evidence justifying its classification – which significantly hampers medical research into the therapeutic aspects of the drug. It’s a classic Catch-22.”
Because of cannabis’s status under Schedule I — the most restrictive category, which is supposed to be reserved for substances with no medical value — researchers interested in studying it encounter extra procedural hurdles that don’t apply to examinations of other drugs.
At the Wednesday briefing, Shulkin suggested that it would be up to Congress to make changes to federal marijuana policy.
“Until time the federal law changes, we are not able to be able to prescribe medical marijuana for conditions that may be helpful,” he said of his department’s medical doctors.
But under the Controlled Substances Act the Trump administration does have the power to administratively reschedule marijuana.
Shulkin, who previously served as the VA’s undersecretary of health in the Obama administration, has seemed somewhat open to increasing military veterans’ access to medical marijuana in the past. In a letter last year he wrote that he “wholeheartedly agree[s] that VA should do all it can to foster open communication between Veterans and their VA providers, including discussion about participation in state marijuana programs.”
He also wrote, “I recognize that the disparity between Federal and state laws regarding the use of marijuana creates considerable uncertainty for patients, providers, and Federal, state, and local law enforcement personnel.”
Last year, both the House and the Senate approved measures to allow VA doctors to recommend medical cannabis to veterans in states where it is legal. But the provisions were later stripped out by the conference committee that merged both chambers’ separate legislation into a final version of the VA funding bill.Image copyright EPA Image caption Mr Kennedy has questioned whether vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been widely debunked by medical professionals
Robert F Kennedy Jr, a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement, says President-elect Donald Trump has asked him to chair a study on vaccine safety.
Incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer confirmed the pair met to discuss vaccines and immunisations.
However, a spokeswoman for Mr Trump, Hope Hicks, told Reuters that "no decisions have been made at this time".
Mr Kennedy has long contended that some vaccines may cause autism, a claim that has been widely debunked.
The president-elect has also expressed doubt about vaccinations.
Mr Trump has previously tweeted about the issue, advocating for children to receive smaller doses of vaccines over a long period of time.
"I am totally in favour of vaccines," Mr Trump said in a 2015 Republican primary debate.
"But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time. Same exact amount, but you take this little beautiful baby, and you pump - I mean, it looks just like it's meant for a horse, not for a child, and we've had so many instances, people that work for me.... [in which] a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back and a week later had a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic."
Medical experts have overwhelmingly rejected any link between vaccines and autism, warning that promoting such a theory endangers public health.
The people around Donald Trump
What's behind the 'anti-vax' movement?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found no connection between autism and vaccines, citing numerous studies.
The commission will focus on making "sure we have scientific integrity in the vaccine process for efficacy and safety effects," Mr Kennedy told reporters after Tuesday's meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
Mr Kennedy, the eldest son of liberal icon Senator Robert Kennedy, is an environmental activist who has focused his attention on the "anti-vax" movement. He campaigns for parents to opt out of vaccinations and immunisations.
He came under fire in 2015 for describing the number of children injured by vaccines as "a holocaust" during a film screening of Trace Amounts, a documentary on the subject.
Mr Kennedy later apologised and said he "struggled to find an expression" to convey his thoughts.
Analysis - By James Gallagher, health and science reporter
Mr Kennedy's potential appointment has already been described as "very frightening" by one scientist.
The link between the MMR (Measles Mumps and Rubella) vaccine and autism has been thoroughly discredited.
The British doctor Andrew Wakefield - who first suggested the link - can no longer practise medicine in the UK after being struck off for acting "dishonestly and irresponsibly".
So the rise of a prominent anti-vaxxer can be seen as a massive middle-finger to established science.
However, this is not a surprise.
Andrew Wakefield remains vocal in the US and during the election campaign he met Mr Trump.
Afterwards he told the science news website Stat: "For the first time in a long time, I feel very positive about this, because Donald Trump is not beholden to the pharmaceutical industry."Erin Mershon, Greg Rosalsky, Cole Stangler, Nate Willis and Jeffrey Young contributed reporting.
WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republicans may not have been happy about the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, but many of their children probably are.
According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, dozens of Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare have adult children who are allowed to stay on their parents' health plans thanks to the law, which extended this benefit nationwide. Many of the lawmakers' children are employed and on their own health care plans, but others continue to take advantage of their parents' coverage.
"He [My 24-year-old son] is on his health plan right now -- on his mother's plan -- but again, that wouldn’t weigh in on where I stand on the issue," said Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) last week, before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. "Again, I just think the whole thing needs to be scrapped. And I don’t even want to think about certain provisions yet."
But Walsh and his GOP colleagues are soon going to have to start thinking about which provisions they want to keep if they are going to try to repeal Obamacare. Republicans are almost completely unified in wanting to get rid of the health care law, but they are significantly more divided on what a plan would look like going forward -- and whether they should keep some of the law's most popular provisions.
On Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Republicans would not require parents' health insurance plans to extend eligibility to adult children if Obamacare is repealed.
Walsh demurred when asked if he supported maintaining the provision.
“No, I don’t know that I do. I don’t know that I do," he said. "I don't know where I am on that, and that's a lousy thing to say. My oldest is 24. That doesn’t matter to me, though, irregardless of that."
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), however, wants to keep it.
"There are good things in the health care bill, and that's one of them," said Amodei, who has a 25-year-old daughter with her own health insurance. "I haven't talked with anybody who thinks that's something we ought to get rid of."
"I support it. Oh, sure.... It would be [incorporated] in any Republican proposal," added Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), whose 22-year-old son is a full-time student.
So far, Republicans have not put forward a comprehensive alternative plan to Obamacare, focusing mostly on talk of "patient-centered reforms" that allow the "market to work." While three large health insurance companies promised to keep covering adult children on their parents' plans regardless of the Supreme Court ruling, many children would have lost coverage if the court had struck the law down.
Since the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, the share of Americans aged 18 to 25 without health insurance dropped to 23 percent from 28 percent.
Before the law was passed, 34 states had enacted laws that extended eligibility for adult children to stay on their parents' health plans, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics and conducted by researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. But as the National Conference of State Legislatures noted, many of these states had tighter restrictions on the age and other eligibility requirements for dependents than are in the Affordable Care Act.
After Colorado, New Jersey and South Dakota enacted mandates for young people in 2005 and 2006, young adults reported increases in health insurance coverage, more physical exams, a greater likelihood of having a primary care physician and fewer occasions when they went without medical care because of costs than their counterparts in 17 states that do not mandate insurance coverage for that age group.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has at least one of his daughters on his health care plan (he isn't sure about the second). He said he liked the provision. He believes, however, that the market would have provided the extra coverage for adult children, even if the Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act.
"They're going to continue that [provision] anyway," he said. "I think the insurance companies have all kind of decided that that's an okay thing. They were in our office, they've been in our office in the last few weeks."
The reason that health insurers began widely offering such benefits, however, is because Obamacare mandated it. The provision proved to be extremely popular with the American public. Without the law in place, it's unclear how long insurers would continue to offer such coverage, since they would no longer be required to do so.
Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) has a 21-year-old daughter on his health care plan, which his spokeswoman noted was not the federal plan that members of Congress receive. He has declined federal benefits -- including health insurance and retirement -- and instead has coverage through a private insurance plan that he pays for through his business, Freedom Automotive.
Rigell was not elected until 2010, after Congress had already voted for health care reform, but he would like to see it repealed going forward. Still, he also said he supports the provision covering young adults.
"I think that is a good provision," he said. "There are parts of the Affordable Care Act that I support."
Rep. Bob Turner (R-N.Y.), however, was less sure.
"I haven’t really thought too much about this," he said. "I do know, whether your kid is 22 or 26, who’s gonna pay for that? Is it everybody pays for that or is it the person who has the kids pays for it? So I'm gonna let this sort itself out when we get through the bill."
"I don't think this is going to be one of the biggest drivers of things -- that particularly," Turner said. "High-risk pools, portability -- such important issues. This one has some merit, but I don't consider this one important."
Lawmakers who want to both keep their children on their health plans and repeal the Affordable Care Act could face political problems, as has Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.).
Brown has said his 23-year-old daughter is still on his health care plan, despite his opposition to Obamacare.
"Of course I do," he replied when the Boston Globe asked him whether he keeps his daughter on his plan.Supreme court says international law does not fit the'reality on the ground' of long-term Israeli occupation
Israeli companies are entitled to exploit the West Bank's natural resources for economic gain, according to a supreme court ruling that says international law must be adapted to the "reality on the ground" of long-term occupation.
The supreme court rejected a petition brought by an Israeli human rights organisation against the quarrying of stone by Israeli companies in the West Bank. Yesh Din claimed that the quarrying was illegal under international law because it exploited the natural resources of the occupied territory for the benefit of the occupying power.
But the court ruled last week that in a prolonged occupation the economic development of the occupied territory could not be frozen indefinitely. It added that the quarrying firms were not destroying the "capital" of the West Bank's natural resources, and were providing employment to Palestinians.
Existing Israeli-owned quarries should be allowed to continue operating, but no new ones should open, the court ruled, reflecting the Israeli government's position.
Yesh Din said the ruling could be applied to other economic aspects of the occupation, such as water resources and the appropriation of archeological artefacts.
Its petition against the state of Israel and 10 Israeli companies operating quarries in the West Bank demanded a halt to all Israeli quarrying and mining activity, and that no new licences be issued. It said Israeli quarrying in the West Bank was illegal and "executed through brutal economic exploitation of occupied territory for the needs of the state of Israel, the occupying power".
According to a Palestinian Authority report on the economic costs of the Israeli occupation published in September, the potential value of production from mining and quarrying in the West Bank under Israeli control is an estimated $900m (£580m) a year.
Yesh Din quoted an Israeli interior ministry document from 2008, which said that most mines and quarries in Area C of the West Bank (around 60% of the territory that is under Israeli military control) are owned by Israeli companies. Three-quarters of the total yield is sold in Israel.
Michael Sfard, Yesh Din's legal adviser, said: "Quarrying natural resources in an occupied territory for the benefit of the occupying state is pillage, and the court's reasoning that a long-term occupation should be treated differently cannot legalise an economic activity that harms the occupied residents."
Hanna Barag of Yesh Din said the ruling was "dangerous". The judgment was based on the assumption that the length of the occupation meant that Israel could adapt international law. "It allows Israel to literally steal the land," she said. Israel has occupied the West Bank for more than 44 years.
At a quarry close to the Israeli settlement of Kochav HaShacher, deep in the West Bank, director Ami Soshani dismissed Yesh Din's arguments, saying Palestinians benefited from the company's operations.
The land on which the quarry is sited was taken over by Israel. Owned by the settlement and managed by a separate company, the quarry is overlooked by the Palestinian village of Kfar Malek.
It extracts around half a million tonnes of dolomite each year, and 20 of its 25 employees are Palestinians. Soshani says that most of its output stays in the West Bank, sold either to settlements or Palestinian concrete factories.
"For the Palestinians, this is an important centre. Palestinian construction companies know they are not cheated and get a good product. The Palestinian workers here did not support the court action because they knew it could affect their livelihoods," he said.
The land itself, he said, had been promised to the Jews. "This is our inheritance, we got this land from God." There was no reason why Jews and Palestinians couldn't "stay together and live together" on the land, he added.
Shoshani said his major concern was for the environment. "This kind of quarrying is damaging. It is an ugly wound on the landscape." A geological survey found there was potential for a further 20 years of quarrying at the site.
In response to the ruling, Yesh Din said "manipulation of the rule prohibiting the harming of property in occupied territory creates a legal basis for irreparable economic exploitation of occupied territory … On its face, the new rule allows the occupier (in a long-term occupation) to make endless use of the variety of objects found in the occupied territory: to pump its water sources, to transfer its archeological artefacts to elsewhere outside the territory, to use areas within it for garbage disposal, to sell public real estate, and more."Syria's Assad says political Islam project has failed
DAMASCUS - Agence France-Presse
A handout picture shows Syrians waving the national flag and some holding placards bearing a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad. AFP Photo
The "project of political Islam has failed," Syria's President Bashar al-Assad said on Monday, calling for the separation of religion from politics, state television said.Assad's regime has been battling an uprising that has come to be dominated by Islamists, ranging from moderates to radicals, who want to see Syria run as an Islamic state."The project of political Islam has failed, and there should be no mixing between political and religious work," he said in comments on the 67th anniversary of the founding of his Baath party.Assad refers to all those fighting against him as "terrorists" and has said that he is battling extremists with retrograde ideas.The president has repeatedly stressed the need for all parts of Syrian society to challenge "extremism".Assad said his government was also "continuing with the process of reconciliation, because what concerns us is ending the bloodshed and the destruction of infrastructure".In recent months, Assad's government has negotiated limited ceasefires with rebels who agree to raise the government's flag in their neighbourhoods, and in many cases turn over their weapons.The deals usually follow months-long sieges by the army, which have contributed to humanitarian crises in parts of the country.Syria's conflict, which began in March 2011, has left more than 150,000 people dead.This review is for the novel Metro 2033 written by Dmitry Glukhovsky.
The video game based on this book is one of my three favorite video games of all time....the other two being Half-Life 2 series and the Stalker series.
After many hours playing the video game I decided to read the novel. I was not sure what to expect. I am giving my impressions below.
I will also let you know how similar it is to the video game in a section below (COMPARISON OF BOOK AND VIDEO GAME.)
PLOT: The basic premise is that there has been a nuclear war and what's left of mankind is living in subways (probably throughout the world but nobody is quite sure.) Obviously it is the year 2033. This story takes place in the subways below Moscow.
Artyom, who was a young boy at the time of the nuclear war, is the main star of the show. He is grown up now and early on he relays the story to a mysterious stalker (stalker is a very loose translation, it real means more like guide/tracker/trail blazer/etc) named Hunter about how he opened up a way into the Metro as a young boy for whatever is out there.
What's out there are mutants or animals that are mutated and maybe something else. Hunter, just back from his latest excursion is getting prepared to go back out again when he gives Artyom a mission to complete if he does not come back within a short period of time. His mission is to go to the Metro city of 'Polis' and seek out another Stalker named Melnik and give him a message. That's the basic premise but the story is much more involved than that. This book is about a journey.....the same way that Lord of the Rings is about a journey. You wouldn't summarize 'Lord of the Rings' by calling it a story about a group of halflings that take a trip across the continent to get to Mount Doom.
COMMENTS:
-Not all of the sentences make perfect sense. This novel is a translation from Russian and there are some inconsistencies. Occasionally something is lost in the translation.
-The book is fairly long....almost 500 pages in novel form. At times it does drag but the story is always interesting. The characters spend a lot of time philosophizing about various aspects of life and life in the metro in general. While I find some of the discussion a bit tedious at times, it does add to the story.
ABOUT THE MAP:
There are some good maps of the underground on the internet. Just use google. Some of them will show you the path. Others will give you the coordinates and alternate names of the stations. This is important because the map in the book does not always follow the names in the story. Also the map provided in the book is actually different than the real map. Artyom carries an incorrect map in the story and discovers that there are other stations he doesn't know about. You will find yourself bewildered if you try to follow along with Artyom. It can be very confusing if you don't have the true map. So do yourself a favor and have one ready when you are ready to read this book!
COMPARISON OF BOOK AND VIDEO GAME: The story is roughly the same in both but in reality it is not the same at all. At it's very basic it is the same story but how you get to the main locations is very different.
-The novel visits many of the same locations as the video game but there are more locations in the book.
-The characters are more fleshed out in the novel (obviously!!!) Also, obviously, the stations are described in much more detail. You will meet many of the same characters, but your interactions will be different. Artyom's interactions with the characters will be different but the characters themselves have the same personalities and behave in much the same manner.
-You will meet additional characters along your journey. Some of these characters may be real or they may be in Artyom's head, you are never quite sure. Be prepared for some lengthy speeches of philosophical content.
-You will start out at the same location and the mission given by Hunter is the same....get to Polis and find Melnik. The ending is also pretty close to the same. But just about everything else in between is at the same time similar and very different.
-You will obviously learn far more in the book about the underground Metro.
-The mutant creatures are pretty much described the same way they show up in the video game.
-The story of the Dark Ones is basically the same in both versions.
HOW ABOUT THE SEQUEL?:
After reading this you will be ready for the next book. Keep in mind that Artyom is a very minor character in 'Metro 2034.' Hunter, who is really just a minor character in Metro 2033 even though he drives the story, is a major character in 'Metro 2034.'
Metro 2035 is the book that the second Metro game'Metro 2033: Last Light' is based on.
CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS: 5 stars. Definitely one of the best post-apocalyptic stories written.
I strongly recommend this book for fans of post-apocalyptic fiction. It is one of the best. I rarely read a book twice and I did so with this one.
Recommended for fans of the video game.
Recommended for fans of science fiction in general.
This book has spawned two sequels as of the time of this review (Metro 2034 and Metro 2035). There are also numerous other novels by other authors that have been written that take place in different parts of the world based in the same universe. Also as of the time of this review, unfortunately, none of these have been released in English.
There has been one graphic novel that I know of based on the Metro Universe called 'The Outpost' and it takes place in the United States.(Photo: Leigh Prather/Shutterstock)
If you glanced around the room at a conference of geneticists, it would be easy to guess where in the world all the attendees' ancestors came from. Using skin color, hair, facial features, and other physical traits, you could distinguish the East Asians from the South Asians and the Africans from the Europeans. Our broad racial categories appear to be founded on genuine biological differences between people from different geographical regions. And these differences seem to define a set of natural human groups, the product of the last 70,000 years or so when modern humans emerged from Africa to colonize the other continents, acquiring distinct physical traits as they adapted to new environments.
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The concept of human races appears to be solidly grounded in present-day biology and our evolutionary history. But if you asked that conference of geneticists to give you a genetic definition of race, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Human races are not natural genetic groups; they are socially constructed categories.
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Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices.
Now, the truth of this claim is not obvious. The idea that humans fall naturally into racial groups is almost universally accepted in all societies. Sure, many people have mixed ancestry that crosses racial boundaries, but there are undeniable physical differences between people native to different parts of the world. Many of those physical differences reflect genetic differences, and over the past two decades, researchers have used those genetic differences to pinpoint the geographical origins of people's ancestry with ever-increasing precision. Just last month, one group reported that they could use DNA to place Sardinians within 30 miles of their native village. On a larger scale, geneticists will frequently talk about the “populations” of general geographical areas, making these broad populations sound very much like races. And there are clear examples of recently evolved adaptations in different human populations, such as the high-altitude physiology in Tibetans and Andeans.
Genes certainly reflect geography, but unlike geography, human genetic differences don't fall along obvious natural boundaries that might define races. As my Washington University colleague Alan Templeton has shown, by objective genetic definitions of race, human races don't exist. Writing in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Templeton notes that "Human populations certainly show genetic differences across geographical space, but this does not necessarily mean that races exist in humans." For an objective, biological definition of race, this genetic differentiation has to occur "across sharp boundaries and not as gradual changes." Templeton examined two genetic definitions of race that are commonly applied by biologists to vertebrate species. In both cases, races clearly exist in chimpanzees, our nearest relatives, but not in humans.
One natural definition of race is a group whose members are genetically much more similar to each other than they are to other groups. Putting a number on what counts as "much more" is a somewhat arbitrary exercise, but Templeton found that the genetic differentiation between populations of chimpanzees is over seven times greater than the genetic differentiation between broad geographical populations of humans. Furthermore, the level of genetic differentiation between human populations falls well below the threshold that biologists typically use to define races in non-human species.
Races could also be defined by genetic branches on the family tree. For most of us, this is the most intuitive definition of race. It’s one that, at first glance, is consistent with recent human evolution: After originating in Africa, part of our species branched out first into Asia and Europe, and then to the rest of the world. We should thus expect different geographical populations to be distinct genetic limbs on our species' recent evolutionary tree.
But as it turns out, our species' family history is not so arboreal. Geneticists have methods for measuring the "treeness" of genetic relationships between populations. Templeton found that the genetic relationships between human populations don't have a very tree-like structure, while chimpanzee populations do. Rather than a family tree with distinct racial branches, humans have a family trellis that lacks clear genetic boundaries between different groups.
These findings reflect our unusual recent evolutionary history. Unlike the distinct populations of chimps, humans continued to exchange both goods and genes with each other even as they rapidly settled an enormous geographical range. Those ongoing contacts, plus the fact that we were a small, genetically homogeneous species to begin with, has resulted in relatively close genetic relationships, despite our worldwide presence. The DNA differences between humans increase with geographical distance, but boundaries between populations are, as geneticists Kenneth Weiss and Jeffrey Long put it, "multilayered, porous, ephemeral, and difficult to identify." Pure, geographically separated ancestral populations are an abstraction: "There is no reason to think that there ever were isolated, homogeneous parental populations at any time in our human past."
Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices. Those choices are not totally arbitrary, biologically meaningless, or without utility. But because they are choices, we have some leeway in how we define and apply racial categories. We shouldn't deceive ourselves; how we define race does not just reflect biology, it reflects culture, history, and politics as well.Image copyright PA Image caption Chris Henkey, who has been named in reports as the flight's captain, with partner Lenka Nevolna
The pilot of a British Airways plane which caught fire at a Las Vegas airport, forcing the evacuation of 170 people on board on emergency slides, has told NBC he is "finished flying".
Chris Henkey, from Reading, said he was "unlikely" to make a trip to Barbados, after which he was due to retire.
His fiancee said she was "very shocked", but praised him as a "hero".
Officials in the United States said the left engine of the Boeing 777-200 caught fire before take-off.
At least 14 people were taken to hospital with minor injuries after the incident on a runway at McCarran International Airport.
Describing the incident, Mr Henkey told NBC: "There was a loud bang and the aircraft sort of veered to the left. Because we had a third pilot he actually opened the door and went down into the cabin, saw how serious it was."
He told the network he had been due to fly to Barbados on Saturday and return the following Tuesday "and that would be it."
But he reportedly added: "It's safe to say I'm finished flying."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption In footage filmed inside the aircraft, the flight crew can be heard telling passengers to remain in their seats
Image copyright Jordan Masters Image caption The flight was destined for London's Gatwick airport
Image copyright PA Image caption Mr Henkey, left, was praised as a hero
His fiancee, 40-year-old Lenka Nevolna, confirmed he was due to retire.
"He's a hero," she said. "He's a great man with a warm heart, and generosity, and I'm very proud of him."
'Very experienced'
In a recording, which appeared to be a conversation between Mr Henkey and air traffic control, he was heard saying calmly: "Mayday, mayday, Speedbird 2276 request fire services."
A woman in the control tower immediately replied: "Speedbird 2276 Heavy; fire services on the way."
Forty seconds later the captain added: "We are evacuating on the runway. We have a fire. I repeat, we are evacuating."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jack Traisneau and Tom Hamer described how some passengers left the BA jet with their hand luggage
Image copyright Eric Hays via AP Image caption BA have not confirmed the identity of the captain
According to reports, Mr Henkey was applauded by passengers in the terminal building.
"I know the papers are saying now 'he's a hero'," the pilot told NBC. "[But] we have to remember there are two other pilots and cabin crew who all behaved very, very well."
BA would not confirm the identity of the captain but said he was "very experienced and has flown with British Airways for 42 years".
In a statement, the airline said the aircraft "experienced a technical issue as it was preparing for take-off".
Flight 2276 was bound for London's Gatwick airport.
There were 157 passengers and 13 crew members on board.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters President Donald Trump's biggest gatherings of business leaders fell apart, and according to reports Trump's own comments are to blame.
As detailed by reports, the decision to finally disband the council came after Trump's comments over the weekend that did not explicitly denounce neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups at the heart of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Strategic and Policy Forum was announced in December 2016 for business leaders to have a direct line to Donald Trump and influence his policies going forward. Critics argued it was a simple way for Trump to display a stable, pro-business face. Steve Schwarzman, the Forum's leader and CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, said at the time that it was an opportunity to help shape the new president's policies.
"The Forum, which is composed of some of America's most highly respected and successful business leaders, will be called upon to meet with the president frequently to share their specific experience and knowledge as the president implements his plan to bring back jobs and Make America Great Again," said a release announcing the formation of the council.
There was only one official meeting of the Forum on February 3, at which Trump promised "exciting times ahead" and said his administration was "coming out with a tax bill soon and a healthcare bill even sooner."
Following the violence in Charlottesville and Trump's initial reaction in which he said "many sides" were to blame for the events. His remarks prompted the demise of the council. Here's a breakdown of how the council fell apart according to reports from CNBC's Patti Domm and Dominic Chu and Bloomberg's Melissa Mittelman, Jennifer Kaplan, Jing Cao, and Zachary Tracer:
Sunday night: PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi began to ask other members about whether the Forum remained a good idea.
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi began to ask other members about whether the Forum remained a good idea. Sunday night/Monday morning: General Motors CEO Mary Barra and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty joined Nooyi in calling the other members and gauging the reaction to Trump's comments.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty joined Nooyi in calling the other members and gauging the reaction to Trump's comments. Monday morning: Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier quits an unrelated council of manufacturing business leaders, prompting a wave of departures from that group and ramping up public pressure among the other members of Trump's various business groups.
Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier quits an unrelated council of manufacturing business leaders, prompting a wave of departures from that group and ramping up public pressure among the other members of Trump's various business groups. Monday afternoon: Trump's statement Monday condemning white supremacists and neo-Nazis cooled |
he looks to Dunwall’s bounding harbour. A giant tanker slopes its way past, vast arms on top of it transporting an enormous, imprisoned whale. The sight is tragic, horrifying, surreal, impossible to ignore. For the people of Dunwall, all it signals is a fuel shipment.
Whale oil is the source of and key to this world’s industry. When Corvo seeks a way to disrupt a light gate blocking one possible path to his target, he follows its cabling to its control panel. Later, he’ll have acquired the blueprints that allow him to hack it and gain access himself, but for now a noisier alternative is to simply remove its whale-oil battery. This is a city of amazing accomplishments – but clearly the path taken to them has been a dark one. Combined, the many visual and thematic layers in Dishonored make for a magnetic, magnificent sight: wild and unsettling, colourful yet downcast, explicable but mysterious. I want to see so much more of it.
In the demo I watch, Corvo combines an ad-hoc mix of roofs, doors, tunnels, rats, running, hiding, imbibing strange liquids, spells, spell-unlocking and brazen violence to create a custom route to his target, presumed corrupt lawyer Arnold Timish. His assassination is neither noble or silent. Instead, Corvo goes in guns and knives out, using windblast to scatter Timish and his bodyguards across the room, then freezing and bloodily stabbing or headshotting them without hesitation. This does not go unnoticed by Dunwall’s guards, so Corvo flees desperately – plunging out of a window then blinking spectacularly from roof to roof, darting above and behind the huge iron watch towers that spray bullets at him as clanging bells sound damningly all around and, deftly, circling around the looming, flame-spraying stilt-walkers that block his egress. From the front, they are towering, faceless machines, surely impervious to any of Corvo’s weapons. From behind, it’s a guy standing in the cockpit of long-limbed vehicle, his all too human back exposed as he tugs on levers to steer the construct about. A back that might as well have a target painted on it. So down he goes, and to safety Corvo goes. A frail, shadowbound weakling Corvo is not. Dunwall is his to master.
He did it all wrong, of course. I’d have gotten in and out, silently. No-one who didn’t have to die would have died. Rodent feet would have explored every street. No-one would known I was ever there. But I can appreciate that Corvo is not Garrett, not if he doesn’t want to be. Corvo is something else: he is Altair, he is Adam Jensen, he is Subject Delta. He is Corvo. With all these powers, all these choices, all these routes available to him, perhaps he wouldn’t want to tread the least flashy, most nondescript, invisible path after all. Who could blame him?An international team of court scientists released a study earlier in August dismissing claims that so-called chemtrails from airplanes exist and are sickening people around the world. Activists and environmentalists have not lost heart, though, and are still moving ahead with lawsuits and legislation to expose this toxic global program.
By Mark Anderson
Establishment scientists may be doing all they can to undermine legitimate research into so-called chemtrails—those toxic chemical trails left behind by airplanes high up in the atmosphere—but that has not taken the wind of out of activists’ sails. Citizens across America are still working to get to the bottom of what exactly has been filling our skies and allegedly making many people sick.
According to the mainstream media, an international team released a study pooh-poohing the theory that a secret large-scale atmospheric program, or SLAP, is in place intended to affect the health of humans and the environment.
AFP reported on this study on Aug. 19.
But there is some good news out there.
On Feb.12, 2015, the so-called Geoengineering Act of 2015 (H.B. 5480) was introduced into Rhode Island’s General Assembly, which “would demand public disclosure and health and environmental evaluations of any geoengineering activities.” As of May 2015, it was held for further study.
Under its “declaration of geoengineering policy,” it says: “The... assembly declares that while the use of geoengineering to address climate change and global warming is a topic worthy for both scientific and other public investigation and debate, its implementation and use should be strictly regulated... at this time. Such regulation must include the opportunity for input and comment from the general public, as well as from the medical, environmental, and scientific communities.”
The bill added, “Tests must be performed on a continuous basis to ascertain levels of proposed and known chemicals, particles, gases, metals, other compounds, and materials to ensure that these programs are not implemented without public consent.”
The state legislation died in committee last year, but there is hope that legislators will revisit the measure this year.
In addition, in early 2016, a mass-tort environmental class-action lawsuit was brought in the Federal Court of Canada “on behalf of all affected Canadians in respect of aerial discharges performed directly or indirectly by Her Majesty the Queen and/or her instrumentalities, in Canadian air space, and which aerial discharges are alleged to compromise cognitive function, contribute to other neurological disorders, damage property and the environment, among... other... damage,” Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, a geophysicist, informed AFP.
The noted website “Geoengineering Watch,” which watchdogs this issue, had urged Canadian attorneys to take up this issue and believes its efforts have paid off.
Mark Anderson is AFP’s roving editor.In 1928, the detective novelist, S.S. Van Dine published “Twenty rules for writing detective stories” in The American magazine. The First Commandment reads
The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.
Detective fiction invites readers to work alongside or, if you’re really good, ahead of the detective to solve the crime. If the author does not play fair, the reader cannot play the game. The challenge for the writer is to provide clues tantalizing enough to sustain readers’ desires for answers, but challenging enough to foil their efforts to find them.
On this count, Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga, the creator and director of HBO’s True Detective, have succeeded marvelously. The show has sparked more speculation about how it will all turn out than any program since Lost. There are now so may recaps and conversations going on about the program on Reddit and other forums that this week Vulture produced a recap of the recaps. From tracking down source material in 19th-century “weird fiction” to locating creepy pictures of Courir de Mardi Gras, fans and critics of the show have become detectives as obsessive as Rust Cohle, scouring screenshots of the show for the clues that will solve the crime. They were egged on to investigate from the start by Detective Marty Hart’s invocation of the detective’s curse: “Solution was right under my nose, but I was paying attention to the wrong clues.”
It is no small matter that what empowers these obsessive fan investigations is digital video technology. DVDs, DVR, and screen-capturing technology allow us to watch television shows as closely and carefully as we might a book. Lost coincided with the rise of DVR (it took until 2008 to be in 25 perecent of U.S. homes) and became one of the first shows subjected to such intense examination using digital technologies. Fans created websites dedicated to nothing but posting and decoding screen captures of the program in order to unlock its many mysteries. During the run-up to the conclusion of Breaking Bad, viewers used screen caps to discover color schemes, callbacks to earlier seasons, and hints about the finale.
But Pizzolatto and Fukunaga have made the first true cop show of the digital age, or rather, the first cop show to reckon with and exploit the effects of digitization. True Detective has provided us with so many clues that the creators are daring us to think any aspect of the show is irrelevant. Is it merely a coincidence that the show’s initial crime takes place in 1995, the very year that the DVD was invented, and that Cohle and Martin missed their target then?
Fans of Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and even Law & Order typically got to revisit an episode only when it re-aired. There was no going back to re-investigate clues or confirm that the plot had played fairly with the audience.
Neither was there much need. As a good friend pointed out to me, those 48-minute shows could not accommodate the accretion of details and clues that True Detective can maintain over eight episodes. Playing out over a short, stand-alone season and written entirely by Pizzolatto before filming, True Detective can promise viewers a tighter narrative than any show written over many years in a writer’s room. But the show also challenges the audience’s memory in ways that older detective shows couldn’t. Pizzolato has claimed that “if someone watches the first episode and really listens, it tells you 85 percent of the story of the first six episodes.” But who can really listen and watch that well?
And so to the replay we go. Few shots have been examined as much the five horsemen in episode two.
In this shot, taken from the perspective of Cohle, the camera lingers just long enough on this photograph displayed at the house of Dora Lange’s mother so that no viewer could doubt that it mattered. Even more important than the length of the shot was what it contained: a gathering of Klansmen. Or so just about everyone concluded in the recaps of episode two. Men on horses wearing pointy hats in the Deep South. What else could they be?
The conclusion was reinforced when we met Reggie Ledoux in episode five, covered as he was with white-power tattoos. Finally, as many have noted, the significance of the five figures was alluded to in other episodes.
But this past Sunday we found out that those were not Klansmen at all, but men dressed up for Courir de Mardi Gras. Not everyone was hoodwinked. The earliest correct I.D. of the scene I have located appeared on Reddit the same night episode two aired, made by a commenter who goes by HerrKroete but who might want to change his username to TrueDetective. HerrKroete is, in fact, Nicholas K. Johnson, a graduate student at Indiana University and a New Orleans native. He told me he recognized the outfits for what they were immediately.
The rest of us fell victim to the detective’s curse, helped along perhaps by a chauvinism against the South that both assumes the Klan always lies in wait and is ignorant of the actual, unique culture of Louisiana. Guilty as charged in my case. As Johnson also pointed out to me, if we’d simply watched Treme we would have know from the start. The show did an episode on Courir de Mardi Gras in season two.
What matters to me, however, is that both the identification and misidentification of the horsemen depends on digital television and the power to re-watch, rewind, and freeze the frame in such a way that the image remains legible enough to inspect, as we would a photograph. Twenty years ago, if Ben Matlock had discovered a picture like that, the camera would have lingered on it for much longer than the slightly less than two seconds it gets on True Detective, and it would have been the clue that solved the case rather than one in a constellation. Not so for Pizzolatto and Fukunaga, who anticipated Reddit and the recappers. The five horsemen shot feels like both a challenge and a dedication to them: “This one goes out to the freeze-framers.”
As the cop show undergoes this transformation driven by technology, dropping a clue into a single frame might be counted as fair play for the audience. But won’t that turn viewers into paranoid detectives, finding meaning everywhere and in everything, watching one frame at a time, but missing what really matters?
In a novel, the novelist literally creates every word of a book; live-action film and television, however, are images composed of objects that have been determined and manipulated by dozens of crew members and actors. While brilliant directors like Fukunaga clearly spend a great deal of time composing every shot, accidental juxtapositions are inevitable and open to the most ludicrous interpretations. No director was more careful about composition than Stanley Kubrick, but that did little to stop a whole school of insane interpretations from springing up around The Shining.
The intention of True Detective is surely to bring us to the same conclusion about the endlessness, if not futility, of the search for a solution. It wants us to get stuck in the same circle that its detectives are caught in, if only so we recognize the basic duplicity of cop shows, which suggest that the darkest corridors of humanity can be illuminated and disinfected in the space of an episode.Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.
"We found very many human genes undergoing selection," says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million DNA sequences* showing the most variation. "Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years."
"We believe that this can be explained by an increase in the strength of selection as people became agriculturalists—a major ecological change—and a vast increase in the number of favorable mutations as agriculture led to increased population size," he adds.
Roughly 10,000 years ago, humanity made the transition from living off the land to actively raising crops and domesticated animals. Because this concentrated populations, diseases such as malaria, smallpox and tuberculosis, among others, became more virulent. At the same time, the new agriculturally based diet offered its own challenges—including iron deficiency from lack of meat, cavities and, ultimately, shorter stature due to poor nutrition, says anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, another team member.
"Their bodies and teeth shrank. Their brains shrank, too," he adds. "But they started to get new alleles [alternative gene forms] that helped them digest the food more efficiently. New protective alleles allowed a fraction of people to survive the dread illnesses better."
By looking for wide swaths of genetic material that vary little from individual to individual within these sections of great variation, the researchers identified regions that both originated recently and conferred some kind of advantage (because they became common rapidly). For example, the gene known as LCT gave adults the ability to digest milk and G6PD offered some protection against the malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum parasite.
"Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes," Hawks notes, because that gene—OCA2—had not yet developed. "We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes."
Comparing the amount of genetic differentiation between humans and our closest relatives, chimpanzees, suggests that the pace of change has accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate, the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
Not all populations show the same evolutionary speed. For example, Africans show a slightly lower mutation rate. "Africans haven't had to adapt to a fundamentally new climate," because modern humanity evolved where they live, Cochran says. "Europeans and East Asians, living in environments very different from those of their African ancestors and early adopters of agriculture, were more maladapted, less fitted to their environments."
And this speedy pace of evolution will not slow until every possible beneficial mutation starts to happen—the maximum rate of adaptation. This has already begun to occur in such areas as skin color in which different sets of genes are responsible for the paler shades of Europeans and East Asians, according to the researchers.
The finding raises many questions. Among them: "the medical applications of this kind of knowledge [as well as] exactly what most of the selected changes do and what drove their selection," Cochran says.
But the history of humanity is beginning to be read out from our genes, thanks to a detailed knowledge of the thousands of them that have evolved recently. "We're going to be classifying these by functional categories and looking for matches between genetic changes and historic and archaeological changes in diet, skeletal form, disease and many other things," Hawks says. "We think we will be able to find some of the genetic changes that drove human population growth and migrations—the broad causes of human history."
*This article wrongly characterized the HapMap genotype dataset used for this analysis as "genes" rather than "DNA sequences."So how are businesses to make use of Periscope to engage their audience?
Announcements & Celebrities
Periscope could be used to announce special offers and competitions as a way to push instant traffic to a brand’s website, where a Tweet might only create a low click-through rate, an audience engaged onto a live stream presents a greater opportunity for surges in traffic.
Add a celebrity into the mix and such an endorsement marketing could rocket-boost engagement rates even more.
Company culture
Another way to bring the consumer closer to the brand is through behind-the-scenes visits. This technique uses the personal connection that Periscope allows.
This direct access could be turned into live Q&A sessions for a business to find out what their customer needs. Periscope could be used in a real-time company board meeting for instant user feedback. Such an honourable role for a consumer could prove important for brand loyalty.
Product Teasers
Another customer-connection use of Periscope could be to give consumers a sneak-peek to products before they are launched. Imagine watching a hotly awaited product being stacked on the shelves the night before its release like the latest Apple product or Playstation game. How about seeing Harrods marking up the Christmas sale items before you even get in there.
Trending Events
When Oreo tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark,” during the 2013 Superbowl power cut, they were greeted with a huge influx of retweets (15,000) and 8,000 new followers, plus another sixteen-thousand additional entries into a competition they were running at the time. Their brand had improved greatly with having a platform which enabled a real-time response, but how much did spontaneity and serendipity have to play in the ‘Oreo moment’? For brands to master socially-enhanced live streaming, they will have to synchronise their product with the audience and context.
Periscope vs Meerkat
Periscope isn’t the only live-streaming app on the scene; Meerkat is another popular alternative which has been given multimillion dollar backing. Since Periscope was acquired by Twitter, who have over 230 million users, Meerkat will have stiff competition.
Two current functionalities that are integrated into both of these apps is that the broadcasts are removed; Meerkat does so immediately and Periscope after twenty-four hours. Whether companies will invest in content that disappears will remain to be seen.
This has been improved this week as Periscope has provided the ability to view Periscope streams after they have ended. Previously this was just available 24 hours after a stream ended and only on Android and IOS. Now you can view the new ‘web replays’ when clicking the stream opening up a new browser enabling you to re-live the moment and watch the stream replay. The natural step will be for Periscope to add embed codes for sites to add on their own websites then we can really take advantage of Periscope marketing opportunities. I imagine it’s coming soon, so keep watching as this new marketing channel evolves.
In a consumer-climate driven by immediacy and responsiveness and where the user’s perception of brands becomes dependent on their interaction with it, live-streaming could be another powerful tool towards the direct target of consumers.
Are you ready to add Periscope to your marketing plans?A Four Corners investigation has uncovered gangs of black market workers run by labour hire contractors operating on farms and in factories around the country. Courtesy ABC/Four Corners.
MIGRANT workers paid $3.95 an hour. Working 22 hour shifts. Forced to sleep on dog beds. And some even perform sexual favours to extend their visa.
These are the horrific slave-like conditions faced by farm workers on 417 working holiday visas across Australia.
An investigation by Four Corners has uncovered the shocking exploitation of foreign workers that occurs on Australian farms supplying our biggest supermarkets.
Black market gangs of contractors are acting as the middle men and supplying workers to Australian farms and factories where they are routinely underpaid, harassed and abused while working in low skilled jobs.
Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, Costco and IGA are all implicated in the allegations, as are fast food chains KFC and Red Rooster.
“This is very much a country wide problem” says ABC reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna, who led the investigation. “Our entire fresh food chain of supply is riddled with exploitation,” she told news.com.au.
The national broadcaster is speculating hundreds of millions of dollars in pay that should go to the workers is going missing every year. But one of the most insidious allegations uncovered by the investigation is the targeting and treatment of female workers.
According to the report, women are being targeted and have been propositioned to perform sexual favours in exchange for an extension on their visa or merely some time off work.
The migrants at the heart of the corruption are incredibly vulnerable, often have limited English and remain in these jobs out of fear.
“If they ever speak out or complain, they are sacked or deported” says Meldrum-Hanna.
She says in some cases, workers are being forced to carry out shifts that are 22 hours long and are frequently denied bathroom or water breaks. “There are people who wet their pants and the conveyor belt keeps going,” she says.
In one case at a Queensland farm, a group of workers featured in tonight’s episode were forced to sleep in the dog’s bed. In a separate case, a woman who should have been paid $20.90 an hour was receiving just $3.95.
The migrant workers suffering this systemic abuse have entered Australia legally on a 417 working holiday visa which allows them to travel and work for up to six months at a time.
Australia has 150,000 of these migrant workers coming through each year, and the industry is desperately reliant on their labour. But it is the black market contractors who supply the migrants to the farms who are skimming their wages and enabling the corrupt system to thrive.
These contractors operate in two ways. Some have ties with overseas organisations who promise migrants jobs and connect them with the contractors who are waiting for them upon arrival.
The other way in which these workers are targeted is through websites offering work for 417 visa holders — some of which are so brazen, they actually declare the work to be black market employment.
“Once you translate [the websites] to English, the illegality is breathtaking,” says Meldrum-Hanna.
According to her, it is the lack of oversight from the immigration department that has allowed the exploitation and corruption to become so entrenched and commonplace.
The 417 visas are not monitored by the department and Meldrum-Hanna believes the visa regulations amount to “in-built exploitation” as the government turns a blind eye.
“There is no requirement for immigration to keep tabs on them,” she says.
The migrant workers aren’t the only victims of the corrupt system. The widespread practices of exploitation are forcing ethical farmers out of the market while doing irreparable damage to Australia’s global reputation.
“We will be known as a country that exploits vulnerable people who are looking for a better chance at life,” said Dr Joanna Howe, a labour law and migration expert from the University of Adelaide Law School.
“We would never accept this if it were Australian workers being treated in this way, but because it’s 417 visa holders and we don’t know them, there’s a lid on it, we accept that it’s OK,” she told the ABC.
Federal Member for Hinkler and former cane farmer, Keith Pitt who features in tonight’s episode, believes the damage to our overseas reputation is already done. When asked if he thinks Australian shoppers would buy such products if they knew the horrible working conditions in which they were produced, he said “absolutely not.”
As for those farmers who choose not to use contractors, they are being squeezed out of the market.
Four Corners journalists spoke to the CEO of one of the country’s largest potato suppliers who had been dropped by two major supermarkets for cheaper suppliers using exploited labour.
“They’re cheating the system. They’re taking it from the little guy, from the people on the farm and the people in the pack sheds and using that as their competitive advantage in the marketplace,” Steve Marafioti told Four Corners.
“It’s not the correct thing. It’s not the right thing. It’s actually changing the shape of our industry.”
The problem has been allowed to persist but industry insiders are calling on the supermarket giants to stop shirking their moral responsibility.
“Supermarkets need to ensure they’re sourcing from ethical suppliers,” says Meldrum-Hanna.
While multiple authorities and government agencies such as the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Department of Immigration are responsible for regulating the system, they stand accused of turning a blind eye to the criminal practices of labour hire contractors.
However the journalist who led the investigation believes the problem can be rectified with a few simple changes, including greater oversight and the scrapping of the 417 visa.
But at the moment the extent of the problem remains “breathtaking” and there is little indication the changes will occur.
The full investigation can be seen on tonight’s episode of Four Corners at 8:30pm on ABC 1.Pablo Picasso's monochrome painting of the 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica remains one of his more famous works. The tapestry version just unveiled at London's Whitechapel Gallery usually sits at the UN, acting as a powerful visual statement against the horrors of war. But there is much meaning beneath this famous work, writes Picasso expert Gijs van Hensbergen. THE WOUNDED HORSE It is the horse that takes centre stage in this apocalyptic knacker's yard where nothing seems to make any sense. Are we in a bull ring, a village square or a plywood theatre set? The horse's screaming dagger-shaped tongue and its death-head nostrils focus our attention directly on the terrible pain and suffering that pulls us repeatedly back to witness the horror. If this is a bullfight it has gone horribly wrong, defying all logic of the corrida. No horse is ever run straight through with a spear in a plaza de toros, as the horse of Guernica has been. In an early version, hidden under layers of paint, Picasso had bent the horse's head down to the ground in submissive defeat. THE BOMBING Operation Rugen took place on 26 April 1937 during Spanish Civil War German and Italian bombers allied with nationalists pounded town in Basque country held by Republicans Deaths estimated between 200 and over 1,000 Much of town flattened Bombing brought to international attention by Times journalist George Steer Here, in the final version, even in its dying moments the horse remains defiant. It may be the last gasp but down to the right of its crooked knee a plant sprouts a few anaemic leaves as the only symbol of hope. Did the horse represent the Spanish people, Picasso was asked? He refused to answer. Throughout the history of painting the horse has become the universal symbol of man's companion in war, understood by every culture. Guernica was a horrific example of saturation bombing - not the first, nor the last. From Coventry to Dresden, from Hiroshima to Baghdad, people have forged a powerful empathy with this fatally wounded horse. Return to top THE BULL The Bull, of all the protagonists in the painting is the only one that remains calm and dispassionate. Picasso was quizzed if the bull represented the Spanish dictator Franco but the truth appears far more complex. With its statuesque head, and lozenge eyes it watches the drama unfold. In many depictions of artists in their studios, most notably Velazquez's Las Meninas and Goya's Family of Charles IV, both in the Prado, and known to Picasso from his early youth, the artist anchors the left border of the masterpiece. THE TAPESTRY Normally hangs at UN At Whitechapel Gallery to mark reopening Donated to UN by Nelson Rockefeller in 1985 In lead-up to Iraq war, tapestry was covered by blue cloth for US media conference Although denied, critics said this was because of anti-war message More variations in colour compared with painting Throughout the 1930s Picasso had increasingly depicted himself in the guise of the bull and the minotaur, half-man, half-bull. In his Vollard Suite of etchings, again and again the potent minotaur violates, rapes, caresses and treats with tenderness his beautiful, voluptuous, female victim. Picasso loved in-jokes, secrecy and the rituals of ancient Mediterranean cultures. Fascinated by the Roman cult of Mithraism and the ritual slaughter of the bull by the Sun God Mithras, Picasso places the bull's head between a jagged naked light bulb, a crowing cock and a screaming mother - the Virgin Dolorosa (paraded through every Spanish street during Holy Week). What are we to make of Guernica's confusing compendium of images weighted so heavily with religious content? The Bull watches the sacrifice. If it is Picasso is it a mere impotent witness? Or, is it the cause of this tragedy? Return to top THE HEAD Early on, in the first few days of painting Guernica, Picasso placed his own self-portrait - recognisable by his characteristic swept-over hairstyle - in the position of this decapitated bust. Turned over, with his gaping mouth to the sky, the final version becomes a kind of "everyman". Some see in the smashed bust, severed arm and broken sword, which frame the base of the painting, distant echoes and memories of the horrific earthquake that rocked Malaga destroying 10,000 houses in Picasso's early childhood. It is possible. Picasso had an extraordinary memory and throughout his life kept all the gates to his deep and fertile subconscious wide open. PICASSO Born 1881 in Malaga, Spain Studied in Madrid First visiting in 1900, Picasso spent much time in Paris Helped create Cubism but worked in several styles Died in 1973, aged 91 At his father's knee, in Malaga's Cafe de Chinitas, he would have heard the story of the Arab fakir Ibrahim al-Jarbi, sent to kill the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the final desperate days of the Christian reconquest of Spain, after 750 years of rule by the Muslims. Al-Jarbi was caught, chopped into pieces and catapulted over the walls of Malaga's Arab fort. It was an epic legend that was repeated in Malaga like a mantra and would have fired the imagination of any impressionable young boy. But the source is perhaps closer to hand. Just months before painting Guernica, Picasso had been asked to create a series of prints to raise funds for the Republic. The Dream and Lie of Franco is a savage attack by Picasso on Franco's regime. Portrayed as a swollen monster, Franco proceeds through a series of scenes to desecrate and destroy all in his path, including a classical bust. As director of Madrid's Prado gallery, in exile, Picasso felt a deep loathing for the military machine that was prepared to visit indiscriminate violence upon his people and bomb the Prado, while also peddling propaganda about the Republic's alleged war on culture. Return to top THE MOTHER AND CHILD The mother screams and screams, but nothing will bring her child back. No god and no amount of divine intervention can breathe life back into the limp rag doll. Her dress has fallen off her shoulder, the swaddling clothes of her child open up to reveal a range of stubby little toes. Everywhere we look across the painting we see gesture - fingers like sausages, hands carved with lines and an array of clasping, grasping fists. Her grief has depersonalised her. Her eyes are tears. Her tongue a dagger pointing up to the Bull's steaming nostrils. For Guernica, Picasso produced almost 70 preparatory works that included sketches and paintings, many in black and white but some in dramatic colour. An early sketch for Mother and Child - which travels the entire history of the image including Michelangelo's Pieta - showed the mother and child descending down a ladder. Picasso, as the Prado's director in-exile, knew the collection inside out. No artist, or anyone with sensibility, could fail to be drawn to the museum's extraordinarily poignant Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden - arguably, the greatest Christian image ever created. Picasso, as was his will, cannibalised it and gave us this pathetic timeless image of an inconsolable woman that we see repeated today in the newsreels transmitted from Gaza, Rwanda, Bosnia and Sudan. Return to top THE THREE WOMEN Picasso's life while painting Guernica represented the worst period in his life. His mother and sister still lived in Barcelona and it was impossible to know where Franco might bomb next. Picasso's personal life in Paris had become immensely complicated. His wife Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballet dancer, had become increasingly unhinged as she discovered the artist's infidelities, and wished to sue him for half his estate. This included his works of art - some unfinished, others his working archive. His suppliant mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, a Grecian beauty less than half his age, had given birth to their daughter Maya and was farmed out to the country for weekends away. Into the empty space came Dora Maar - a dramatic dark-haired beauty, who was as exotic and erotic as an artist could ever ask for. He first met her on the terrace of the Deux Magots cafe in Paris staring deep into his eyes as she stabbed her fingers through her gloves playing dare with a knife. In many ways Dora was his intellectual equal. She took photographs of Guernica in progress and also, as it happened, painted many of the markings on the flank of the dying horse. One day, unexpectedly, Marie-Therese came up from the country to see Picasso in his Paris studio. He was up the ladder painting and Dora was in the room. The fight between the two women was left to run its course by Picasso, who transferred it and distilled it into the image we see today. Three women at war, three graces, three fates, three women mourning at the cross, all readings are viable. But we must also remember that the woman holding the torch we have seen before - she is Liberty leading the people and, of course, Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty - a copy of which Picasso passed every morning in Paris while walking the dog. Return to top Gijs van Hensbergen is the author of Guernica: The Biography of a 20th Century Icon. Send us your comments using the form below. Guernica is the most moving anti-war painting I've ever seen. It's rightful place was in the UN building, so that everyone who passed it whilst holding a nations peace in their hands, would be reminded of the horror war brought on civilian life.
Linda Docherty, Giffnock The lightbulb deserves deeper exploration as a very important item in this painting, recalling the electric eye of the modern age which made the whole world audience to the Guernica atrocity. Secondly, it is certainly indicative of the technological magic which made possible such startling military abuses. This is consistent with cubist/modernist/futurist fascination with war as the ultimate expression of human power and tendency to use creation for purposes of destruction.
Charlie LeBel, Paris, France I have always thought that this was a very unsatisfactory painting. Picasso was not a political man and this work of art seems to be the work of someone who is being forced to make a statement about something he does not really feel. It does not move me.
Roger, Verona, Italy What always comes to me when I see this picture is the noise.
John McCormick, Northampton Guernica resonates with every generation - from the nightmarish qualities of the twisted bodies frozen in time to the flower of hope clutched in dying fingers. Does man ever learn that war is futile - or are we destined by our leaders to repeat our mistakes in some kind of macabre symphony, each succeeding movement more devastating than the next?
S Matthews, Erie, Pennsylvania USA Once Picasso was asked by a German military official "Haben Sie das gemacht?" (Did you make this?). He replied: "Nein, das haben Sie gemacht." (No you made it).
Roel, Krakau Guernica stands as one of the most powerful indictments of the human cost of war. It still has the power to shock, as noticed when it was covered up at the UN headquarters in New York just before the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Phil Brand., London, England A note on setting: All of these very Spanish characters seem to have run downstairs. On the upper right hand corner we see the bombs going off like lightning at the top of the staircase, a glimpse of the bombs going off, the lightbulb about to go out, the ceiling ready to cave in. Downstairs, their bomb shelter, was more like the wine cellar of a typical Tapas bar, the warmth of wood, the wine rack behind the horse. Besides the wood, lightning from the bombing probably rendered this colorisation, opaque and frighteningly orange. These very "Spanish" characters have made their mark through history, mythology and art. The horse, a symbol of their conquests on other lands, could probably be Rosinante, if the fellow underneath the horse is Don Quixote, with armor and broken spear. The bull is panting, with its tongue hanging out. The only reason it stands stoically is because it has nowhere else to go. The Virgin and Child are in the pose of Stabat mater dolorosa, rather than the Virgin holding baby Jesus. The Three Graces are naked and ashamed. With the representation of such popular symbols, perhaps Picasso was telling us how the massacre of a small town was the violence Franco inflicted on the whole land, the destruction of her people, her art and her history.
Jackie Pike, |
, Crux-arm, ArchLinux, etc. ). We will continue to support the open source communities and provide cost-effective hardware platform for them.
Recently, Allwinner Technology has given permission to Cubietech for jointly development of open source development Cubieboard 8 microcomputer based on UltraOctaA80 chipset. A80 is a 28nm 8 -core high-performance application processor with a CPU dominant frequency of 2GHz. It also has the following amazing features:
1. A new generation of 64-core GPU graphics core PowerVR G6230
2. A new generation of display engine that supports H.265 hardware solution, 4K resolution codec, 3-screen simultaneous output
3. It supports more than 2GB of memory
4. It supports USB 3.0
5. It supports 16 million -pixel high-definition camera
At present, the engineers from Cubietech and Allwinner are making intense effort on this development and it can be expected that Cubieboard 8 will be available for the end sales in mid- June（UPDATE: Project delayed! the board was back, but we still need some time to debug ). Let’s wait and see!Remember Thursday when Toronto FC announced to the world, via press release and an article on their official website that they'd signed Tal Ben Haim on loan? Remember thinking, wow, TFC are all over the place right now, but oh well, this is worth a try I guess? Remember chuckling/wincing over that 'one of the top defenders in the EPL for nearly a decade line', trying to avoid the sickly deja vu of a club spinning it's revolving door hard again and hyping up the new entrants way too much, thinking this was getting dangerously close to the good old 'comedy club' days rather than the new professionally run club we all hoped we might have now?
Yeah. Well. About that.
Kevin Payne talked to some of those real journalist types today and among other tidbits (we're the lab rats for young referees, Steven Caldwell and Jeremy Brockie should be available for Saturday's game, changes are going to have to be made to make TFC roster compliant, etc etc) he let it be known that the Ben Haim loan was actually still being negotiated and not in any way a done deal.
The loan itself, the deal with QPR was done, rushed through to beat the deadline, but Ben Haim himself is looking for a longer term commitment before he'll be playing for TFC. This is probably the sort of thing that happens regularly in this sort of situation, only we usually don't hear about it, usually the rumour doesn't become full blown report with official statements and everything. Also, it's understandable really given he's had plenty of success so isn't a hungry guy on the way up looking to prove himself. He's no Hogan Ephraim or John Bostock, with plenty to prove, potential unfulfilled. He's had some relative success at a relatively high level, he'll find someone to give him that last paycheque before he retires. There's no need for him to come over here and play and potentially injure himself without any kind of long term deal ahead of him, jeopardising what might be his last chance to sign that last contract, and other endorsement deals and all that.
Maybe it will all get eventually resolved, TFC will be the team to take the chance he can still perform, and he'll be over here soon, but maybe they won't be able to come to terms and frankly that might well be for the best. Though the situation right now seems like just another chapter in the hilariously inept running of this team, I hope Payne and co swallow their pride and take the hit rather than sign him to the long term deal he wants merely to save face. Bringing in older players like Caldwell and Ben Haim on loan is one thing, there's no harm done if they turn out to be the next Laurent Robert, Mista, insert your own favourite example here, and they get let go quickly. Signing those players to longer term deals really doesn't seem like a good idea for a team rebuilding for the future.
The jokes just keep on coming, but hopefully we'll be able to look back and realise that slipping on this banana skin is what stopped them from walking in front of a bus. Still, might be worth making sure the player's ok with it before announcing anything in the future. Just a thought.Robbie J Robbie J is importing a car to put a RB in Registered
Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: london Cars owned: RB 280Z, 997 T and STI Leggy Posts: 5,233
The Germans are coming
Avus Performance Unveils Matte-Black Nissan GT-R with 580HP Upgrades - Carscoop
It's not hard to understand why matte-black is one of our favorite shades for the almighty Nissan GT-R that has been upgraded by Germany's Avus Performance. Using the limited production GT-R Black Edition that leaves the factory in a dark metal gray with a black and red interior as a base, the tuner covered the entire body of the high-performance coupe in a flat black wrap while the 20-inch alloys that are combined with wheel spacers have been finished in a glossy black color.
Performance modifications include a retuned ECU and a sportier exhaust system that does away with the two cats and the middle silencer helping the 3.8-liter twin-turbo V6 engine to produce a total output of 580 horsepower and 700Nm or 516.3 lb-ft of torque, up from 485HP and 588Nm.
Avus Performance also lowers the GT-R's ride height through different coilovers offering the car an even more menacing stance.
According to the German tuner, the matte black wrap will cost you ***8364;2,499; the coilovers ***8364;1,299; the ECU tune ***8364;1,899; the exhaust upgrade ***8364;998; the painted 20-inch alloy wheels ***8364;999 and the wheel spacers ***8364;349.
how much torque?? Avus have re-mapped a GTRIt's not hard to understand why matte-black is one of our favorite shades for the almighty Nissan GT-R that has been upgraded by Germany's Avus Performance. Using the limited production GT-R Black Edition that leaves the factory in a dark metal gray with a black and red interior as a base, the tuner covered the entire body of the high-performance coupe in a flat black wrap while the 20-inch alloys that are combined with wheel spacers have been finished in a glossy black color.Performance modifications include a retuned ECU and a sportier exhaust system that does away with the two cats and the middle silencer helping the 3.8-liter twin-turbo V6 engine to produce a total output of 580 horsepower and 700Nm or 516.3 lb-ft of torque, up from 485HP and 588Nm.Avus Performance also lowers the GT-R's ride height through different coilovers offering the car an even more menacing stance.According to the German tuner, the matte black wrap will cost you ***8364;2,499; the coilovers ***8364;1,299; the ECU tune ***8364;1,899; the exhaust upgrade ***8364;998; the painted 20-inch alloy wheels ***8364;999 and the wheel spacers ***8364;349.how much torque?? __________________
R35 arrived in May 08 Last edited by Robbie J; 5th October 2009 at 11:27 PM..Happy 2 Year Anniversary Prophet Ezra and Prophet Elisheva!
On Shavout 2016, YAHUVEH brougth the most anointed man to this ministry!I need you to remind YAHUSHUA's DEMON STOMPERS, and everyone who is blessed by this Holy Ministry, that Ezra you are anointed appointed from heaven. You are not just the spiritual head as my husband, but head the spiritual prayer covering on earth to all who receive this 23 year old ministry as a blessing. Together you and I received so many emails of loving gratitude for teaching the Torah portions.Congratulations to Amightywind for another Anniversary! Shavout 2018! Especially for the Holy Prophecies given to us from YAH YAHUSHUA and the Sweet RUACH HA KODESH our IMMAYAH. We are honored to pray for all who send in their prayer requests.We are both leaders and Jews, but you have been chosen by YAH, YAHUSHUA to be appointed as a Jew born and raised in Israel. Where I am a Jew you teach the Jewishness, Holy Feast Days and Torah. Ezra and Elisheva are not ashamed to share our heavenly love when we met on March 7 2016 and married on Rosh Hashanah Oct 2 2016 our 2 anointings became one. Judah and Ephraim joined together in our ministries, anointed love from YAHUSHUA became one heart and soul for the main reason of spreading 50 languages we bring through word of mouth and videos, there is one way to heaven, through the blood and name of YAHUSHUA our LORD and only begotten SON of YAH.We are working on many projects while reorganizing web sight making things easier to find and more beautiful. The 3rd edition of the new book is being worked on including Israeli Prophet Ezra's testimony and new pictures. Remember to celebrate for 7 days without Ezra Elisheva would not have a Holy earthly Spiritual and physical pray covering, including the Bride of YAHUSHUA as audible voice of YAHUSHUA called Elisheva HIS Ring Maiden she waited for her Ring Bearer to come. The prophecy has not yet been released only to the Ring Maiden. He had to live Holy be anointed apointed set apart as Elisheva is also an Apostle as he is.The Ring Bearer would have to be born in Israel to be an Apostle and prophet and to worship YAHUVEH YAHUSHUA RUACH KODESH above anyone else. The Ring Bearer has to be the most anointed on earth with signs wonders miracles following YAHUSHUA using him to help Elisheva in all ways.Ezra is not lazy he works for YAHUSHUA in all ways. In Elisheva eyes there is no greater romance or better husband. There is no greater love on earth the love story was first written in Heaven. Where she only knew the worse forms of abuse now, she only knows a marriage and other leader as best on earth she trusts. Our marriage YAHUSHUA says HE is the foundation stone marriage and ministry built on. Please take a moment to send prayers, of love, protection blessings. If you want to make videos or introduce yourself as you are blessed by the way the 2 anointings have become 1 and increase daily. For YAHUSHUA's Glory there are over 1000 new Prophecies since Ezra has come, and not all are posted the laborers are few and harvest is great as together we share new wine from Heaven.Shavuot is a, very special day for the ministry to all who feel grateful for Ezra. Literally in all ways, Ezra saved Elisheva life and this ministry. He is used by YAH to improve, and help designate people to make videos and help Elisheva minister. Like spiritual parents, Apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers of Heaven revelations we stand side by side, and worship YAH, YAHUSHUA, and our HOLY SPIRIT IMMAYAH! Be a commandments keeper, defend them. When you sin ask forgiveness from YAHUSHUA but never purposely sin. They will look forward meeting you in Heaven if not first on earth!Q) How long do contrails last?
A) According to all the books on clouds in the last 70 years, contrails last anywhere from less than a second, up to several hours. If depends on the atmospheric conditions at the altitude the plane is flying. It’s unrelated to the weather on the ground.
This is an oft-asked question. The answer is reasonably straightforward, but misunderstanding is common. To understand why a contrail can last as little as a fraction of a second, or as long as several hours, you need to understand what a contrail is, and how it forms.
Here’s another question, which has the same answer:
Q) How long does a snowflake last?
Why is this basically the same question? Because contrails are generally made of ice crystals. Jet exhaust contains a lot of water vapor (the chemical reaction actually produces more water than there was originally jet fuel), and when this gets shot out of the back of the engine at 2000MPH, it hits the frigid air (typically colder than -40 degrees), and the water vapor condenses and freezes, very quickly, into tiny ice crystals, just like snowflakes.
So why do these ice crystals sometimes stay around for a long time, and sometimes vanish in seconds? The temperature is well below freezing, so they can’t melt, can they? This is puzzling, because it involves something that most people know nothing about: “sublimation“.
Sublimation is when a substance (in this case, water), goes directly from being solid to being vapor (a gas), without actually melting into a liquid. It’s like evaporation, except instead of a liquid evaporating, it’s a solid (ice). If the air is dry (i.e. there is little water vapor in it), then the ice crystals will quickly sublimate into vapor, and the trail will vanish quickly.
However, if the air already has a lot of water vapor in it, then the ice will sublimate slower, and the trail will last longer.
If the air has so much water vapor in it already that it can’t hold any more (i.e. it’s “supersaturated”), then the ice crystals can’t sublimate, and so the contrail will stay around for a long time. The ice crystals might even attract water from the air, if there is enough, and the contrail will get thicker. Winds might make the contrail spread out to even cover the whole sky.
The above is a simplification, as other factors like temperature, pressure, and sunlight have an effect. But it explains the basic reasons why some trails last only a few seconds, and some can last for hours, and spread out to cover the sky.
Finally, there is one more way of asking the question:
Q) How long do clouds last?
This is the same question because contrails are clouds. Contrails are physically very similar to cirrus clouds (except they are long and thin), and so they act almost exactly the same. You see cirrus clouds that last for hours, so why not contrails?
References – note the dates
“A Color Guide to clouds” from Richard Scorer & Harry Wexler, 1963
1972: Richard Scorer – “Cloud of the worlds”GEOJE, South Korea — SIM JAE-DUK, a South Korean shipyard worker, checked into his motel in Front Royal, Va., on a May evening in 2006, sleepy after his first-ever trip to the United States — on a budget flight that first stopped in Tokyo and San Francisco. Two days later, he set off on the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-Mile Run and won it, setting a record of 17 hours, 40 minutes, 45 seconds, which has yet to be broken.
The next day, he caught a flight home.
“I don’t like missing work because of my running,” said Mr. Sim, 44, who works at Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering on this island off the southern port of Busan.
Massanutten race officials and runners recall him as a “total unknown” who spoke no English except “Water, water!” and “Thank you!” But Mr. Sim has become something of a legend among South Korea’s amateur marathoners, whose population has exploded in the past decade. He has been nicknamed the Korean Forrest Gump, after the movie character who runs across America.
Mr. Sim got his start running after six years of nine-hour workdays inside the ships, breathing chemicals and dust through a face mask. His respiratory system was so weak that in 1993, doctors recommended surgery to help him breathe. “Because of breathing difficulties, I always kept my mouth open, looking like an idiot,” he said. He also lost most of his sense of smell. (On race days, he asks fellow runners to smell his lunch box to check if any food has gone bad.)LeBron James said he wants to play a game in the NFL in a wide-ranging question and answer session with fans on Twitter Friday night.
Saying he'd answer questions for 15 minutes around 11:30 p.m. ET, the Miami Heat star stayed online for 50 minutes.
Questions were all over the map -- from basketball to video games to best friends. For the record, James answered "NBA 2k14, Madden 25 and COD" to his favorite video games and "@SavannahRB My wife" to his best friend.
Someone asked James if he would consider playing one pro football game.
"I wanna play one NFL game before it's over," said James, who did play football in high school.
In response to a question about Dwyane Wade's status, James said: "He's going to be great!! He's back."
James also lamented that Mike Miller is no longer with the Heat.
"He's awesome! Still sucks that he's gone. Memphis has a great one," he said.
The Heat did add to the roster, however, signing former No. 2 pick Michael Beasley, who has had off-court trouble in the league. James was asked about his relationship with Beasley.
"Great! I love him. Misunderstood. He can flat out hoop," James said.
Asked which players have been hardest for him to cover, James responded: "Melo, KD, Kobe, DRose, CP, DWade, TMac."
He was also asked if he likes or hates being compared to Michael Jordan.
"It's tough being compared to the greatest but I love challenges," he said.A bank endowed with great value propositions and great customer service delivered via the mobile platform (iPad, iOS and Android Smart phones) making it effortless for the users.BankMobile is the first and only bank in the USA that has absolutely no fees whatsoever.
The Outstanding Features
It is the only bank with no fees whatsoever with a guarantee to pay at least 0.25% APY, more than the top 4 banks in the country. The current savings rate (no minimum balance requirement) is 0.75% APY while the big banks are paying 0.01% – one will earn 75 times more interest with BankMobile.
Mobile application removes all the overheads of paperwork. The application features
Picture account opening (open your account by taking a picture of your driver’s license or state issued ID).
Picture bill pay (no vendor data entry required – take a picture of your bill, enter the amount of payment and hit send – your bill is paid.
The 4-digit secure PIN.
Quick access (just tap our app icon and all your balances pop up – no need to login in – of course you can’t move money this way for security reasons).
Photo check deposit.
Locking debit card (with one swipe you can lock your debit card so it can’t be used fraudulently, just swipe when you want to turn it on for use).
P2P (send money to someone just by knowing their email address or cell number).
ATM locator to use 55,000 surcharge free ATMs (this is more than 3 times as many ATMs as the largest bank owned network).
The customer service is stellar as it acts as an advocate of the customer creating win/win outcomes – no “big bank games” or tricks will ever be played.
Financial literacy is critical – BankMobile helps the customer with their financial needs. Customers are fairly advised by the experts to meet their financial goals.
The Founders who breathed into their Idea
Jay Sidhu – Chairman and CEO
Warren Taylor – President
Luvleen Sidhu – Chief Strategist.
“We have been in banking for 35-45 years with a proven track record. We see the branch network as working against many banks and believe we will be a disruptor in banking by launching BankMobile.”
Under Jay’s leadership, Sovereign Bank grew a small $700 million bank into a $90 billion bank from 1988-2006. In 2009, The founders took over a failing $200 million bank in PA (New Century Bank), renamed it Customers Bank.“We felt we lost touch with the customer at the big bank and vowed to created a bank worthy of the name, Customers Bank. We did this based on honesty/transparency with the customer and having almost no punitive fees – delivering the high touch / high tech philosophy from day one”.
This worked phenomenally, the branches (on average) have over $160 million in deposits – This is about 3 times more than the average big bank has in deposits per branch, yet only has 4.5 FTEs per branch.These savings and passed it on to the customer in the form of paying higher deposit rates and having little to no punitive fees, this model worked extremely well. But what if it could bring our overhead down even lower by growing without branches – using mobile technology to gain customers? This was the evolution of BankMobile.
Challenges and Potentials.
The biggest hurdle was bonding with great partners and formulating the existence to the Country. “We believe every consumer should bank with us – if they don’t, they are either not acquainted or we are not doing our job.”
It aims to make banking effortless, more convenient, and truly being an advocate for our customer by acting in their best interest with honesty and transparency.
The big banks “trick” customers, having legally accurate ads that are deceptive, and impose customers with ridiculous fees. Banks collected over $32 billion in overdraft fees last year.
“We, as a country, spent just $7.5 billion on breast cancer and $5 billion on lung cancer. That is $32 billion from people who can probably least afford it.”
The Face off and Head-ways
Big banks, they own about 70% of the deposit market and have huge marketing budgets to gain brand awareness.
Neo-banks, People are looking for a different experience from the big banks. However, unlike neo-banks, we offer joint accounts, a savings account, an unsecured line of credit, and absolutely no fees.
For future, the work will progress towards making the app more appealing with more capabilities and products like loans, CDs, and alternative investments.
The Patrons and Capitalization
Millennial Group – They are the largest population segment and their age bracket is most receptive to using mobile banking.
Affinity Groups – BankMobile has already signed various unions and groups interested in making bank mobile available to their membership.
“It is capitalized bank, so we have access to capital. However, we always explore capital opportunities.”- Warren Taylor, The President.
To know more visit: http://www.bankmobile.com/Kevin Bell, 47 (pictured), committed suicide Wednesday by jumping out of a ninth-floor window in his apartment building
A father-of-two hedge fund executive committed suicide Wednesday morning by jumping out of his luxury Manhattan apartment building.
Kevin Bell jumped out of a ninth-floor window at the historic Anthorp Building on the Upper West Side around 7.20am, landing on some scaffolding set up in front of the building.
The 47-year-old Duke graduate was pronounced dead at the scene.
Sources told the New York Post that Bell left behind a note saying that he was depressed.
'The family is hysterical. He was under a lot of meds. He did not give a specific reason why he jumped, but he was depressed,' the source said.
He is survived by a wife Claudia and two daughters who were at home at the time of the incident.
A building worker said it was another tenant who spotted the body and informed staff.
'A couple of our residents reported hearing a thud,' the worker said. 'The daughter of a tenant looked out the window and she told her mother there was a man lying down on the scaffolding.'
Kevin Bell is seen above with his wife Claudia Bell in a Facebook photo
A building worker said it was another tenant who spotted the body and informed staff. Bell is seen above with his wife
Bell was a Duke graduate who worked as the head of credit risk at Arrowgrass Capital Partners
The Anthorp Building, where Bell lived, is on the National Register of Historic Places and counts Al Pacino, Sydney Poitier and Jennifer Hudson among its famous tenants
It was the mother that reported the body.
'He was bleeding,' the worker said. 'Some of the residents are pretty shaken up.'
Bell was a Duke graduate who worked as the head of credit risk at Arrowgrass Capital Partners.
The hedge fund manager reportedly left behind a note saying he was depressed. Above, the historic Anthorp Building where Bell lived
The father-of-two is seen above in a Facebook photo with his children
The hedge fund issued a statement on Wednesday, reading: 'We are deeply saddened that our friend and colleague Kevin Bell has passed away today. We extend our sympathies and condolences to his family.'
The Anthorp Building, where Bell lived, is on the National Register of Historic Places and counts Al Pacino, Sydney Poitier and Jennifer Hudson among its famous tenants.
• For confidential help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or click here
• For confidential support on suicide matters in the UK, call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or click hereI am starting a movement. UFC 174 will be coming to Vancouver on June 14, 2014. I fully expect to see the likes of Rory MacDonald and a few other Canadians on the card. One warrior that should be involved is “Ragin” Kajan Johnson (19-10-1) who has been a big part of the latest Ultimate Fighter reality show, TUF Nations: Canada vs. Australia seen on Wednesdays via Sportsnet360 here in Canada.
The Burns Lake, B.C. native was my pick to win the show, but unfortunately was knocked out by teammate and good friend Chad Laprise (7-0) in the semi-finals. Don’t get me started on how Team Canada coach Patrick Cote dropped the ball in how he handled Canadian teammates, good friends and Tristar training partners fighting each other. Cote lacked any real professional leadership and it should have been a no brainer to make sure both fighters were treated fairly and had equal amount of corners and training support. Instead Johnson was left with one person in his corner and it appeared to viewers he was treated like an outsider. Kajan wrote about this very issue in his blog on MMAJunkie.com.
Spoiler alert for those of you who are PVR’ing the series. It was a pretty close fight until Laprise came over the top with a vicious right hand that landed flush on Johnson’s jaw. The sound still resonates. Pop! Johnson fell to the mat and the fight was stopped. There was no real cheering from the fighters who witnessed one of the most brutal and heart breaking knock-outs in TUF history.
Kajan’s jaw was broken and as blood poured out of his mouth the only thing that he could spit out was, “I just didn’t want to go through this again. I didn’t want my face to break again,” a teary-eyed Johnson said. “I didn’t want to lose the biggest fight of my life…It’s just another test. I just don’t know why I’m tested so much.” It was an emotional moment where reality became almost too painful to watch. Johnson asked UFC President Dana White for the toughest fight in the semifinals and the President obliged by giving Kajan his teammate and good friend. It was a reminder that we were watching a well produced TV show and drama always rules the day.
Fast forward to the present and Kajan is healed up and ready to fight. “If there is one thing I’m great at its overcoming adversity,” Johnson said. “Not only do I now have a titanium jaw I also have Wolverine’s mutant healing powers. I’m about to mount the biggest comeback you’ve ever seen. It’s MY time!”
The twenty-nine year old MMA veteran wants his moment to be in his hometown of Vancouver in front of his family, friends and fans. “I need to be on the 174 card. Vancity needs a hero,”Johnson said. “I want to be that person. I want to show every kid that came up in B.C. that we can do anything we put our minds to.”
It would be a small marketing miss if the UFC does not grant Kajan his shot in front of his hometown. What is the point of putting on a “reality show” targeting Canadian and Australian viewers if you aren’t going to use some of the characters that we got to know over the last couple of months? It wouldn’t be the first time that a competitor from the TUF show got a shot fighting on the preliminary card somewhere. Johnson stood out on the show and provided some personality to go along with his talent. The guy has been through so much adversity that most guys in his shoes would have given up on the dream years ago. Not Kajan. Instead he is back to training and keeping the dream alive and doing so with his Cheshire Cat smile.
In the end, the UFC doesn’t owe Kajan anything but you know that he is the type of guy that they like. He is a fighter in the truest sense of the word and Johnson has been fighting his entire life. If the UFC can offer Nordine Taleb another shot, they sure as hell can give Kajan his moment in the sun.
Let your voice be heard and let the UFC and UFC Canada know you want to see “Ragin” Kajan Johnson in the Octagon at UFC 174 in Vancouver by signing our fun petition below. Thanks to everyone and let’s see what we can do.
***Judge says illegal filesharing is damaging music industry, but Irish law does not allow ISPs to cut off offenders' internet
Four of the world's largest record companies have failed in an attempt to get the "three strikes" rule enforced against illegal filesharers in Ireland.
Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI brought the case against UPC, one of Ireland's largest broadband providers, in order to establish a legal precedent that would force internet service providers to cut off illegal filesharers' internet connections.
Today the Irish high court ruled that laws to identify and cut off internet users were not enforceable in Ireland, meaning the country is not in line with European copyright law. The record companies were looking to force internet service providers to adopt the "three strikes rule", forcing those accused three times of sharing copyrighted material to be disconnected from the internet.
The court noted that a "substantial portion" of UPC's 150,000 customers were illegally sharing music.
In a judgment published today, Justice Peter Charleton said that laws were not in place to block the internet connections of those accused of sharing copyrighted content. However, he acknowledged that the creative industries are being blighted by internet piracy.
"This not only undermines their [the creative industries] business but ruins the ability of a generation of creative people in Ireland, and elsewhere, to establish a viable living," said Charleton. "It is destructive of an important native industry."
The case was being closely watched by other internet service providers in the country as the music industry intensifies its push to penalise those sharing copyrighted work.
The Irish Recorded Music Association, which forced Ireland's largest broaband provider, Eircom, to adopt the "three strikes" policy on filesharing of its own accord after an out-of-court settlement in February 2009, said it was "extremely disappointed" with the ruling, adding that it would look to the government to support the cause of rights holders.
Speaking after the judgment, the IRMA chairman, Willie Kavanagh, said: "We are extremely disappointed that the high court today has effectively determined that the Irish state has failed to protect the constitutional rights of copyright holders by failing to implement EU copyright directives correctly."
IRMA had asked the internet service providers UPC and Vodafone to operate the three strikes ruling in the same way that Eircom had, but both declined, citing the rights of their respective broadband customers. A 48-hour scan of the two broadband networks found some 37,500 copyright infringements from UPC subscribers alone, IRMA said in June this year.
UPC, Ireland's third largest broadband provider, said it would continue to work with rights holders, other internet service providers, the Data Protection Commission, the National Consumer Agency and government departments to address the issue of illegal filesharing.
"UPC has repeatedly stressed that it does not condone piracy and has always taken a strong stance against illegal activity on its network," the company said in a statement. "It takes all steps required by the law to combat specific infringements which are brought to its attention and will continue to co-operate with rights holders where they have obtained the necessary court orders for alleged copyright infringements.
"Our whole premise and defence [is] focused on the'mere conduit' principle, which provides that an internet service provider cannot be held liable for content transmitted across its network," the company said. "Today's decision supports the principle that ISPs are not liable for the actions of internet subscribers".A woman who confronted a neighbour over his swastika flag was told "this is Nazi f***ing America" and to "get your a** in your car and get the hell out of here".
Page Braswell said she was driving through Mount Holly, North Carolina, when she passed a house flying a red-and-white Nazi flag from the front porch.
The Black Lives Matter campaigner filmed the tense encounter with the middle-aged man, who told her: "Don't f***ing worry about it."
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 a video posted to Facebook, she asked the man why he was flying the flag.
The man, who said his name was Joe Love, replied: "What's it to you? Do you make the payments on this f***ing house? I know you're filming, f*** you. What kind of flag do you fly?"
Ms Braswell said she flew a rainbow flag.
"What does that tell me about you?" the man asked. Ms Braswell said: "That I'm not a Nazi."
The man replied: "I'm not a Nazi either. This is Nazi f***ing America. Get your a** in your car and get the hell out of here.
"If you don't get the hell out of here, me and you's going to have trouble, I promise you that."
Alongside her post Ms Braswell said: "We need to ALL stand against Nazis. Share far and wide."
Focus on neo-Nazi and white supremacist attitudes in the US has intensified after the events of last Saturday's rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that descended into violent clashes and saw one counter-demonstrator killed.
A number of racist groups had organised to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee.
But fighting led authorities to shut down the rally. Anti-racist demonstrator Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when a car, allegedly driven by a white supremacist, was rammed into a crowd.
James Fields, 20, of Ohio, was charged with murder.
Shape Created with Sketch. Charlottesville, Virginia Protests Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Charlottesville, Virginia Protests 1/9 Statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee stands behind a crowd of hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' during the 'Unite the Right' rally 12 August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are protesting the removal of the statue from Emancipation Park in the city. Getty Images 2/9 Militia armed with assault rifles White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' with body armor and combat weapons evacuate comrades who were pepper sprayed after the 'Unite the Right' rally was declared a unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police. Militia members marched through the city earlier in the day, armed with assault rifles. Getty Images 3/9 Trump supporters at the protest A white nationalist demonstrator walks into Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally in Virginia. AP Photo 4/9 Racial tensions sparked the violence White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' exchange insults with counter-protesters as they attempt to guard the entrance to Lee Park during the 'Unite the Right' rally Getty 5/9 Protesters clash and several are injured White nationalist demonstrators clash with counter demonstrators at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. A state of emergency is declared. 6/9 A car plows through protesters A vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The incident resulted in multiple injuries, some life-threatening, and one death. AP Photo 7/9 State police stand ready in riot gear Virginia State Police cordon off an area around the site where a car ran into a group of protesters after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo 8/9 Rescue personnel help injured people after a car ran into a large group of protesters after an white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo 9/9 President Donald Trump speaks about the ongoing situation in Charlottesville, Virginia from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He spoke about "loyalty" and "healing wounds" left by decades of racism. 1/9 Statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee stands behind a crowd of hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' during the 'Unite the Right' rally 12 August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are protesting the removal of the statue from Emancipation Park in the city. Getty Images 2/9 Militia armed with assault rifles White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' with body armor and combat weapons evacuate comrades who were pepper sprayed after the 'Unite the Right' rally was declared a unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police. Militia members marched through the city earlier in the day, armed with assault rifles. Getty Images 3/9 Trump supporters at the protest A white nationalist demonstrator walks into Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles |
a relic of the Cold War, consider the following examples (in no particular order):
Several years back the proposed Total Information Awareness program sparked controversy because one of its missions was to engage in “information warfare,” which included directing misinformation toward the governed population as part of their larger campaign to manipulate the enemy.
In the past, CNN has employed, as interns, military psy-op specialists from Ft. Benning. It may still do, for all I know.
A few years ago there was a scandal when Wikipedia started tracking the IP addresses logged for edits and found articles on government agencies had been revised by employees of those agencies.
WikiLeaks has been targeted for some time by the national security community for hosting embarrassing government documents. The site drew serious government ire by posting a leaked CIA document which explicitly celebrated public apathy as a way of allowing the national security state to ignore the will of the supposedly “sovereign” voter. It referred, specifically, to the ability of European countries to participate in the Afghan war despite the disapproval of overwhelming majorities of the population—and then went on to argue that, since apathy might no longer be enough, Western governments ought to actively manipulate public opinion with disinformation campaigns. After the posting of that document, the intelligence community began considering covert measures to discredit WikiLeaks. The campaign of harassment has since been stepped up even more since the posting of a video showing American troops joyfully massacring civilians in Iraq.
An Austin area drug activist couple are facing an investigation by county Child Protection Services—despite their kids being, as the assistant DA said, “healthy, happy and well cared for”—because of what they’re teaching their kids about the government. They are accused of child endangerment for teaching their kids, among other things, that “marijuana is good and anti-drug efforts are riddled with lies,” and that “government is out to harm them.” Not only that, but the dad “doesn’t believe in church.” As proof that they’ve been warped and terrified by anti-government propaganda, CPS cites testimony from a police sergeant that the kids were “crying for no reason” when a bunch of thugs in black uniforms and body armor kicked in the door of their home serving a no-knock warrant. Imagine that.
On a less threatening but more pervasive level, government constantly lobbies us using our own tax dollars. The White House Office on Drug Control Policy website hosts propaganda against local decriminalization and medpot initiatives. Local schoolyards are covered with signs encouraging voters to vote for millage increases. The city posts signs near roadwork announcing “Your street improvement tax at work.”
All these stories add up to a very alarming trend.
If I recall correctly the garbage I was taught in civics class, the general idea is that we have a marketplace of ideas where the public engages in unfettered discussion of the issues and then instructs the government on its wishes. You know, the people are the bosses, the government works for us, and all that.
In reality, far from serving as an instrument of the will of an autonomous public, government sets the range of permissible debate, and acts covertly to guide the debate in order to protect the class interests it really serves.
As Samuel Huntington argued forty years ago in his paper on the crisis of governability, the post-WWII position of the U.S. as “hegemonic power in a system of world order” depended on a “large measure of public apathy,” enabling the President (aided, Huntington said, by an establishment made up of representatives of leading banks, corporations, and think tanks) to make foreign policy with a free hand. And as Chomsky has pointed out, the American public is treated in functional terms as a domestic enemy whose perceptions must be managed via information warfare, lest it threaten the constellation of class interests that controls the state.A missile strike from a suspected US drone has targeted a compound in a northwestern tribal district in Pakistan near the Afghan border, killing at least 10 people, Pakistani intelligence officials have said.
Thursday's attack came a day after a drone strike in the same area in North Waziristan, marking the resumption of the CIA-led programme in Pakistan after a nearly six-month hiatus.
The Pakistani government condemned the strikes, with a ministry of foreign affairs statement calling them a violation of Pakistani sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The latest attack, early on Thursday, saw a pair of US drones drop three missiles on a compound and a vehicle in the town of Ghulam Khan, two Pakistani intelligence officials told the AP news agency, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the media.
Military sources told the Reuters news agency that six people, including four Uzbeks, were killed in Wednesday's strike around 5km north of Miranshah, the capital of the North Waziristan tribal region, where Taliban fighters are holed up.
Pakistan's northwest, particularly the North Waziristan tribal area, is home to numerous armed groups - both local and al-Qaeda-linked foreign groups - who often work together, sharing fighters, money or expertise.
Due to stricter rules on the use of drones, diplomatic sensitivities and the changing nature of the al-Qaeda threat, the number of drone strikes had dwindled.
Airport attack
The missile strikes came in the wake of a siege on the international airport in Karachi, Pakistan's busiest hub. The five-hour attack ended with 36 people dead, including the 10 attackers.
The Pakistani Taliban, who have been fighting to overthrow the government and install their brand of Islamic law, killing thousands of people in the campaign, initially claimed responsibility for the attack on Jinnah International Airport.
An Uzbek armed group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, also based in North Waziristan, later said it had also played a role in the attack.
The statement appeared to be a sign of increased cooperation between armed groups in Pakistan.
Shahidullah Shahid, a Taliban spokesman, said on Wednesday that the Taliban had worked with the Uzbek group but did not give any details.
The Pakistani government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has tried to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban ever since he took office last summer, but those talks have so far yielded little results.Through March 11 you can help end hunger by dining at one of more than 30 participating restaurants—including Strip, Noche, Two Urban Licks, Aqua Blue, Local Three, Aria and South City Kitchen—and adding a donation to your tab. Then Sunday, you can walk or run off those calories during the 2012 Hunger Walk/Run at Turner Field, Atlanta Dish reports. Sponsored by Fifth Group Restaurants (Alma Cocina, Ecco, South City Kitchen, La Tavola Trattoria and The Original El Taco), the 2012 Hunger Walk/Run raises funds for six local charities, including The Atlanta Community Food Bank. Last year's event garnered $500,000. Can it be beat?
Concentrics Restaurants
One Midtown Kitchen
Two Urban Licks
Tap
Parish
Murphy's Atlanta Restaurant
Lobby Bar and Bistro
Room at TWELVE Centennial Park
Fifth Group Restaurants:
South City Kitchen Midtown
South City Kitchen Vinings
La Tavola Trattoria
Ecco
Alma Cucina
Bold American Events
The Original El Taco
Here to Serve Restaurants:
Strip
Cantina
Coast
Shout
Twist
Aja
Prime
Goldfish
Noche-Highlands
Noche-Vinings
Noche-Brookhaven
Other Participating Restaurants:
JCT Kitchen
No. 246
The Iberian Pig Kitchen and Bar
Double Zero
WestEgg
Kaleidoscope
Six Feet Under Pub and Fish House
Sufi's Kitchen
Davio's
Local Three
Muss and Turner
Community Q BBQ
Tomatillo's
Taco Mac
The Albert
Aria
Marlow's TavernPITTSBURGH — The Sharks have won when they’ve been in this situation before. They say they can do it again. History suggests they have almost no choice.
The Sharks will look to avoid going down by two games for the first time in the 2016 NHL playoffs when they play the Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final on Wednesday.
It’s not a must-win for the Sharks, but it comes pretty close.
The Sharks, who lost the Cup final opener 3-2 on Monday, are 0 for 10 in their history when they trail a series 2-0. In the history of the Stanley Cup Final, a team that has lost the first two games has dropped the series 44 of 49 times.
The last team to fall behind 0-2 and win the Cup was the Boston Bruins in 2011. They lost Games 1 and 2 on the road against the Vancouver Canucks, then came back to win four of the next five and capture the Cup in seven games. The Bruins won all three games at home and captured Game 7 in Vancouver.
“You never want to go down 2-0 in a series,” Sharks goalie Martin Jones said Tuesday. “Whether you lose the first game, any game, you never want to lose two in a row in playoffs.
“That sense of urgency is going to be important for us.”
The NHL’s best road team during the regular season has its work cut out to even the series and earn a split at Consol Energy Center before returning home for Games 3 and 4.
Among the tasks for the Sharks: Slow down Sidney Crosby and the Penguins’ cadre of skilled forwards and defensemen. Establish a consistent forecheck. Get more traffic in front of the net and more shots on rookie goalie Matt Murray. Take care of the puck. Things they were able to do in the second period of Monday’s game, when they outshot the Penguins 13-8 but weren’t able to do enough of in the first and third periods.
“We realize that we didn’t bring our best game last night, and at this time of year, in this spot, you need to be at your best to win games,” Sharks center Logan Couture said. “So, we have a lot of work to do to be better in Game 2.”
The Sharks are 5-1 in the playoffs in games after a loss, with their only back-to-back defeats coming in games 3 and 4 of their second-round series against the Nashville Predators. San Jose won the first two games of that series.
In the Western Conference finals, the Sharks lost Game 1 the St. Louis Blues 2-1, then came back with a 4-0 victory in Game 2. The Sharks also lost Game 4 at SAP Center 6-3, then won by the same score at Scottrade Center in a pivotal Game 5.
“We had a game — Game 4 against St. Louis at home — where we weren’t very good,” Sharks forward Dainius Zubrus said. “We bounced back and won the next two. That’s kind of the approach and we’ll be ready.”
Crosby was the best player on the ice for either team in Game 1, making every shift count and giving the Sharks fits with his explosiveness on offense. But the Sharks also felt they played into Crosby’s hands and into the strengths of the Penguins’ forwards by not forcing them to spend much time defending in their own zone.
“I thought we did a good job in the second period, were pretty clean, forcing them to play in their end for a while,” Couture said. “When we’re playing well, that’s what we do.”
Sharks coach Pete DeBoer was leading the New Jersey Devils when they made the final in 2012. They lost the first two games of the series at home to Los Angeles, both in overtime. The Kings closed it out in six games for their first Cup title.
“We’re on the road this time,” DeBoer said, noting the difference for himself between now and then. “The home team played a better game than us. I think we didn’t find a way to get rewarded. The good news was we still had a chance right until the last five minutes to win that game. I think we’ll be better.”
For more on the Sharks, see the Working the Corners blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/sharks. Follow Curtis Pashelka on Twitter at twitter.com/CurtisPashelka.Gov. Rick Perry Says He Won't Seek Re-Election In Texas
Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he will not run for re-election in 2014, feeding speculation that he might again pursue the presidency as a Republican candidate in the 2016 race.
The governor made his announcement at a news conference Monday in San Antonio, which was carried live online by The Texas Tribune.
He said he would use the next 18 months to think about his next moves. On FOX News Sunday, he answered a question about a potential presidential run by saying, "Well, certainly, that's an option out there."
Making his announcement Monday, Perry said he would make any other information public "in due time."
In his speech, Perry touted his record on economic issues, particularly in creating new jobs. More than once, he referred to the slogan, "Texas Works."A twin-axle Airstream trailer in Germany
Airstream is an American brand of travel trailers ("caravans" in British English) which are easily recognized by the distinctive shape of their rounded and polished aluminum coachwork. This body shape dates back to the 1930s and is based on designs created by Hawley Bowlus, who had earlier overseen construction of Charles Lindbergh's aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis.
Airstream trailers and recreational vehicles are manufactured in Jackson Center, Ohio, USA. The company, now a division of Thor Industries, employs more than 800 people, and is the oldest in the industry.
History [ edit ]
A large Airstream trailer
Refurbished Airstream trailer, California, March 21, 2013
The company was created by Wally Byam, had a BS in History from Stanford turned publisher, began building trailers out of Masonite in his backyard in Los Angeles during the late 1920s.[1] Byam published a magazine selling "how-to" kits to customers wishing to build their own trailers. After helping market Hawley Bowlus' trailer, Byam acquired the struggling Bowlus Company.[2] In 1936, Byam introduced the "Airstream Clipper", which was essentially a rebadged 1935 Bowlus, with the door relocated from the front to the side. The design cut down on wind resistance and thus improved fuel efficiency. It was the first of the now familiar sausage-shaped, silver aluminum Airstream trailers. The first Airstream, called the "Clipper" in 1936, was named after the first trans-Atlantic seaplane. It slept four, carried its own water supply, was fitted with electric lights and cost $1,200.[3] Of more than 400 travel trailer builders operating in 1936, Airstream was the sole survivor of the Depression.[4] During World War II, travel became a luxury most could not afford and non-military industries faced an acute aluminum shortage. When World War II ended, the economy boomed, and people's attention once again turned towards leisure travel. Byam's company went back into production in 1948. In July 1952, a new facility in Jackson Center, Ohio, was established. 1979 saw the last Airstreams to be manufactured in California.
In 1974, Airstream began manufacturing a Class A motorhome, badged "Argosy".[1] They began as painted 20- and 24-foot (6.1 and 7.3 m) models, and were followed in 1979 by the first examples of the Classic model motorhome, with an unpainted aluminum body much like the trailers.
Airstream-badged Class A motorhomes began as 24- and 28-foot (7.3 and 8.5-m) models in 1979, and in the 1980s and 1990s, models ranging from 25 up to 37 feet (7.6 up to 11.2 m) were marketed. The aluminum motorhomes were followed by more traditional-looking fiberglass models in the 1990s. Airstream discontinued manufacture of Class A motorhomes in 2006. One bus model, the Skydeck, featured interior stairs leading to a deck on the roof.
In 1981, Airstream's Commercial Vehicle Division marketed a Class A motorhome as a funeral coach. It was designed to transport family, flowers and the deceased from the funeral home to the cemetery.
Starting in 1989, Airstream built Class B motorhomes based on the Ford Econoline chassis and the Dodge B-series van chassis.[1] Production ceased after the 1999 model year. In 2004, Airstream introduced the Westfalia and Interstate, built on the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter chassis. The Westfalia was discontinued in 2006.
Airstream, still based in Jackson Center, is a division of Thor, Inc. Airstream produces several models — Basecamp, Sport, Flying Cloud, International Signature and Serenity, Tommy Bahama, and Classic. 2016 trailer sizes range between 16 ft to 33 ft (4.9 to 10 m).
Airstream in Europe [ edit ]
Airstream are distributed across the UK from the Swift Group[5] with three models made specifically for the British market. The Airstream Missouri, Yukon, and Colorado[6] have been created with smaller dimensions to accommodate narrower European roads. The furniture and cabinetry in these models are still manufacturers as the HQ in Ohio and shipped over for each trailer.[7]Airstream are also popular amongst the European market for takeaway diners and business stands[8].
Production [ edit ]
As of January 2015 Airstream was producing 50 trailers per week or about 2,600 per year. The company was expanding its capacity with plans to increase production by at least 50% over 2014 levels.[9] By April 2016, the Dayton Business Journal reported Airstream was producing 72 trailers per week--an annual rate of 3,744 assuming consistent production all year. The same article said they were aiming to increase to 77 trailers per week in 2016.[10]
Nest Acquisition [ edit ]
In 2016 Airstream acquired Nest Caravans, which was an Oregon-based company which had one product in development, at the prototype stage. Nest trailers are made of molded fiberglass. The Nest is a smaller and lower priced trailer than any in the Airstream line, but at the upper end of prices for its market segment, that was to be sold for $29,995 before the acquisition. Airstream CEO Bob Wheeler said "Nest is a product that conveys sophistication, simplicity, and upscale modernity, so it made sense for us to partner and help bring this design to market."[11] Airstream moved the company to Ohio and expanded staff for production which is underway. Airstream Nest trailers are scheduled to be available in early 2018.[12]
Airstream parks [ edit ]
1966 Airstream Overlander International
There are more than a dozen Airstream parks throughout the United States.[13] These are RV resorts or campgrounds where owners of Airstream-manufactured units are allowed to buy, rent or lease a site. Some of these facilities welcome non-Airstream products, while others are more strict in their admission. Some of the parks require membership in the WBCCI to be admitted. Several of the resorts are owned and operated by the local unit of the WBCCI.
Airstreamers [ edit ]
Airstreamers are a group of "RV-ers" who share a community spirit because of their common love of the trailers. In the early 1950s, Airstream company founder Wally Byam began leading groups of owners on travels to many portions of the world, where the towed trailers were quite remarkable. Photos taken of the trailers in front of many famous tourist sites were common. This promoted a mystique which surrounded Airstreams and persists to this day.
The Wally Byam Caravan Club was formed during the 1955 rally in Kentville, Nova Scotia, Canada. Later, the word "International" was added to the club name, resulting in the acronym "WBCCI". On August 17, 2005, a commemorative plaque was dedicated on the site. Club members join together for one large International Rally each summer (which by club rules always includes the dates of July 1 and July 4), and hundreds of smaller local rallies are held coast-to-coast by "units" (chapters). Airstreams are still popular, and restoration of older models is a passion shared by many.
Space program [ edit ]
The Astrovan drives in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building.
In 1969, upon their return from the Moon, the crewmen of Apollo 11 were quarantined in the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a modified airtight Airstream trailer, until it could be determined that there was little likelihood of their having brought back lunar pathogens with them.
For decades, NASA has used a fleet of Airstream motorhomes to transport astronauts to the launch pad. The space shuttle program used a modified 1983 Airstream Excella beginning in 1984 dubbed the Astrovan.[14]
United States Air Force [ edit ]
Airstream trailers are commonly used to transport American officials around the world. The trailers are strapped down inside military cargo planes. The trailers feature leather seats, air conditioning and climate control, wood panelling, porcelain toilet, LED televisions, surround sound, and Blu-ray players.[15]
Tokyo Smoking wagon is a modified AirstreamThe cover to the original Simplified Chinese edition
Unrestricted Warfare (超限战, literally "warfare beyond bounds") is a book on military strategy written in 1999 by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army, Qiao Liang (乔良) and Wang Xiangsui (王湘穗). Its primary concern is how a nation such as China can defeat a technologically superior opponent (such as the United States) through a variety of means. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, this book instead examines a variety of other means. Such means include using International Law (see Lawfare) and a variety of economic means to place one's opponent in a bad position and circumvent the need for direct military action.[1]
Source of text [ edit ]
The English translation of the book was made available by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service on the internet in 1999. Reportedly, the United States Naval Academy wrote to the authors to ask for permission to use this book.[citation needed] The book was then published in English by a previously unknown Panamanian publisher, with the subtitle "China's Master Plan to Destroy America" and a picture of the burning World Trade Center on the cover. These additions were thought to be misinterpretations of the text, not intended by the original authors. A French translation was published in 2003.[2]
The text has been cited by the U.S. government, e.g. on a military website by James Perry[3] who states:
In February 1999, the PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House issued Unrestricted Warfare, a book written by two PLA air force political officers, Senior Col Qiao Liang and Senior Col Wang Xiangsui. The venue for publication and the laudatory reviews of the book in official publications suggested that Unrestricted Warfare enjoyed the support of some elements of the PLA leadership. The Western press quoted various sensational passages from the book and described it in terms that verged on hyperbole. The book was not a blueprint for a “dirty war” against the West but a call for innovative thinking on future warfare.
Weaknesses of the United States [ edit ]
The book argues that the primary weakness of the United States in military matters is that the US views revolution in military thought solely in terms of technology. The book further argues that to the US, military doctrine evolves because new technology allows new capabilities. As such, the book argues that the United States does not consider the wider picture of military strategy, which includes legal and economic factors. The book proceeds to argue that the United States is vulnerable to attacks along these lines.[4]
Alternative methods of attack [ edit ]
Reducing one's opponent, the book notes, can be accomplished in a number of ways other than direct military confrontation. The book notes that these alternative methods "have the same and even greater destructive force than military warfare, and they have already produced serious threats different from the past and in many directions for...national security."
Lawfare [ edit ]
Lawfare, or political action through transnational or non-governmental organizations can effect a policy change that would be impossible otherwise. Because of the international nature of the modern world and activism, it is much easier for nation-states to affect policy in other nation-states through a proxy.
Economic warfare [ edit ]
Owing to the interconnected nature of global economics, nations can inflict grievous harm on the economies of other nations without taking any offensive action.
Network warfare [ edit ]
see iWar
One of the better-known alternatives in this book is the idea of attacking networks. Networks are increasingly important in not only data exchange but also transportation, financial institutions, and communication. Attacks that disable networks can easily hamstring large areas of life that are dependent on them for coordination. One example of network warfare would be shutting down a network that supplies power. If there is a significant failure in the power grid caused by the attack, massive power outages could result, crippling industry, defense, medicine, and all other areas of life.
Terrorism [ edit ]
Another instance of threats to nations within the scope of the concept of "unrestricted warfare" is terrorism. Terrorism is used by a group to gain satisfaction for certain demands. Even if these demands are not satisfied, a terrorist attack can have vastly disproportionate effects on national welfare. One only has to look at the economic crisis that followed the terrorist attacks against the United States, or the extensive security measures put in place after those same attacks. Terrorism erodes a nation's sense of security and well being, even if the direct effects of the attacks only concern a minute percentage of the population.
Defense against unrestricted warfare [ edit ]
The authors note that an old-fashioned mentality that considers military action the only offensive action is inadequate given the new range of threats. Instead, the authors advocate forming a "composite force in all aspects related to national interest. Moreover, given this type of composite force, it is also necessary to have this type of composite force to become the means which can be utilized for actual operations. This should be a "grand warfare method" which combines all of the dimensions and methods in the two major areas of military and non-military affairs so as to carry out warfare. This is opposite of the formula for warfare methods brought forth in past wars."
Implications [ edit ]
As the authors state, the new range of options combined with the rising cost (both political and financial) of waging traditional warfare results in the rising dominance of the new alternatives to traditional military action. A state that does not heed these warnings is in dire shape.
In popular culture [ edit ]
The novels Foreign Influence, Full Black, and Act of War by Brad Thor are based on this book.SINGAPORE: Ten women have been arrested for their suspected involvement in vice-related activities, the Singapore Police Force (SPF) said on Thursday (Sep 28).
They were rounded up in raids organised in September on residential units in Punggol, Serangoon North and Yishun, police said in a news release. Cash amounting to S$580 and mobile phones were seized as exhibits.
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Preliminary investigations showed the women, aged between 26 and 39 years old, had advertised sexual services on websites and conducted vice activities within the residential areas.
Owners of the houses raided will be investigated, police added.
Under the Women's Charter, those convicted of being the occupier or person-in-charge of a brothel, or convicted of keeping, managing or assisting in the management of one, may be fined up to S$10,000, jailed a maximum of five years or both.
Additionally, those who knowingly live on the earnings of the prostitution of another - for example receiving rental earnings from prostitutes - may be imprisoned a maximum of five years and fined up to S$10,000.
AdvertisementPoem on Life in a multiple star-system
What it would be like to see a triple sunset?
Jatan Mehta Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 2, 2017
This is a poetic follow-up on the possibility of Life in multiple star systems. Assuming that there is Life on such worlds with many suns, what would it be like to see a double/triple sunset? Can they also figure out their place in the Universe? Let’s take a look at one such planet found by scientists in a multi-star system.
An artist’s impression of Sunset as seen from the super-Earth Gliese 667 Cc. The brightest star is the red dwarf Gliese 667 C, which is part of a triple star system. The other 2 distant stars, Gliese 667 A and B appear to the right. Astronomers have estimated that there are tens of billions of such rocky worlds orbiting faint red dwarf stars in the Milky Way alone. — Source: Wikipedia
Here goes the poem trying to capture the view and thoughts on Life in such an amazing multi-star system:
Here lies the bathing light of the red dragon,
Deepening horizons on a world so foreign..
Yet much like a heaven that is our Earth,
there could be water on its surface unhurt..
Could there be Life too on this land of the triple-star,
Would they also figure out as to who they are?
Would they understand the distant but dazzling binary-star show?
That they are the suns of the one they know!
Oh what a view it would be,
for Life there to see!
But if on that world, there isn’t any,
then let it be the carved destiny of humanity!
Thoughts?AutoGuide.com
Bentley is giving a glimpse into its future design direction with a new new concept unveiled on the eve of the 2015 Geneva Motor Show.
Called the EXP 10 Speed 6, the concept made its debut ahead of the show’s opening and according to the British automaker it is “showing the future direction of luxury and performance.” The concept takes a look at how Bentley envisions the future of a high-performance, two seater that draws from its history of motorsports.
No details have been released on the car’s powertrain but in a release Bentley does say it could use an advanced “performance hybrid” engine.
This hybrid theme is carried through into the interior with the interior elements made of a mixture of copper and steel fused together.
2015 Geneva Motor Show Coverage
Bentley says this car could become a new sports car sitting along side the Continental, but the bigger focus for this project is the design direction that will influence future Bentley models. There’s a new interpretation of the company’s front grille and four-round headlights and the automaker calls the concept “a dynamic sculpture, creating harmony between sharp lines and flowing surfaces and using twisted surfaces to imply speed.”
“EXP 10 Speed 6 is one vision for Bentley’s future – a powerful, exquisite and individual concept,” said Wolfgang Dürheimer. “The showcar has the potential to be the new pinnacle luxury two-seat sports car. It offers thrilling, driver-oriented performance, complete with trademark modern Bentley luxury and effortlessness.”
Discuss this story at our luxury lifestyle forumOf the 250,000 species of flowering plants on earth, only 150 to 200 are cultivated by humans, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture organisation, just three of them — rice, maize and wheat — generate 60 per cent of the world's food.
It is a stark contrast to the estimated 5,000 different bushfood plant species that Indigenous Australians once utilised and seasonally harvested.
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But on a property bordering the rainforest in the Sunshine Coast hinterland's Obi Obi valley, Veronica Cougan is aiming to raise awareness of forgotten native foods — the amazing trees, fruits and flavours we have in our own backyard.
Share Native sea celery is also known as native parsley, and grows wild across coastal areas in Australia's southern states.
"We just haven't given them enough attention yet and a lot of people just don't know what they are, so I don't think they're game to buy it and they don't know what they're buying," Ms Cougan said.
"But a lot of chefs are now starting to pick up on the bushfoods, and once people have tried something made by somebody, professional or amateur, they love it."
Ms Cougan owns and operates Witjuti Grub Bushfood Nursery with her partner Roy McKenzie, and serves up delicious wild jam made from Davidson plums, plum pine and lilly pilly fruit.
"Davidson plums are a lovely big fruit," Ms Cougan said.
"A big golf ball-sized fruit, full of a deep red beautiful-looking flesh and just two slender seeds in that, so most of that is useable flesh.
Share The flower of the Davidson's plum is popular with native plant enthusiasts and can grow up to 10 metres tall.
"There are two varieties: the north Queensland variety fruits in autumn with great big hanging bunches, like giant bunches of grapes.
"We've heard of trees that produce up to 40 kilograms of fruit and they're a tall slender tree like a tree fern or a palm in growth habit.
"Then there's the New South Wales Davidson plum, which occurs just on the border with Queensland.
"It actually fruits in summer and you get these lovely pink flowers on the trunk, followed by plums up and down the trunk."
Ms Cougan was enrolled in a horticulture course 19 years ago when she met Graham White, the current president of the Queensland Bushfood Association.
Now she cultivates up to 25 different species of native trees, shrubs, vines and herbs in her nursery, propagating by seed and cuttings — collecting, breeding and using grafts to achieve superior fruiting qualities.
Share Root stock is grafted with wildly popular native finger limes.
"We're still a small specialist nursery but the lines that we've got now are better fruiting trees," she said.
"Everybody loves finger limes and why wouldn't they? They're just incredible — the range of colours, the little balls of citrus caviar, they're so versatile — we can't keep up with the demand.
"They're a small tree that can fit into anybody's yard, and you can keep the grafted varieties in a pot on your deck and they'll fruit really well for you as long as you feed them occasionally and water them."
Forgotten bush flavours
When explorer Thomas Petrie first arrived on the Sunshine Coast there was a vibrant Indigenous community, but European settlement led to significant displacement of the local Aboriginal people.
Share The strongly aromatic native thyme was used by Indigenous Australians for its medicinal qualities, and has an earthy, minty flavour.
"I think with the people up in North Queensland that still live closer to the land, they have still got a lot of information they could share," Ms Cougan said.
"A lot of the local information has been lost.
"I'd really love the bushfoods to come into everybody's awareness and to be used every day by everyday people.
"I think it's right under our noses and the flavours are amazing."
Share Finger limes are bursting with tiny balls of citrus and come in a variety of colours.
Ms Cougan broke open a finger lime that erupted with small balls of citrus juice.
"This variety is pink inside, that one there is green skin and green inside. You can get yellow skin with yellow inside, and the one we're excited about at the moment has deep red balls of citrus and it's just beautiful."
"The native bees come over to them as well and its thorns provide a really great protected site for the little finches and wrens to come and nest in.
"We've had up to four active nests at one time in this tree here. It gives them shelter from birds of prey and pythons."
Share The thorns of the native finger lime trees also provide a safe haven for nesting wrens and finches.
"Our local pepper is a beautiful vine with a lovely heart-shaped leaf and you get beautiful clusters of red berries, which turn black when they're dried out and get all crinkly like peppercorns and away you go, just chuck it in your pepper grinder.
"Lemon myrtle is probably up there with finger limes. Everybody I think is familiar with lemon myrtle now: they've tried it in food or cosmetics, and once again it's something that can fit into anybody's yard.
"It's a tree that you can keep pruned to any size, and being a foliage plant it grows in a pot too if you want to use it for that.
Share The native pepper vine is an attractive plant that produces red berries that can be dried and crushed just like ordinary cultivated pepper varieties.
"The warrigal greens is a rambling ground cover that gets a lot of seeds, so when your warrigal greens die back, the seeds drop all around them and with the next rain or decent watering, you'll get a whole lot of new warrigal greens coming up again.
"Use it just like you would use spinach — take the new growth tips — and it's easy to grow in the garden or in a pot.
"A lot of people have either got or have had native violets in their garden, but most of them don't realise that it has an edible leaf and also an edible flower, so that beautiful little flower there just makes a gorgeous garnish.
Share The native violet is more than just a pretty groundcover. It also produces edible flowers and leaves.
"The curry myrtle is an inland plant and it's got a real sort of curry eucalyptus smell, great in dukkhas and seasonings as well.
"This one's called the native thyme and it's a real earthy minty flavour, beautiful dried, and as you can see it's a lovely little shrub that's becoming really popular."The Clinton campaign's assault on Bernie Sanders over health care got more intense on Tuesday.
This time it wasn't presidential candidate Hillary Clinton or one of her aides delivering the attack lines. It was her daughter, Chelsea, who argued that Sanders would dismantle Medicare and Medicaid -- and "strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance."
Like so many statements the Clinton campaign has made about Sanders position on health care |
las puertas de los despachos. No sabemos muy bien qué pasa luego allí dentro. Hay eurodiputados que han presentado enmiendas que son copias textuales de solicitudes que hacen las grandes compañías. A uno se le pilló porque no perdió ni el tiempo en copiarlo y mandó un email con la enmienda que le había mandado la Volkswagen con su sello.
— ¿Tenéis constancia de que existan pagos o beneficios para estos eurodiputados?
— Lo de los pagos es más difícil de comprobar. Pero lo de las puertas giratorias es escandaloso, más que en España porque van y vuelven. Como nadie presta demasiada atención (somos 751 eurodiputados y muchos no son conocidos ni siquiera en sus Estados), pueden usar las puertas giratorias varias veces. Hay muchos eurodiputados que tienen acciones en grandes empresas y están haciendo informes, poniendo enmiendas, arrastrando a su grupo hacia un determinado voto…
— ¿Cuándo empezaste a abordar la lucha contra el TTIP?
Publicidad
— Un poco antes de aparecer Podemos, moviéndome por redes, había leído algo sobre el TTIP. Pero había muy poca información. A la hora de repartir las comisiones de trabajo pensé que debíamos estar en la de comercio internacional. Yo sabía que el tratado se estaba negociando en secreto y con absoluta opacidad y que la poca información que había era de algunas ONGs, que decían que era terrible. Así que me metí y ha sido toda una labor de investigación: poca información desde el propio Parlamento Europeo y lo que hemos aprendido ha sido a través de estudios sobre filtraciones que sacan la verdadera peligrosidad de este tratado. Luego ya pude entrar en la sala de lectura, donde están los documentos secretos de negociación, pero no puedo contar lo que leo allí. Firmamos un documento de confidencialidad por el que podemos llegar a tener problemas administrativos y penales porque sería desclasificación de documentos confidenciales de la Unión Europea.
— ¿La ciudadanía no tiene derecho a acceder a ellos?
— No. Pero la Comisión Europea se lava la boca diciendo que sus representantes sí. Pero, ¿de qué me sirve a mí leerlo si no puedo siquiera trabajar con ello? No podría siquiera poner una enmienda relacionada con información que he leído ahí dentro, porque la estaría desclasificando. Puedo dar a grandes rasgos un análisis de lo que he leído allí.
— ¿Cuántos partidos se han sumado a este combate contra el tratado comercial?
— En la Comisión de Comercio Internacional mi grupo parlamentario tiene un asiento solo, los verdes tienen dos, y somos las únicas fuerzas que nos oponemos. Teniendo en cuenta que hay ocho o nueve diputados del PP, seis o siete del grupo socialista que también están a favor (del TTIP), pues somos la voz minoritaria. Ciudadanos son ultraliberales y están a favor del libre comercio sin ningún tipo de trabas ni de protección. El PP, lo mismo. Lo que no cabe en la cabeza es que un grupo que se hace llamar socialdemócrata esté abogando por la eliminación total de protecciones sociales, medioambientales, al consumidor… para favorecer al comercio de las grandes empresas.
“Los grandes
medios no sacan
el tema porque pertenecen a
los principales bancos y ellos
son los grandes beneficiarios
del TTIP”
— ¿Cómo podríamos explicar lo que significa el TTIP para la ciudadanía?
— Una persona que va a un supermercado y quiere comprar pollo no sabrá de dónde viene, si es clonado o si ha sido lavado en cloro después de haber sido desplumado, ni si ha sido alimentado con productos transgénicos… No lo va a saber porque en el etiquetado no va a aparecer absolutamente nada. Puede ir a comprar fruta o unos cereales y que sean transgénicos de Monsanto y tampoco lo sabrá. Desde Podemos no estamos radicalmente en contra de los transgénicos porque muchos de ellos sirven para investigación farmacológica, lo que no puede ser es darles vía libre para que se pueda hacer producción masiva de alimentos y poder jugar con ellos en bolsa. También, si vas a una farmacia, comprarás un producto farmacéutico que no ha pasado las revisiones que hoy en día en Europa son obligatorias para ser comercializado, basándose en el principio de precaución para comprobar que los efectos secundarios son normales. En Estados Unidos esto es al revés: una empresa puede comercializar cualquier tipo de producto y es la sociedad o un organismo independiente el que tiene que ponerse a estudiar sus efectos. Se utiliza a la población como conejos de laboratorio. Además, la privatización de servicios públicos será masiva. Otra de las cosas que prohíbe el TTIP es los monopolios públicos, por lo que sería el fin de empresas como Correos, Renfe y cualquier empresa propiedad del Estado al considerarlo competencia ilegítima.
— ¿Se puede frenar el TTIP?
— Sí, todavía hay margen. He visto un cambio brutal en el argumentario, en el discurso y en las formas de actuar de la Comisión Europea desde que llegué hace dos años. No nos daban ningún tipo de información y nos decían que nos fiáramos de sus negociadores que estaban “protegiendo los intereses de los europeos”. A raíz del aumento, que ha sido exponencial, de la presión ciudadana, no sólo de partidos políticos sino de movimientos sociales y ONGs, y el aumento de los municipios que se están declarando por toda Europa contra el TTIP, les ha hecho rebajar bastante el discurso. No hay un plazo y todavía no está redactado, para lo que se necesita mucho tiempo, pero aunque la Comisión Europea tiene bastante prisa y quiere que se apruebe antes de que se vaya Obama en noviembre, eso es imposible. Por otro lado, hay que decir que el TTIP es una apuesta personal de Barack Obama, Martin Schulz y Jean-Claude Juncker. No se sabe si el acuerdo deberá ser aprobado por unanimidad de todos los Estados o por mayoría cualificada. La parte más difícil y lo que queremos conseguir es que el TTIP sea considerado un acuerdo mixto, por lo que cada uno de los Estados miembros tiene que aprobarlo en sus parlamentos nacionales. Entonces tendríamos 28 zancadillas para ponerle al TTIP porque estamos seguros que, de los 28 parlamentos europeos, más de uno lo tiraría abajo.
— ¿Qué puede hacer la ciudadanía para ayudar en este proceso?
— Protestar, movilizarse y saber a quién se está votando. Porque aquí en España los grandes partidos lo han hecho muy bien y han conseguido que el TTIP no esté en el debate público ni en periódicos ni en televisiones y no entra en ninguna de las campañas electorales. Y los grandes medios de comunicación no lo sacan porque pertenecen a los principales bancos y ellos son los grandes beneficiarios del TTIP y su mayor liberalización.
— ¿Cómo valoras el encuentro de estos días en Barcelona?
— El balance es muy positivo porque ayer se reunieron muchos alcaldes y representantes de ayuntamientos que se han declarado libres del TTIP, y está muy bien que empiecen a crear red. La Comisión Europea le tiene mucho miedo a esto. Puede que los ayuntamientos de algunos pueblos pasen desapercibidos, pero ciudades como Barcelona, Berlín o París se declaren libres del TTIP son puñaladas muy grandes al acuerdo. Estos encuentros son valiosísimos para establecer estrategias comunes de acción, y con la publicidad que se da se está viendo que las cosas se mueven y no nos conformamos.
Más información:
(*) Patricia Horrillo es periodista.I was in 9th grade when I wrote my first story that I didn’t think was complete shit. Up until then, I had this weird habit of burning every scrap I’d scribbled upon. Ideas ripped from movies and TV shows, fan-fiction that when I was writing I was sure was as good as the original work, they were all horrendous. I’d take the notebook pages back behind my parents’ house and set them ablaze with the red extended-reach lighter we kept in the drawer next to the stove. As the ashes fell to the rocks at my feet, I remember feeling relieved. Hours of work rendered blackened clumps of nothingness, but it didn’t matter. At least now no one could read the drivel. Then came the night I wrote Them, an end of the world alien story that had themes and semi-realistic characters, and I did something I’d not done before: I shared my story.
From then on, I kept writing. Story after story. Most were not very good, certainly not now when I go back and read them today, but with each one I, ideally, got better. Usually the stories did not end well for any of the characters, and the endings were oftentimes written with some Shyamalan-ian twist worthy of both an eye roll and face palm. In the months before graduation, I wrote my longest (to date even) short story called Eden. At the time, I knew I’d never written anything as strong. In it, Doctor Han White is given the coordinates to a land where all of his dreams come true. Now, it still suffered from some of the same tropes I’d always included in my works, but it was a damn good tale. It was around this time that I started dating my now-wife Sarah. She encouraged me to keep writing, saying one day I would write a book. My response was always the same, “I only write short stories.”
Things slowed down when I entered college, and not just because of the 21-credit workload I so foolishly took on. I’d made the mistake of asking an English professor I admired for feedback on my story Darren (I swear I’ve written stories with titles longer than one word!). Weeks went by without word. Then one day we met in the atrium to discuss one of my technical writings for class when he pulled out a copy of my story. For the next 30 minutes, he pulled apart every sentence and every idea I’d put into the narrative, of which I was actually extremely proud. When he finished crushing any and all of my enthusiasm, he told me I could go; he had the next student to meet with. Holding fast to my composure, I thanked him for his time and walked back to my apartment. The barrage on my ego hurt like a sonofabitch. While not the first time I’d heard something negative about my writing, it was the first time no punches were pulled. Today, I remember him with mixed feelings. First, the asshole could have at least offered some suggestions as to how I could have better improved my work. Second, the regent taught me that if I was going to keep at writing, I’d need to develop a thicker skin.
Throughout the next three years of college, I continued writing. There wasn’t much I’d ever revisit, but it kept whatever grasp I had of the craft honed. All the while, Sarah would say, “You should really write a book.” By now I’m sure you know my response. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t come up with the ideas. I could create elaborate yarns in my mind, but when it came time to do the dirty work, I froze. The idea of writing the same piece for that long was terrifying. What if it was terrible? At least if a short story wasn’t any good, I hadn’t spent a year of my life working on it.
After graduating college, I was left with an abundance of free time. This was sadly due to my inability to find work as an English teacher. But with that time, I turned my efforts back to writing. By then I wanted to try my hand at writing a comic series. That’s when I plotted the story for Existence (I PROMISE NOT ALL MY TITLES ARE SINGLE WORD!). I had the first issue scripted and the other 29 heavily plotted when I started looking for an artist, but it was hard to pay for talent when I had no money. Student loans needed paying and what was leftover from subbing in the surrounding schools wasn’t going to buy me anyone worth investing in. Weeks were wasted. I had so much material, but nothing could happen. I sure as hell wasn’t going to draw the comics; I wanted people to buy them! In a panic, I started writing. I needed to write something that wasn’t dependent upon someone else. With prose, the only person to blame when the work isn’t done is yourself.
At this point, I can’t quite remember where the idea came from, but I can recall sitting in my bed back at my parents’ house and writing about a hammer falling from the sky. Why the hammer was falling, I didn’t know, but I described how it landed in a young boy’s backyard. I knew it would impact him in some way, but I would figure out the how later. By the time I fell asleep that night, I had a rough draft of the first chapter of The Hammer & the Serpent.
The next morning, I started to ask the important questions like “Why was the hammer falling?” and “How would it drive the story?” and “Oh my god, what should the main character’s name be?” The last question is always the worst. Slowly a plot developed. But of course, the hammer belonged to Thor, and he was sending it as a message. During my second-to-last semester of college, I found that I’d missed a credit somewhere. In a panic, I turned to my favorite English professor at the time, Dr. Hall. I was currently taking his Brit Lit I class, and I found the old epic poems fascinating. Together we created a curriculum for an independent study. The topic was Old Norse literature, primarily studying the Eddas. Once a week, we’d meet in his office and talk about Nordic gods and legends for an hour. It was hands down the coolest class I had in my whole college career. What I would do with the information I’d learned, I did not know. That is until I started answering my questions.
Plotting came next. Throughout high school, I never wrote an outline unless the assignment forced me to do so. I hated the time they wasted. Well, college taught me otherwise, and I’m happier for it. By the end of the day, I had the first outline of the book. I knew that I was writing a book geared for kids in middle school, so I wanted to keep the length manageable. With the success of the Spiderwick Chronicles (a series I still have yet to read), I figured why not shoot for that size? What were they, like 10,000 words? Pssh…that’s no problem, I thought. And so I kept writing. With a goal of 10,000 words, I typed away.
I’d write from 10:30 AM through the night. The next day I’d wake up around 9:30-10 and start again. The book consumed me, and I let myself be consumed. On the days I subbed, I would bring my notebook with me and write in the back of the classroom when the students worked on assignments. In fact, it was in the back of a fifth grade classroom that I came up with the names of the main characters, Corbis and Harper. I remember getting irritated when the teachers would leave actual lesson plans in which I would have to teach something, as it would lessen my writing time.
Each time I started a new chapter, I would plot it out, point by point. With more ideas, the story grew until I hit 10,000 words. I’d reached my goal, but something wasn’t right. I wasn’t anywhere near done with the story I wanted to tell. There was still so much more to say. And then it hit me: I was writing a book. My stomach dropped. Suddenly the task became infinitely more difficult. I only wrote short stories. What the hell was I doing? Why did the page count exceed ten? I quickly did the math, figuring the number of pages I would need to tell my story. The number only made the situation worse. It wasn’t until I looked at the book with a new perspective that I could continue. All my life I’d written short stories. That was my thing. But what if I approached each chapter as if it were its own short story? Every chapter has a beginning, middle, and end, and with a few well placed transitional sentences, a collection of short stories eventually becomes one coherent novel. That was all it took to jump back in. By the time I was done with the first draft, the word counter on Microsoft Word read somewhere around 20,000 words. I had doubled my goal.
Now, I know a 20,000 word book is incredibly short in the grand scheme of novels, but I was damn proud. I’d done it. I’d written my first book! I knew I had to edit, but that wasn’t going to take long at all. One of the reasons it took me two weeks to write 20,000 words was because I wrote slow and steady, choosing each word carefully to ensure it sounded right the first time. Sitting back, I read the culmination of hours of work. And it was hot garbage. Scenes did not make sense, continuity was all over the place, and the story just felt empty. I remembered reading several times that the best time to edit a piece was after a lengthy time away. Editing directly after writing is like critiquing your child. Sure, he may be slightly cross-eyed and piss his pants, but he your little pants pisser. Following that advice, I walked away.
But I couldn’t stay away for long. About a month later I started printing off each chapter individually. Using a pen, I would mark up every single page with notes both macro and micro. I would then apply the corrections and addendums to the file on my computer. Lastly, Sarah and I would lie in bed and read through each chapter aloud or she’d read it on her own (She said my voice always put her to sleep…), and we’d continue to polish the draft. By the time we made it to the end, we’d seemingly perfected the book and added another 5,000 words.
During this process, I’d reconnected with a mother of one of my grade school friends. She was an author of several published books, and she’d introduced me to a small indie publisher. I’d been talking to the guy who ran the company, and he told me to send over my book. It didn’t take long to get feedback. While he enjoyed the story, it still felt shallow. There was not enough, the characters were not fleshed out well enough. He sent me back to work, and I’ve since told him how fortunate I was for that response. The next go around added about 10,000 additional words. But while the story was there, I knew I needed to give it another round of editing. Clearly, strictly doing it myself (and with Sarah’s help) wasn’t going to cut it, so this time I asked a couple friends for help. Without their guidance, notes, and feedback, there’s no way the book would be what it is today. Editing isn’t and shouldn’t be a one person job.
Alas, I finished. It was time to send the book back to the publisher. Only this time, he was less excited. Even though I had made the corrections he was looking for, the ship had apparently sailed. Weeks went by. Months. I’d check in from time to time only to be told they were busy, but that they would eventually get to in. During the wait time, I sent queries to 20 some agents. I was declined by them all. Experts warn that the first rejection is going to hurt, but what they neglect to mention is each one after hurts just as much. If my book was going to be traditionally published, the connections I’d made were my only hope. But it never happened. After waiting over a year, I came to the conclusion that if I wanted my book to find an audience, I would have to do it myself.
Self-publishing was always a scary idea. While it seemed like a simple process, I’d learned that publishers will usually not touch something that was self-published prior. I still held to the minuscule of hope that my book would be picked up. Add more wait time, and the hope completely vanished. In its place a new emotion grew: Acceptance. Like I do for many cases, I turned to Amazon. I knew the Kindle eBook was available, and that it was going to be my primary avenue for distribution. But I was still missing the same thing that I was missing when trying to create comics. I needed the art.
When browsing the covers of most independent books, the market is saturated with shitty covers. Stock photos and generic, pre-loaded fonts were not going to work for me. I wanted my book to stand out, so I began my search for a cover artist. This time, the search did not take long. Not twenty minutes into seeking a competent artist, I came across Olga Zhupina from Russia on Fiverr.com. I’d had good luck with the site after finding an amazing artist for a card game I created, so it was only natural that I return. Olga took my cover description and, blending her own unique art style, created something more than I could have hoped for. Not only that, but it was relatively inexpensive. Where some website can charge hundreds for the rights to a generic photograph, I received a unique piece of art for a fraction of the price.
I won’t get into the formatting for preparing my book for an Amazon release, but let’s just say that making a book look pretty as an ebook was not as simple as I had imagined.
I released The Hammer & the Serpent as an Amazon Kindle Book on November 12, 2015. I announced the release on Facebook, garnering dozens of likes and an impressive amount of shares. The support from friends and family was staggering. By the end of the day, I had sold a whopping two books. But seeing those sales (even though there were only two) and knowing there were people out there reading my work–and hopefully enjoying it!–made it all worth it. I finally had something to show for the time and energy I’d invested in the novel, and I don’t mean money.
When I said, “Every chapter has a beginning, middle, and end, and with a few well placed transitional sentences, a collection of short stories eventually becomes one coherent novel,” I was of course downplaying the need to craft a narrative with an overall continuity. However, strictly speaking for the act of structuring the writing, the statement stands. Each chapter service a purpose, not only in providing a continuation to the previous chapters, but to tell an individual story all on its own. If Chapter Two could not stand on its own, what was the point of creating another? Why not just lengthen Chapter One?
Ensuring each chapter can be taken on its own, treated as its own beast, is more a necessity than choice. Even though I was the kid getting in trouble for reading during class, the bulk of my read time came right before bed. I’m sure this is the case for most people. But what I’ve found is that over time my mind has been trained that if there is a book in my hands and words in my eyes, it is time to sleep. This is a problem for an avid reader. Even in mid-day I need to take breaks between chapters. I have to go for a walk, have a snack, or simply put the book down and shake my head vigorously to fight the encroaching sleepiness.
Because of this, there are nights where I can only complete a single chapter before passing out. And if each chapter does not provide at least some full story on its own (while, of course, furthering the overall story), then I can lose interest in the work.
The comics medium works much in the same manner. Every month another piece of the story is released, usually about 22-32 pages worth of material. If each issue could not be taken on its own, then what would be the point of releasing the series in pieces? Years ago, before books were as common place as they are today, authors would release installments of their novels. In fact, serialized writing is where Charles Dickens got his celebrity. Once a month for nearly two years, Dickens published short installments (usually about three chapters) of The Pickwick Papers.
Each installment had to be interesting enough to stand as its own work, as well as add to the complete story Dickens was trying to tell. Using the same thinking, I apply these rules to writing single chapters as well.
(Before I continue, let me just mention that this the mentality and method that works best for me. There is no right or wrong way to writing. If it is something you love, you will learn what works best for you. I’m here to offer but one way to get the same job accomplished.)
One of my electives in college was some bullshit course on computers. I call it bullshit because the parts I could use outside of the classroom I knew before enrolling, and the parts I didn’t I’d never use again. Although, there was one nugget I took from the lectures. When writing code, we were taught how to create an If/Then Statement. If X occurs, then Y follows. Writers do the same thing when writing, but we usually refer to it as Cause and Effect. One event occurs, leading to some sort of consequence.
On the macro level, looking at the book as a whole, chapters should do the same thing. Chapter One is the cause and Chapter Two is the effect, and the formula continues for as many chapters as there are in the book. On the micro level, each chapter should have its own If/Then or Cause and Effect.
Using my book The Hammer & the Serpent as an example, Chapter One shows the hammer falling into Corbis Callum’s backyard, and Chapter Two explains how Corbis’ family is forced to leave their home. If the hammer falls, then the Callums leave. This is the macro.
It is on the micro that we focus on the events of a single chapter. When the hammer fell into his backyard, Corbis began to hear the weapon whispering to him. If the hammer falls, then it starts calling Corbis to his adventure.
Now, if you are not one of the two people who bought my book, these examples probably mean nothing to you. To further prove my point, I’m going to use the childhood classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
When Dorothy and her friends are in the Emerald City, they are there to ask the wizard to help them with their own respective problems. The Scarecrow is looking for brains, the Tin Woodman is looking for a heart, the Cowardly Lion is looking for courage, and Dorothy is looking to get the hell out of Dodge…well, Oz. Separately, the four heroes meet with the wizard to plead their case. With the natural flow of the story, this makes perfect sense. If they are going to get what they came for, then they need to talk to the wizard, just as The Good Witch of the North explained when Dorothy first arrived in Oz. However, breaking down the chapter as its own entity, we see the wizard take on different forms and swindle the heroes into doing his dirty work, for to get what they came for they need to destroy the Wicked Witch of the West. If they meet with the Wizard, then he will take on forms best meant to convince the heroes to kill the witch.
Think of chapters as mini-stories complied into one big book.
If I have not thoroughly confused you, then let’s move on.
See what I did there?
When asked to give advice on writing comics, Robert Kirkman, author of The Walking Dead, warns against writing scripts. Instead he says, “I would write scenes. I would write interesting and compelling short stories.” He continues, once you are able to nail down specific scenes, it’s not that difficult to stretch it out into something more.
This is the same approach I take when writing. I come up with scenes that I feel are really powerful and meaningful, and then I find ways to link them all together. And they don’t have to come in order. When I sit down to write, sometimes I will pick up at the start of the next chapter and begin to tell that new short story, but most of the time I will be hit with the inspiration to write a particular scene. From there, I will find ways to bridge the scene to what came before and what comes after.
If the next scene in the sequence does not interest me at the time, I know I need to skip it. There is no sense writing something that does not grab my own attention. Leaving it be while I work on something I’m more enthusiastic about will do one of two things. Either I will discover a more exciting angle to take on the part, or I will decide that it is so uninteresting that I’ll remove it all together. It is okay to prune.
Consider each scene to be its own chapter and then its own short story.
Could this all be just some kind of elaborate mind trick that I play on myself? Sure. Perhaps I’m only fooling myself by erasing the distinction between writing short stories and full-length novels. But here’s the thing, I don’t care. No longer am I the young boy lighting his stories on fire. That era is long over. Today I’m a guy sharing his novel with the world, no longer afraid.
And I only write short stories.
To find the book on Amazon, click the link below. Like it? Then think about leaving a review!
http://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Serpent-Corbis-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B017X1DTWY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447571529&sr=8-1&keywords=the+hammer+and+the+serpentOpinion polls predict the worstever defeat for the Congress in the coming election. The party swore by the aam aadmi for a decade, promising him succour through a rights-based approach. Alas, the aam aadmi rejects this categorically.
In 2009, Sonia Gandhi created the powerful National Advisory Council with the top names in the NGO/activist circuit, claiming to be true champions of the aam admi. They prodded Sonia to enact the Right to Education Act, a sort of Right to Work (MNREGA), and a sort of Right to Food (the Food Security Act).
Had these met the needs of the aam aadmi, the Congress would be poised for victory. Why, instead, is it being thrashed? Mainly because Indians no longer want to be treated as objects of pity, or be bought off with doles and freebies even as crooked Congressmen mint money. Narendra Modi has soared in opinion polls by emphasizing development and opportunity, not sops and entitlements. Indians have become aspirers to a better life, seeking good governance more than sops.
Activists say their rights-based approach was fine, but implementation was flawed. Sorry, but any approach that ignores implementation realities is not worth wiping your bum with. Everybody knew that government schools were non-functional because of absenteeism, that employment schemes and food distribution were corrupt and wasteful. Nevertheless the activists persuaded Sonia Gandhi to pour ever more money into these leaky buckets. They argued that some states had performed well, so if others did equally well, the approach would be a big success. This was like arguing that if only all Indian cricketers played like Sachin Tendulkar, India would become world champion. The logic was not wrong, simply irrelevant.
Others said the rights-based approach was correct but overtaken by scams, inflation, and a slowing economy. Surely this shows that the activists wrongly claimed that their pet priorities were those of the aam aadmi. A big gap has appeared between the aam activist and aam aadmi.
Activists seek to convert entitlements into universal rights. This is conceptually flawed. Mukesh Ambani must have traditional rights (right to vote, right to follow any religion) but why on earth should he have a right to free food or education? Rights must be universal, whereas entitlements should be targeted at the needy.
Neither entitlements nor rights mean much without strong implementation. Sonia steered clear of any radical implementation measures. The Right to Education Act says children must be in school, but imposes no penalty on states that fail to provide schools, and no penalty on teachers who do not teach. Rights without accountability are frauds. Surveys show that children in class V cannot read passages meant for Class II, and children can be functionally illiterate on graduating from school. If Sonia had focused on ensuring strong accountability of schools and other government services to voters, they might have been happy. Instead she and the activists focused on larger budgets and near-universal provision.
Entitlements have existed for decades. Converting them into formal rights has made no practical difference. In theory, a right enables the aam aadmi to take the government to court. But do activists really think that the aam aadmi will go to court every time a teacher is absent or a ration shop says it has no wheat? The courts are clogged and suffer massive delays. Voters know how fraudulent it is to suggest that they have been empowered by new rights to claim redress from the courts.
Sonia has also missed a simple political insight. Despite Central laws converting entitlements to rights, implementation is done by the states. Over 90% of villagers have never seen a central government officer — the only government they know is the state government. If schools or ration shops work well or badly, voters give the credit or discredit to the state government, not New Delhi. In 2009, Sonia’s sycophants claimed that MNREGA had won her the election. In fact she swept the cities while the poorest states most in need of MNREGA voted for Opposition parties. This reflected support for dynamic Opposition CMs (Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, Shivraj Chouhan and Raman Singh) rather than central laws.
This explains why the aam aadmi doesn’t give a damn for Sonia’s rights-based approach. In practice this simply expands old, flawed entitlements. The supposed right to take the administration to the courts is meaningless. Implementation is all-impor tant, so what matters is not any central law but a good chief minister. The aam aadmi is sick of gran diose promises, and wants good governance plus a dynamic economy that creates opportunities Kejriwal and Modi have grasped this. Sonia has yet to come to terms with this.Welcome to Colossorama! A place built for the most violent people! Pick a sword, ditch it for a spear, swap it for a hammer, take a drink or two, and get slashing and bashing! Only those that can adapt will be remembered in the Pantheon of Gladiators! So, get in there and make us proud. After all, heads won’t chop themselves, you know.
(Version 1.2B2 - 26 May 2018)
Originally Made for Ludum Dare 36
Features
After surviving a wave of enemies, select a new Weapon or Item, and fight another round! But you can only carry so much with you, so keep swapping until you get the weapons you like the most!
There used to be about 28 weapons and items to choose from. There’s over 60 now! Will you choose ranged over knockback? Healing over speed? Status effects over damage? Keep adapting to keep surviving!
Swords, spears, axes, hammers, scythes, staves and many more! There’s poison, freezing, stunning, invincibility, projectiles, and more variables as well!
You may fight in Colossorama mode for the core head-slashing experience, or choose from one of many challenges! There’s fast paced combat, moon gravity, powerful enemies only and even a party mode for good measure!
18 playable characters for Colossorama mode, each with their own starting loadout! Can you unlock them all?
There’s nothing more honourable than bragging about your score on Twitter, so there’s a button just for that!
Controls
Keyboard and Mouse Combo
Movement
Move with the A (Left Arrow) and D (Right Arrow) keys.
Jump by pressing W (Up Arrow), or by pressing the Space-bar.
Attack by Left-Clicking (Z) or Right-Clicking (X) with your mouse. Each of the sides will use their respective weapons.
Press E (C) to use your item.
Cards Screen
Pick Weapons Cards by Left-Clicking (Z) or Right-Click (X) with your mouse. The card will replace the respective weapon.
Pick Item Cards by Left-Clicking (C). The card will be placed on your item slot.
Controller
Movement
Move with the Left Stick or with the D-Pad.
or with the D-Pad. Jump by pressing A (Cross), pressing Up on the D-Pad, or by tilting the Left-Stick Up.
Attack by pressing X (Square) and Y (Triangle). Each of the buttons will use their respective weapons.
Press B (Circle) to use your item.
Cards Screen
Pick Weapons Cards by pressing X (Square) or Y (Triangle). The card will replace the respective weapon.
Pick Item Cards by pressing B (Circle). The card will be placed on your item slot.
CreditsSeptember's deal came after months of talks led by South Africa's Thabo Mbeki Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has agreed to join a unity government with President Robert Mugabe. The move ends months of political stalemate as the two sides squabbled over the details of a power-sharing deal agreed last September. It comes as Zimbabwe deals with |
patient’s activity but the patient is also learning how best to work with the system.
Such learning happening from both angles is more likely to make the system work.
5. And the goals of your team? And what about other applications?
Success depends largely on our ability to communicate with the machine, the computer that converts the signals from the brain neurons into instructions that replicate and transmit the intent in the thoughts of the patient. You can put electrodes into the brain, but if you can’t make sense of the signals being recorded, then there’s not much point.
The idea of using a stent came from Dr Tom Oxley (a neurologist from the University of Melbourne interested in vascular systems and electrophysiology). Tom was looking for support for his idea.
Professor Terry O’Brien (MB BS 1988, MD 2000), head of medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, suggested he speak to Professor Tony Burkitt and me. We were at the Centre for Neural Engineering at the time. We thought the idea was fantastic and agreed to support it.
We immediately saw what the challenges were and were familiar enough with the bionic eye and ear to know the sorts of challenges that would be met, such as finding biocompatible materials and working in very small spaces.
Tom had been speaking to DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and we joined in with a formal application for funding, which was successful.
It might be possible to record from other parts of the brain, perhaps use it for epilepsy monitoring. I am also interested in the prospect of stimulating the brain through the stentrode’s electrodes. Could we deliver electric current to the brain to stop a seizure, treat severe intractable depression or stimulate lower brain centres for control of Parkinson’s disease?
An implanted device to treat Parkinson’s disease is already available but its use involves invasive surgery with all the inherent risks of entering the brain.
Electrical stimulation delivered there can alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Severe shaking and “freezing”, when the patient can’t move, are treatable.
Read more on Pursuit.Captain Tycho Minogue is back for his second outing in Escape from Pleasure Planet, and developer Up Multimedia has come out of the starting blocks eager to show it’s learned several lessons since its debut release.
While Tycho’s first adventure, My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant, was good, campy fun, its basic game design made for numerous, frustrating experiences. Pleasure Planet seeks to correct those amateur mistakes, offering up gameplay that shows refinement and polish all throughout. A handful of fail states present themselves immediately after the title screen, urging players to get accustomed to a type of trial-and-error gameplay that wasn’t before present.
Taking heavy inspiration from Star Trek’s Risa – and countless other sci-fi properties that have used the trope of a perfect planet that isn’t what it seems – Escape from Pleasure Planet begins as Tycho descends upon a ruthless (yet beautiful) villain who’s crashed upon the resort planet of Arcadia. Armed only with his wits, a bi-corder that is DEFINITELY not a tricorder and his trademark midriff-bearing muscle tee and short, short shorts, Minogue soon learns that his bounty pales in comparison to the mysteries of the planet itself.
While Escape from Pleasure Planet is a self-proclaimed gay game, that can take away from the fact it’s a meaty point-and-click adventure that just happens to feature gay themes, campy humour and psychedelic, 1970s science-fiction. Phillips’ artwork suits the project perfectly, painting Minogue as the super-charged, homosexual version of Barbarella (ignoring the fact that Barbarella is that already).
Phillips, who has worked on projects from comic publishers DC and Marvel, once again offers up top-notch work, filling Arcadia with colourful, vibrant characters. Thankfully, dialog trees provide characters with personalities that match. In the vein of Monkey Island, you’ll want to click on everything in sight to get Minogue’s take on a person, place or thing. I often found myself trying to combine ridiculous inventory items with one another or using the bi-corder to analyse items just to get a reaction from Minogue or those around him.
As you begin to peel away at the mysteries of the pleasure planet, players can choose to go with the gay allegories that present themselves or simply remain focused on the story at hand. Minogue can confront a bigoted space alien, or simply choose to let him be. As things progress, it becomes clear that the hedonistic planet is working hard to hide that side of itself, mirroring the internal struggles some homosexuals face as part of the coming out process (or simply in every day life). Things get quite dark, admittedly, but themes are continually managed with respect and — far more importantly — a wicked sense of humour.
Pleasure Planet excels in every way over its predecessor. Puzzles are challenging but fair; each failure made is clear-cut and understandable (though with that said, it’s best to save more often than simply rely on the auto-save). One or two puzzles suffer from a logic gap or have elements that simply work themselves out, inexplicably, to progress a thread, but they’re quite uncommon and largely forgivable. I never experienced the states of hopelessness and futility that Space Tyrant was often plagued with. When stuck, it was because of my own doing instead of a sloppy bit of code. While there are some rough edges in places, they actually work, helping to entrench the title as a B-grade, schlocky adventure.
Up Multimedia delivers a quality point-and-click adventure with same-sex attracted characters and gay culture in a way that doesn’t alienate players of any sexuality, religion or creed. While its very nature clearly targets those in the LGBTI community, fans of point-and-click adventures will have a splendid time exploring Arcadia alongside Minogue and his motley crew.
The good Far more polish than in My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant.
Vibrant, colour art.
A wicked sense of humour. The bad A logic gap or two.
Escape from Pleasure Planet was reviewed using a promotional code on Steam, as provided by the developer. The author has previously pledged $20 AUD to Escape from Pleasure Planet‘s Kickstarter, and will gift the retail copy of the game it provides to a friend. Stevivor has in past, interviewed Up Multimedia’s Luke Miller. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.After false starts, raised hopes and a U-turn on the road to construction, work on a new mixed-use building downtown Detroit is expected to begin in July.
The Mondrian — named after Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who inspired the De Stijl architecture mode in which the building is designed — is expected to bring up to 108 apartments and 15,000 square feet of retail space to the west side of Woodward Avenue, south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
It's been Detroit-based Queen Lillian Development LLC and developer Chris Jackson's tale of stalled and then restarted development efforts at the 1.6-acre site after finishing Queen Lillian I, an $18.4 million medical office building a mile away.
Yes, development and redevelopment have rebounded in a meaningful way in Midtown and downtown. But even in the improved environment, developers of all sizes must hit the occasional curveball and react to changing market conditions.
Planned occupancy of The Mondrian, originally proposed as a complementary 75,000-square-foot medical office building within field-goal length of the Detroit Medical Center, fell through. Queen Lillian couldn't get a construction loan without half of the building preleased due to lending standards.
The tenant that originally expected to occupy the medical office building, the Wayne State University Physicians Group, backed out of discussions after finding another site just up Woodward north of Mack Avenue. (That project hasn't yet begun construction because of the physicians group's financial woes.) The DMC was also courted to occupy the building.
After losing the physicians group, Jackson turned his attention to smaller medical office tenants — the private practices of doctors and dentists, for example. Although he had interested tenants, lenders wanted 50 percent of the building preleased to approve a construction loan.
"We were chipping away at it slowly but surely, but it wasn't getting to that critical mass" of 35,000 or so square feet pre-leased, said Jackson, a former staffer to Detroit City Council President Gil Hill and former part owner of Greektown Casino-Hotel.🈹 New Year, New Sale
It’s happened, eBook copies of Red Litten World—the third installment of the Bell Forging Cycle—are finally on sale. From today through January 6th, 2018 you can get your DRM-free copies for only 99¢ from your favorite eBook retailer. Hot damn! That’s a saving of five dollars. You can get a book, and you’ll still be able to afford lunch or a fancy coffee. Click any of the links below to purchase.
But wait, there’s more. Since this is Red Litten World’s first sale, I figured I’d triple the savings and offer ebooks of The Stars Were Right and Old Broken Road for 99¢ as well! That means right now you can get all three books for less than three dollars. That’s twelve bucks back in your pocket! The new year is coming so why not celebrate with some new books?
📖 Already a Reader?
Often, my readers ask how they can participate in sales like this even though they’ve already bought the books. Here are a few ways you can help me (and other authors) out:
Share this deal with your friends and family
Post about this sale on Twitter and Facebook
Leave a review (Seriously this helps more than you realize.)
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook
and Gift an eBook (Available at Amazon, Nook, and iBooks. Details in this post. )
) Ask your local library to add my books to their collection
Any of that goes a long way towards helping me out. Thanks for reading and supporting my work. It means more than you can ever realize.
❄️ 🦑 ❄️This year’s Ebola outbreak has sparked a global response. Governments, aid organizations, and public health groups from across the world are pledging billions of dollars and sending personnel to provide relief in affected areas.
The situation is urgent. The World Health Organization projects that anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 new cases will occur weekly by December. The current outbreak has already claimed more lives than all previous ebola outbreaks put together.
At this rate, the already high cost of containment will only continue to grow. The ebola treatment camp in Bong County, Liberia (built by Save the Children, operated by the International Medical Corps) cost $175,000 to build. It employs a paid staff of 165 and goes through 100 sets of gowns, sheets, and other basic patient supplies a day. Monthly, the operating cost is around $1 million, or $15,000 per bed. According to figures from the WHO, operating 100,000 beds would cost West Africa $1 to $2 billion a month.
Frontline non-profits are struggling with these costs. Natural disaster development professionals are at pains to formulate effective fundraising strategies. While a couple of high-profile donations have secured media attention for the fundraising effort—Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated $250 million the the Centers for Disease Conrol, and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation pledged $50 million to UN agencies and various non-profits operating in West Africa—fundraisers face an uphill battle appealing to grass-roots funding.
According to Joel Charny of InterAction, this is because donors respond to cataclysmic events. Highly visible natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines generate not only billions in fundraising, but also volunteers. According to David Wightwick of Save the Children, planes were overflowing with volunteers after Typhhon Haiyan struck the Philippines. But when his organization requested 28 logisticians to work in countries affected by ebola, 21 declined.
Gary Shaye, who also works for Save the Children, commented that “until [ebola] is something much more visible in the media, it’s almost impossible to raise funds.”
Finding a way to tap into the public’s philanthropic spirit is a paramount issue facing frontline non-profits working to contain ebola. Once fundraisers craft a message that connects their potential donors to the plight of ebola sufferers—just as donors felt connected to the victims of other recent natural disasters—disaster relief organizations will be able to move forward in their hugely important work.
This process may now be under way. Mark Zuckerberg has announced a fundraising drive that will be featured on Facebook, where users will be asked to help stop ebola with a donation to the response effort.By David Beers
Published February 15, 2010 04:01 pm |
An article appearing in today's issue of 24 Hours Vancouver garbled what I had to say about social media and protesters, giving the impression that I had knowledge the Media Coop is acting as a command and control centre for anarchist protests. In fact, I have no such knowledge and did not say I did.
The mistake happened during editing, people at 24 Hours say. The result is this mistaken paraphrase of my views:
"David Beers, editor of the TheTyee.ca, said contributors to vancouver.mediacoop.ca have set up something similar to satellite-based communication system used by military."
Actually, I was speaking in general about social media – texting and twitter and other means of sharing digital information via the Net – and the power it gives anyone wanting to organize a protest. But that was well after the reporter and I had finished discussing the Media Coop.
Earlier in the interview I was asked what I knew about the Media Coop and I answered that I knew very little, but saw it as a place where journalistic practices were employed with the aim of advancing social causes.
I would not want to give the impression that the Media Coop people are helping to orchestrate protests. I don't have any reason to believe that.We’ve heard much about the Republican war on women. Exhaustingly.
Lately, we’ve also heard about the war on men.
The war on men-on-women-on-men... or something, as MSNBC’s Alex Wagner described it recently, gained fresh traction with a controversial column by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto about campus rape.
James, honey, meet Pandora.
In full disclosure, I wrote a book called “Save the Males,” so my understanding of these issues is not vague. The title notwithstanding, my bias is toward neither sex but toward yin and yang. My central point was that relations between the sexes do not constitute a zero-sum game, and our failure to recognize the differences between men and women undermines much of what makes us a civilized nation.
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What got Taranto going was a New York Times article about bystander intervention in campus rape. Basically, if a drunk guy is getting aggressive with a girl, you’re supposed to stop him. What was once simple citizenship is now innovative behavior modification. Elsewhere the zeitgeist was buzzing about proposed legislation in California that would codify the terms of consent in sexual relations among college students. Saying “yes” apparently isn’t good enough. Now yes needs to be persistent throughout the act.
The comic possibilities are nearly irresistible, but my survival instinct prompts me to exercise restraint. Herein lies one of the problems with gender issues. Someone always takes things too far, making ridiculous what should be treated with scientific precision.
The war on men or women, take your pick, quickly morphs into a war on intelligence. “They” are winning.
Taranto may have been inartful, but he wasn’t wrong to note that the problem of campus sexual assault (or misunderstanding, as the case may be) is often, if not always, related to alcohol. Drunks misbehaving, in other words. But when two drunks have sex, who, ultimately, is responsible should one decide that she didn’t really mean it? Without current data at my fingertips, I feel safe in presuming that few males charge females with rape following a party.
If the female decides at any point, including the next day, that she didn’t really want to engage in sex — no matter her own behavior at the time or the fogginess of her recollection, never mind the male’s own degree of inebriation — is the male entirely to blame?
Even posing this question will get you banished from the kingdom in today’s confusing sexual arena. The National Organization for Women has called for Taranto’s firing. His error, hardly a firing offense, wasn’t in posing the question about equal drunkenness but in comparing a sexual assault to a car wreck in which both drivers are equally drunk and the male gets blamed. The failure of this analogy should be self-evident.
In any case, these are tough questions for all fair-minded people. My own view will be repugnant to everyone. Feminists won’t like it because it runs counter to the very arguments they have advanced in their impossible pursuit of absolute equality. Men won’t like my answer because it will feel unfair, even though it is born of respect for men’s unique gifts and because it contradicts what feminism has insisted for the past several decades.
Obviously, men and women (boys and girls, really) are equally to blame for getting silly-faced, but — you’d better grab a seat — men should be held to a higher standard. This is not because they’re worse people, far from it, but owing to their superior physical strength and, let’s be honest, the obvious biological and anatomical differences, including, relative to females, copious quantities of testosterone, which fuels both libido and aggression.
In any arena involving physicality, the stronger of two has the moral responsibility to protect the weaker. In heterosexual sex, barring exceptions that merely prove the rule, this will always be the male. It is for men to not take advantage of women who are bereft of their faculties, no matter the state of their own.
Although we can argue that women shouldn’t get drunk and convey mixed signals (try dissecting that the next day), they are functionally less able to resist the advances of a determined male.
This presumes that men should be chivalrous toward women, a concept not much in vogue these days. But worse than an old-fashioned idea is a modern state that believes it should review with whom and how you conduct your sex life.
Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.REUTERS German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the NATO summit Friday
Around 40 presidents, prime ministers as well as hordes from foreign and defense ministries and around 3,000 advisors, secretaries and other officials were all smiles during the three-day NATO summit in Bucharest.
Optimistic about the state of the world, safe in the embrace of the happy NATO family, Angela Merkel, George W. Bush and friends almost seemed happily reenergized by the policy wrangling in the luxury palace in Bucharest. Symbolically it was the German chancellor who set the final tone. "I am very satisfied as I go home," she said before leaving for the airport.
At the very least, the much feared open row between the alliance partners had been avoided. And the dream of the outgoing US president of seeing the most powerful military alliance in the world enlarged was fulfilled -- at least partially. Croatia and Albania can now snuggle up under the NATO security blanket. And Macedonia should be able to join them as soon as its bizarre dispute with neighboring Greece over its name is put to rest.
But that was about it. All the other important decisions were postponed -- yet again. The allies didnt even dare begin the urgent discussions about strategies and plans. They were afraid that by doing so they would no longer be able to conceal the deep division that cuts right across the defense alliance. The old common enemy -- a Soviet-dominated Eastern Block -- is gone, having done away with itself. And NATO has so far not been able to agree on a new enemy. Is it to become the world's policeman now, or should it remain a self-defense pact?
The dispute over new members, the wrangling over communiqués and empty formulations cannot hide the true vacuum at the core of the ever-growing alliance. Instead of just talking about expansion, NATO needs a new concept, a justification for its existence, a guiding vision behind which all members can gather. "The Cold War is over," President Bush told his Russian colleagues on Friday. But what should follow on from that bipolar confrontation and the post-9/11 era is yet to be discussed.
There are completely different conceptions of who is protecting whom against whom and by what means. The alliance is militarily bigger and more powerful than ever -- yet politically weaker than it has ever been. There is a deep rift when it comes to all the important questions: On the one side the Americans and their friends in Eastern Europe, on the other the Germans, the French and their neighbors -- "Old Europe," in other words. And in the vain attempt to prevent these differences coming to the fore, the members in Bucharest preferred to postpone all important questions until the next summit.
AFP One big happy family?
A typical example was the dispute over whether to accept Georgia and Ukraine as members. While the new members from Eastern Europe, backed up by the US, wanted to set the two countries on the path to NATO membership, Western Europe was opposed.
Such a move would be, in the words of one French diplomat, "complete nonsense." The majority of Ukrainians dont want to join NATO. And as for Georgia, apart from its democratic deficits, its two territorial disputes with Russia, over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would be a heavy burden for the alliance, particularly when it comes to its relationship with Moscow.
It was Russia that dominated the meeting in Bucharest. Yet when outgoing President Vladmir Putin arrived in Romania on the last day of the summit, no one really wanted to debate with him. The alliance was happy to accept his gift of allowing NATO supplies to be transported through Russian territory. Yet no one wanted to mention the difficult topics of the US's planned missile defense system or Russia's outspokenness on the issues of Georgia and Ukraine -- after all, Bush and Putin are going to speak fully about this at their meeting on Sunday.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had always maintained that the summit in Romania would "hopefully send a strong signal" regarding a "new strategic concept" for NATO. He said the alliance needed a new concept for the fight against the Taliban and terror around the globe. And that is true. The present strategies were last adjusted in 1999 -- long before the terror attacks of Sept 11, 2001. Nevertheless, that fundamental discussion did not take place.
Postpone, adjourn and just don't argue -- this was the motto followed in Bucharest once again. And now that the summit is over, all eyes are on the next big event, the one that will be held jointly by Germany and France in Strasbourg and Kehl. However it looks highly unlikely that the essential discussions will take place there either -- the occasion is the 60th anniversary of the alliance and will be marked by huge celebrations.
Several members have already rejected the idea of having an extra working summit parallel to the anniversary bash -- after all, why debate when you can simply party?Story highlights A dozen deaths are blamed on the weather across several states
Nearly 200 flights canceled Monday at Dallas-Fort Worth airport
Sleet and freezing rain will cover parts of the southern Plains and Rockies
The storm will make a turn toward the Northeast this week
Wicked wintry weather that pummeled the West Coast is now barreling across the country, threatening to wreck millions of holiday travel plans just before Thanksgiving.
Scores of car crashes and 12 fatalities are blamed on the storm.
Nearly 200 flights out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were canceled Monday, in addition to the nearly 300 canceled Sunday.
Parts of Lubbock, known for its warmth and flatness, turned into a snowboarding park as several inches of snow covered the western Texas city.
Sleet and freezing rain is possible beginning Tuesday from the southern Appalachians to parts of northern New England.
And by midweek, the storm will start zeroing in on the Northeast, the National Weather Service said. And that could spell more travel nightmares.
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How cold is cold?
An Arctic air mass will probably keep temperatures 15 to 20 degrees below normal along the East Coast through Thursday. But even if the system fails to deliver heavy snow, fierce winds could still hamper air travel, forecasters said.
Airlines flying in and out of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport "pre-canceled about 300 departures to reduce the number of stranded travelers" Sunday in anticipation of the harsh weather, the airport's official Twitter account said. And 10% of flights at Oklahoma City's Will Rogers World Airport were also canceled because of the weather Sunday.
Then there's the ice. CNN meteorologist Chad Myers called it "probably the biggest problem for this storm."
Massive rainfall, too
The storm appeared to stall after it came over the Rocky Mountains, Myers said, but it is expected to pick up moisture from the Gulf and drop heavy rain as it runs up the East Coast. Heavy rain is expected to fall from Georgia on Monday night and over the Carolinas, with some sleet and snow mixed in for northern parts of that swath. The heaviest rain is expected across parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.
By Tuesday, the rain will reach the mid-Atlantic states and parts of the Northeast. And that could turn into freezing rain in the southern and central Appalachians.
Deadly road conditions
Five people have died in weather-related crashes in Texas, the Texas Highway Patrol said Monday. Sgt. Chris Ray said half of his deputies handled 71 accidents over the weekend, and that number will rise when the other deputies report accident totals. The central Texas Panhandle seemed to be hardest hit, he said.
Three of those killed in Texas were in a pileup on icy Interstate 40 in northwest Texas late Friday, Ray said. One of them was a man who got out of his car to help, and got struck. And at least 20 people were hospitalized from collisions within three miles of the fatal pileup, the Oldham County Sheriff's office said.
Four people have died in Oklahoma since Friday, Betsy Randolph of the state's Department of Public Safety said. In each case, the driver was going too fast for conditions, she said. Randolph said only one of those killed was wearing a seat belt.
Two people died in New Mexico in dangerous road conditions. A 4-year-old girl who was not properly restrained was killed Friday when the car she was riding in slid off icy U.S. Highway 70, the state's Department of Public Safety said. On Saturday, a woman in her 50s died when the pickup that she was riding in rear-ended a semi-truck in heavy traffic near Gallup, New Mexico, state police said.
In Arkansas, authorities investigated 18 crashes in a two-mile section of Interstate 540 Monday morning, according to Lance King, troop commander for state police. The largest was a three-car pileup. Three people were transported from the scene, and there were no fatalities, he said.
In Yuba County, California, a 52-year-old died when a tree fell on top of a vehicle Thursday, the county sheriff's office said.
When will this storm end?
By Thanksgiving Day, the storm will be giving the Northeast a layer of snow.
But much of the country will enjoy calm Thanksgiving weather -- even if it's a little more frigid than usual.William L.1985 Vintage Diver
Vintage. It is a word that is said a lot these days. I cannot even begin to count how many watches I see or review that are vintage or retro inspired. It is the trend these days, for how long; who knows, but many brands will ride the train until we are on to the next trend. Many brands are coming out with vintage designs these days but not many are doing vintage sizing. That is where this William L. 1985 Vintage Diver comes in. Not only does it have the retro look, but it measures in at 38.5mm, a size that would have been very normal back in the 60’s and 70’s. If you have been craving for a dive watch under 40mm, keep reading to see if the William L. is something you would wear with your vintage jeans and vintage shirt.
William L. 1985 Vintage Diver Specifications:
38.5mm Stainless Steel Case
44mm Lug to Lug
13.5mm Thick
18mm Lug Width
Sapphire Crystal
100 Meters Water Resitant
Seiko NH35 Automatic Movement
Price: Around $400 USD
https://www.williaml1985.com/en/diver/59-automatic-vintage-diver-70-s-style-3760256221846.html
With so many brands these days, naming a new one must be difficult. A friend and fellow brand owner was bouncing names off me recently for a new venture he is working on and I flat out told him, I don’t have the time to help as coming up with a brand name takes a lot of time and research. Or so one would think. I have no idea where William L. 1985 came up with their name. Guillaume is the name of the man behind the brand and taking a look at their story on the website did not give me an answer either. No matter how great a product is, the brand name can make or break the company. I do not know if that is the case here, but it is an interesting brand name. Dan Henry Watches seems to do very well though, so I guess it is all in the marketing. Fortunately, the William L. 1985 Vintage Diver is a pretty decent watch, so I will look past the name for now.
The 38.5mm case is definitely small by today’s standards and I admit when I first took it out of the box and put it on, It was an adjustment. I have stated many times my sweet spot is 40-44mm these days, down from the days where I wore 48mm watches or larger on the regular. I don’t know if I can rock 38mm to be honest, but I was willing to give it a ride on the wrist for a few days, which I am not sure was enough. I think after a few weeks on the wrist I would have adjusted to it, but with so many watches to review, I am not able to do that. I think the biggest issue I had was the 18mm strap, which just seems so thin to me.
Okay, we have established I am not the target demographic for this size watch, at least not yet anyways. Who knows where I will be in a few years. I am wearing a 40mm watch as I type this, which is something I never thought would happen. Anything is possible. What about the quality and design on the William L. 1985 Vintage Diver? The design I love; I am a sucker for this case style with the hooded lugs and I am glad they kept the polished areas to an absolute minimum. The dial is clean with no unneeded text and I am always glad to see a standard 3 o’clock date placement as opposed to that wonky 4:30 atrocity.
Black and orange seem to be the only colors offered with the William L. 1985 Vintage Diver, and I for one am okay with that. I love black and orange, and while it might sound cliche, they are manly colors. It reminds me of Harley Davidson and gruff bikers. If those colors are not your first choice, well, you are out of luck for now. I have no idea if William L. plans to release any other colorways, but like anything else, if the sales are good and there is demand, they probably will. I like how they went as far as an orange outline around the date window and orange stitching on the rally style leather strap.
The bezel action is pretty good but the crown action leaves a little something to be desired, at least on my example. It has a slight grittiness to it-check out the video to see what I mean. The case back shows off the Seiko NH35 automatic movement, and I know some people love to see the movement, regardless of what caliber, but I would have preferred if this gentleman kept his clothes on and the William L. 1985 Vintage Diver had a nice etched or stamped case back.
William L. 1985 Vintage Dive Lume-Good, not great.
If I take a look at the whole package, considering the price of around $400 USD, the William L. 1985 Vintage Diver does have a lot of appeal. I will always opt for a better movement, but putting that aside, the case finishing is on par with other watches in this price range, the leather strap is attractive and comfortable and fits my 7 1/2 inch wrist with ease. The domed sapphire crystal does not cause crazy amounts of distortion or glare because they didn’t go overboard with a massive crystal. The dome is subtle, the way it shouldn’t be in my opinion. The big deal here is the small size. While the guys who love bigger watches might wish for a 44mm version, I know their are many guys out there with smaller wrists or guys that just like to wear a smaller watch that will be very excited to see a nicely designed diver that comes in under 40mm. William L., please take note that a 42 or 44mm version would probably be well received as well. Something to consider for next year possibly. In the meantime, if you want a vintage style watch in a vintage size, this is one of the few on the market, especially in the microbrand segment.For Egypt, the U.S. Government has effectively whitewashed gross abuses of human rights, even as it approved giving $6.5 billion in aid illegally, as suggested in a government report released on May 12.
That U.S. GAO Report– by the official, independent U.S. watchdog, the Governmental Accountability Office -- shows the failure of the system, meant for implementing U.S. worldwide laws against aid to brutal abusers of human rights. In practice, the U.S. systematically winks at, for example, Egypt’s “Ministry of Interior – an organization identified by State as having security force units of concern for human rights violations” (page 32).
The report is a major exploration (77 concentrated pages) of how the U.S. State (and Defense) departments turn a blind eye to measures like, most recently, el-Sisi's current brutal crackdown which includes recent massive arrests of peaceful protesters, long prison terms for demonstrators, smashing of human rights groups and jailing their attorneys, and the infamous covering-up at the highest levels of the torture-murder of the Italian student, Giulio Regeni.
Throughout the world, U.S. law requires its basic law of aid – known as the “Leahy Law” – that forbids aid to those with credible evidence of human rights abuses. The GAO studied (for 2011-2015 with aid of roughly $1.3 billion aid to Egypt annually) the workings in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo of the U.S.’s worldwide (for relevant aid receivers) database of rights abusers. The abuser database did, occasionally, flash red lights about units like the Ministry of the Interior, and, the Cairo police. There were even infrequent occasions (in Morsi’s time) that the State Department did its job and created barriers or “tensions” about aid going to some abusive Egyptian officials and security units.
But, then, the U.S. system has used many ways, the GAO report showed, to condone the Egyptian government despite abuses. First, it simply allows Egypt to get away with not responding to questions. “In a postshipment check involving the transfer of riot control items, such as rubber ball cartridges and smoke grenades, to the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior, the Egyptian government did not respond to a [State Department] question.... [Yet] State closed [this]... as favorable.” “Riot control” sounds like el-Sisi’s version of crushing the demonstrations -- what observers reported as peaceful protest.
Second, State was slightly tougher on the Morsi regime ending in 2013, but seems fully to condone the worse abuses of the el-Sisi regime. The GAO closely analyzed statistical evidence of the vetting of security forces that got coveted U.S.-funded training. While overall “State rejected” in 2011-2015 “less than 1 percent of the total cases vetted,” the figures for el-Sisi’s time were even more condoning – the State Department “has not rejected any cases since fiscal year 2013, including no cases since the removal of President Morsi in July 2013. (Pages 37-38)” No cases? At all? Is this the same Egypt of el-Sisi that is constantly castigated by international human rights groups, and has outraged all Europe by the Regeni matter?
By the way, in what might be deemed the cover-up in Washington of the cover-up in Egypt, State gagged the GAO about telling how bad State was in its delinquency in vetting. These figures were key to GAO’s blunt conclusion: ‘State and DOD [Defense] are not in compliance with their policies regarding human rights vetting (page 38).” State gagged GAO this way: “State deemed our [GAO] estimate of the percentage of Egyptian security forces that were not vetted... to be sensitive but unclassified information. We therefore omitted that information from this report. (page 38)”
This is no small matter: GAO emphasizes State’s gag order, about how bad was its delinquency, in both its one-page summary and in its cover letter to Congress (page 3). I understand GAO lost two whole months trying to get State to let it report its figures. State clung to shielding its own flagrant delinquency in outing abusers.
Even when State did vet, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo had abdicated its duty to build up the abuser database. The Embassy may have put some names in, but none of the back-up documentation needed to hold the line against named abusers |
was in here.
Caboose: Hi, Andy!
Andy: Shut up.
Caboose: Hey Andy, would you like to come out of the closet?
Tucker: Yeah, Andy. How about you come out of the closet? Tell everyone your little dirty bomb secret. Heheh.
Andy: Keep it up little boy teal.
Tucker: Ohhh. What are you going to do? Slap me?
Andy: Im a bomb. What do you think Im going to do?
Tucker: I think you have a point.
Caboose: I dont get it. Whats Andys secret? I want to hear. I wont tell anybody.
Andy: Man, I dont even want to talk to you guys. Why dont you just go away?
Caboose: Ill keep it between me and Tucker.
Tucker: Why are you so mad at us? What did we ever do to you?
Andy: Oh, let me think about that. Lets see. You guys are always using me for stuff. You either want me to translate crap or blow someone up.
Tucker: Whats wrong with that? Youre a bomb. Youre supposed to blow up. Last time you really wanted to blow up.
Andy: Yeah. But, do you have any idea what its like to blow up? It really hurts, man! I dont mean that kind of hurt where it goes away after a while. I mean split your sides and have pieces of yourself fly everywhere kind of hurt!
Tucker: Ohhh. Wait if you blew up, howd you get back?
Andy: Try looking into respawning.
Tucker: Respawning? Whats that?
Andy: Its a long story.
Caboose: Is that your secret?
Andy: Is this guy still on crack?
Tucker: Hes born with it. You get used to it after a while.
Caboose: Would you like us to take you out of the closet, Andy?
Andy: No, I like it in the dark close, cramped quarters. OF COURSE I WANT OUT OF THE CLOSET!
Tucker: Bow-chicka-
Andy: Oh, shut up you dirty Shizno!
Tucker: I could always lock you in here.
Andy: I could always blow up.
Tucker: I thought you said that hurt.
Andy: Itll be worth it. Now, what the hell do you jockstraps want with me?
Tucker: Ill give you a clue. It has something to do with a ship.
Andy: Aww man. You guys want me to blow something up again.
Tucker: Ill give you another clue. It has something to do with a transporter.
Andy: You guys want me to blow something up.
Tucker: Getting warmer. It has something to
Andy: You guys want me to blow something up!
Tucker: Oooh. Good guess.
Andy: Dammit!
Caboose: Id like to guess now!
Tucker: Come on, Andy. Wheres your bomb spirit? Whered all your explosive enthusiasm go? Take one for all bomb kind.
Andy: I can blow up now. Then where would you be?
Tucker: Okay, okay. No blowing up yet.
Caboose: Dont worry, Tucker. I wont blow up.
Tucker: Just relax and let us take you out of there and put you on the transporter pad. Okay?
Andy: Why? So you can beam me away and have me blow up?
Tucker: We could always let the Klingons find you. Theyll make you blow up for no reason at all and wait for you to respawn or whatever and use you to explode again. How would you like that, Andy?
Andy: Alright, alright. Pick me up. Ill do it, but just this last time. If I see you guys after I come back Im going to attach myself to a body and kick the living crap out of all of you!
Tucker: Alright. Thats the spirit. Caboose, carry Andy.
Caboose: Okay.
Andy: Why does he get to carry me again?
Tucker: Because hes freakishly strong and you weigh a lot.
Andy: Oh, boo-hoo. I wouldnt want to hurt your girly little teal arms.
Tucker: Shut up.
Caboose picks up Andy and follows Tucker to the turbolift. Meanwhile, on the bridge
Krat: victory over the federation will be swift. I will use this ship to bring glory to the Klingon Empire for ages to come and I will secure a place for myself on the Klingon high council
Sarge: (Groans) Simmons, I dont know if I can take much more of this. I think I may just crack.
Krat: songs will be sung in my name
Simmons: Hang in there, Sarge. I think hell be done in the next hour.
Sarge: Thats not soon enough. I feel my battle hardened mind slipping away. My only hope is that Griffs goes before mine does. Its the only singular thought thats keeping me from going insane.
Griff: Im doing just fine, Sarge. Im glad you care.
Sarge: Griff, if we make it through this alive, Im going to make it so that when you walk, its going to be with three boots! Two on your feet and one up your
Krat: Silence! You three dare interrupt my long-winded babble? You will receive punishment for this. I swear it by the hand of Khalus.
Griff: Maybe you guys should make a policy never to take prisoners. Itll save you a lot of trouble.
Sarge: Griff, Im warning you
Krat: Perhaps that is not a bad idea. Maybe I will start executing prisoners. It does suit me.
Simmons: Well Sarge, it was an honor serving with you, sir.
Sarge: Oh shut up, brown nose. He isnt doing anything.
Simmons: When will you love me like a son? When?!
Sarge: Oh, cut that out, Simmons. Youre making a scene. The klingons are laughing at you right now.
Klingon 1: This is sad.
Klingon 2: I know. Cant the red one see that the other red one is reaching out to him?
Klingon 3: I never told my father I loved him. (Starts sobbing)
Krat: I have had enough of this. I shall kill your leader, now.
Simmons: Well, it was nice knowing you, Sarge.
Sarge: (Grumbles) If something doesnt happen soon, someone isnt getting paid.
Unknown voice: What? Oh yeah.
Phaser fire suddenly breaks out and Krat collapses to his knees.
Krat: (Curses in Klingon, something to the effect of Son of a b*tch!)
Two more Klingons fall under phaser fire. The last one standing nearest the turbolift has a blue glowing orb stuck to him.
Last Klingon: What the? Get it off! Get it off! (Explodes)
Simmons: Woah. What was that?
Griff: Am I on drugs?
Sarge: Good work, Tex. Now, what in Sam Hill were you waiting for?
Tex: (Becomes visible) Oh, sorry. I was watching everything. Now, you were saying something about payment?
Sarge: Its all being wired into your swis account as we speak.
Simmons: Sarge, they dont have money in this era.
Sarge: Dammit Simmons, youre going to ruin everything.
Tex: What?
Sarge: Uhh nothing. Ahem. Good work.
Tex: Whatever.
Griff: Wow, Tex. I knew you could kick ass. Ive just never seen it happen.
Simmons: You didnt have to see it. You experienced it first hand.
Griff: Oh, shut up. You fainted.
Simmons: I didnt faint, dammit!
Sarge: Now we just need to deal with the rest of the Klingons on the ship and we can call it even.
Tex: Im on it.
Griff: Sarge, what about that ship?
Tex: Ship? Where?
Simmons: The one on the screen.
Tex: Ooooh. It looks big and shiney.
Church: Dibs!
Sarge: What the? Blue?!
Tex: Church?! What are you doing here?
Church: I was going to ask you the same thing.
Tex: No you werent! What are you calling dibs for? That ship is mine!
Church: Funny. I dont see your name on it.
Simmons: I thought Caboose shot you.
Church: What? How did you see that?
Simmons: It was on the security monitor.
Church: Oh. Well, luckily the phaser was on stun.
Tex: Unfortunately.
Church: Oh, what are you so mad about? You got to kill a bunch of guys.
Tex: Church, you had no place calling dibs. That ship belongs to me. Itll cover my service fee.
Sarge: Service fee? What about the money?
Tex: Yeah right. Simmons said they dont use money here. So, Im taking the ship.
Sarge: Ill just keep the money, then.
Church: Oh sure. Youre going to take the ship? I dont think so.
Tex: How about I shoot you?
Church: Ships all yours.
Tex: Thats more like it.
The view screen shows the Klingon battle cruiser exploding with a bright flash.
Sarge: Sweet corn and biscuits!
Simmons: Woah! It just exploded.
Griff: What? I didnt see it. Make it do it again.
Tex: What the hell?!
Church: Woo! Well, so much for your ship, Tex.
Griff: This sucks. I never get to see kickass explosions.
Tex: You guys owe me a ship.
Simmons: Check out the shuttle bay. There should be plenty in there.
Sarge: Good thinking, Simmons. I still get to keep the money.
Tex: How many shuttles are we talking about?
Simmons: The Enterprise
Sarge: Ahem!
Simmons: Sorry. The Sarges ship carries four shuttlecraft. You can take your pick.
Tex: That sounds good.
Simmons: For some reason, the former crew kept losing shuttles and still managed to retain a full compliment in short order.
Church: How is that even possible?
Tex: Heck if I know. Im taking one.
Church: What do you need a ship for, anyways?
Tex: Im a mercenary. I gotta have stuff, you know.
Church: Weak.
Tex: This thing is still on, you know. (Points phaser at Church)
Church: Why do you always threaten to shoot me? It wont be long before that gets old.
Tex: Alright. I wont shoot you.
Church: Thank you.
Tex: Ill just beat the crap out of you.
Church: What?
Tex: (Beats up Church)
Church: Ow! Owww! Get off me! Ow! Not the face! Someone help! Ow! Oh this is so painful!
Simmons: Hey, he whines like you do, Griff.
Sarge: This calls for a celebration. (Shoots Simmons in the butt with a phaser)
Simmons: Ow! Sarge, did you really have to do that?! Im getting a paper jam error, now!
Sarge: Of course I did. Im the commanding officer. Its my job to make sure moral is high in the ranks. (Shoots Griff)
Griff: Ow! Son of a b*tch! (Flops on the ground)
Simmons: I dont get it. We didnt fire a shot and the Klingon ship still blew up. I wonder what could have happened.
Back in the transporter room before the destruction of the Klingon battle cruiser.
Tucker: Okay Caboose, just set him down on one of those pads.
Caboose: Right!
Andy: Wow. Im surprised that trick actually worked. How did you know the Klingons would run if you threatened to detonate me?
Tucker: Meh. Theyre pussies. They always run.
Caboose: At least you didnt have to unlock their death with your key.
Tucker: Okay. The transporter thing is working. Now, we just need to beam you over and we should be good.
Andy: Do you even know how to use that thing?
Tucker: I do in just a few minutes.
Andy: I knew it. You couldnt even pull off a stupid plan like this.
Tucker: Shiela, can you hear me?
Shiela: Hello, Private Tucker. What can I do for you?
Andy: Woah. Whos the chick in the computer?
Shiela: Excuse me?
Andy: Im just saying you know you sound magnetically attractive.
Shiela: For now, I will take that as a compliment.
Tucker: She used to be our tank, Andy. You dont want to piss her off.
Caboose: Andy, you be nice to Shiela. She is very nice and she had nice big treads.
Shiela: Why thank you, Private Caboose.
Tucker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shiela, I need directions on how to operate the transporter. Can you help me?
Shiela: You managed to get this far? Wheres Private Church?
Tucker: Caboose shot him in the back by accident.
Shiela: Oh I am sorry to hear that.
Tucker: Yeah. It seems like such a waste, doesnt it?
Shiela: Negative. I am sorry to hear that he was not permanently eliminated. The phaser was set to stun and Private Church is en-rout to the bridge.
Andy: Shame.
Tucker: I hope you still have that thing when he comes back, Caboose.
Caboose: Why?
Tucker: Okay. Shiela, how do you operate the transporter?
Andy: Hey guys, how do you want me to do this?
Tucker: Do what?
Andy: Hello. Im going to explode. How do you want it? Should I go for a medium yield where I only take out a small area or do you want the works with a bright flash of light and everything?
Tucker: Ummm I dont know. Something big so it will take out the whole ship. Surprise me.
Andy: Okay, okay, okay. I got it. Im going to do bright and flashy and throw in some shrapnel with glowing red bits at the end. Hows that sound?
Tucker: Yeah, okay. Whatever looks good. Shiela. I could really use those instructions.
Shiela: I could use the automatic functions to beam the bomb near the enemys main reactor. That should provide the desired effect.
Tucker: Okay, that also works.
Andy: Wait, are we going now?
Tucker: Yeah, Andy. Its time for you to do your thing.
Andy: Wait, I need to say some final words.
Tucker: Fine. Say some final words and then its time to go.
Andy:
Tucker: Well?
Andy: Just give me a minute. Im thinking.
Tucker: I dont know about you, but we dont have a lot of time here.
Andy: Okay, okay. Ive got them.
Tucker: Okay. What are they?
Andy: I hate you guys.
Tucker: Oh, great.
Caboose: It was beautiful. Im really going to miss him. He was the best bomb anybody could ever hope to meet.
Andy: Yeah, Im really going to miss you too, Crack head.
Shiela: I am now ready to transport.
Tucker: Okay, Shiela. Just wait for my mark. Andy, give me a count down.
Andy: What, you mean like, from 3?
Tucker: Umm no. I mean like from ten.
Andy: Ten again?
Tucker: Yeah. Three just wouldnt give us a lot of time.
Andy: Fine. Ten nine eight seven
Tucker: Okay, Shiela. Go.
Shiela: Initiating transport
Andy: (Dematerializes) four three
Tucker: Caboose, quick. Go turn on the view screen.
Caboose: Right! (Switches on the screen) Woah. That ship is big and shiney.
Tucker: Get out of the way, Caboose. I cant see.
Caboose: Oh, right. Is that better, Tucker?
Tucker: Yeah, yeah. Thats good.
Caboose: Now for the explosion!
Tucker: (Long pause) Its just sitting there
Caboose: Yeah, I know. Doesnt it look big and shiny?
Tucker: Yeah it does, Caboose. But, I dont know Shouldnt it be blowing up by now? Andy was at four when he beamed off. He should have been at one by now.
The image of the Klingon battle cruiser lights up brightly as it explodes.
Tucker: That was sweet. Man, Andy really knows how to blow.
Caboose: I thought it looked very bright and sparkly. I liked the part just before it, you know before?
Tucker: I think you mean when the ship was in one piece.
Caboose: Yeah, that was the best part. (Long pause) Could we do it again.
Tucker: I dont know, Caboose. Were kinda out of smart ass bombs and Klingon ships. I guess well have to wait for something else to come along. Something always does.
Caboose: Thats a shame because that was really cool and really bright. Hey what about that thing?
Shiela: My sensors indicate a very large object is approaching the port bow.
Tucker: Wow. That things pretty big and blue.
Caboose: It looks like a big long thing with a big mouth.
Tucker: It looks like an over sized lit joint.
Shiela: My sensors indicate the objects hull is made of solid neutronium.
Tucker: Oh. Well, that isnt so bad.
Present time on the Bridge.
Simmons: Hey, Sarge?
Sarge: What is it Simmons? Cant you see Im humiliating Griff?
Griff: I hate you.
Simmons: Well, I dont know if it means anything to you, but theres this very large object approaching the port bow.
Sarge: Whats that?
Simmons: Port is to the left, Sarge.
Sarge: Right. Put it on the screen.
View screen shows the image of a long cylindrical object approaching.
Sarge: Holy Magna Carte! What in blazing saddles is that?
Simmons: Unknown, Sir. The objects hull appears to be made of solid neutronium.
Sarge: Okay, now repeat that in English.
Simmons: Im just reading what the computer says.
Sarge: Whats it mean in English, numb nuts?
Simmons: Guh, it just means its really hard.
Sarge: What is?
Simmons: The object on the screen! Man.
Sarge: Well, maybe its an illusion.
Tex: That looks bigger than the last ship.
Church: Its big enough to eat us whole! Were screwed! (Is hit by Tex again) Ow!
Simmons: Its coming right for us.
Sarge: Hell swerve first.
The scene fades to black and the famous Red vs. Blue logo fades into view.
Simmons: I dont think that thing is stopping, sir.
Sarge: Hell wait for the very last second and then hell swerve.
Tex: Im heading for the shuttle bay.
Simmons: Im with her.
Sarge: You sissies. Dont you have any faith in your commanding officer?
Simmons: See ya, Sarge.
Sarge: No wait. Come back. I dont want to sit here by myself. Anybody? No body? Awww, shucks.
-End-
Red vs. Blue belongs to Rooster Teeth
Halo is copyright to Bungie Studios
Star Trek belongs to Gene RodenberryHere we go again!
The Democrats are using the terrorist attacks that took place this past weekend as their justification for gun control legislation.
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) addressed the Senate floor on Monday where he blamed Republicans for stopping the Democrat’s proposed gun control legislation.
“In the aftermath of these attacks, our constituents are looking to us for help. They want to feel safe. They want to be safe. We can help provide that safety by closing the terror loophole. But Democrats can’t do it alone. We need Republicans’ help,” Reid said.
“Currently, there is a loophole in our law that allows potential FBI terror suspects to legally purchase guns and explosives. Stop and think about that for just a little bit: A person with suspected ties to terrorism can walk into a store now and buy all the explosives, all the guns and all the ammunition they want,” Reid argued.
Under the Democrats’ bill, someone who is on the no fly list would be prohibited from purchasing a firearm. They have deemed the legislation, “No fly, no buy.”
“We can argue from now on about whether this bill would have prevented this weekend’s attacks,” Reid said. “But one thing is for sure, it would prevent the next attack.”
The Republicans have drafted a bill that would establish a three-day waiting period for anyone who is on the no fly list who wishes to purchase a firearm or explosives.
Currently, both pieces of legislation are being blocked by the other political party. The Democrats in the Senate blocked the Republican bill. The GOP blocked the Democratic bill in the House of Representatives.YouTube If you ever spent a summer at camp, it's unlikely you made it to September unscathed by head lice. If you were one of the lucky ones, you probably know someone who wasn't as fortunate.
Now, tons of teenagers are getting lice, but it isn't swapping baseball caps at the Fourth of July BBQ that's behind the outbreak.
Blame selfies.
Yes, according to a lice expert located in Scotts Valley named Marcy McQuillan, lice is usually found in elementary aged kids. This year, SFist reports McQuillan has seen a "huge increase" in lice cases in teens.
"Typically it's younger children I treat, because they're at higher risk for head-to-head contact. But now, teens are sticking their heads together every day to take cell phone pics," McQuillan told SFist.
It gets darker, McQuillan reveals, as selfies are now the silent killer:
Every teen I've treated, I ask about selfies, and they admit that they are taking them every day...I think parents need to be aware, and teenagers need to be aware too. Selfies are fun, but the consequences are real.HoZBlooddrop Profile Blog Joined December 2013 Italy 320 Posts #2 when will the results be available?
DooMDash Profile Joined May 2010 United States 1012 Posts #3 Taken. I urge everyone to tell people to take the survey so your voices are heard. S1 3500+ Master T. S2 1600+ Master T.
Synastren Profile Joined May 2014 United States 31 Posts #4 On August 23 2015 06:55 HoZBlooddrop wrote:
when will the results be available?
Probably next weekend, but it depends on how long the survey runs. Probably next weekend, but it depends on how long the survey runs. RIP ZeeZ
flipstar Profile Joined January 2011 226 Posts #5 CBA filling this one out as I'm sceptical regarding the value of information we get in return.
Why would I change perception on
- the abrubptness of the change?
- Feeling insulted
- Viewership appeal
- etc
And for anything that isn't redundant, the timeframe is too short form your own educated opinion imo. Maybe I'll answer it later this week before 'deadline'? Probably not though.If you're gonna use this data, i would personally consider ignoring everyone with less than 50 games or at least take this into consideration when looking at the data. It's probably also gonna be really important to divide results by race. In the previous one this wasn't so important, but in this one I would say that it is.
Hell, I'll fill it out later if you provide the datasets so that people can look at it themselves.
Synastren Profile Joined May 2014 United States 31 Posts #6 On August 23 2015 07:32 flipstar wrote:
CBA filling this one out as I'm sceptical regarding the value of information we get in return.
Why would I change perception on
- the abrubptness of the change?
- Feeling insulted
- Viewership appeal
- etc
And for anything that isn't redundant, the timeframe is too short form your own educated opinion imo. Maybe I'll answer it later this week before 'deadline'? Probably not though.If you're gonna use this data, i would personally consider ignoring everyone with less than 50 games or at least take this into consideration when looking at the data. It's probably also gonna be really important to divide results by race. In the previous one this wasn't so important, but in this one I would say that it is.
Hell, I'll fill it out later if you provide the datasets so that people can look at it themselves.
My reasoning for the current survey is:
1) Initial impressions of the change
2) There is a flurry of activity and interest, because the change was so recent
3) To get another timepoint for comparing against the pre-survey, and again for the next survey.
I will be running another survey in a week or two. Please don't think that this survey is all I'm interested in with regard to attitudes towards this change. However, neglecting the first impression would be bad, I think, as would ignoring this swell of activity and interest.
I've considered making the entirety of the data set(s) available to the community, but I want to see if Blizzard has any interest in getting the whole data first. If you are interested in getting all of the data I've collected, contact me directly. If nothing else, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. My reasoning for the current survey is:1) Initial impressions of the change2) There is a flurry of activity and interest, because the change was so recent3) To get another timepoint for comparing against the pre-survey, and again for the next survey.I will be running another survey in a week or two. Please don't think that this survey is all I'm interested in with regard to attitudes towards this change. However, neglecting the first impression would be bad, I think, as would ignoring this swell of activity and interest.I've considered making the entirety of the data set(s) available to the community, but I want to see if Blizzard has any interest in getting the whole data first. If you are interested in getting all of the data I've collected, contact me directly. If nothing else, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. RIP ZeeZ
flipstar Profile Joined January 2011 226 Posts #7
I'm happy you'll share with the ones interested, I consider it to be very important when it comes to statistics, for obvious reasons. Will contact you directly later unless you satisfy my curiousity in one go. It's far from impossible.I'm happy you'll share with the ones interested, I consider it to be very important when it comes to statistics, for obvious reasons.
buchaa Profile Blog Joined September 2012 Pakistan 77 Posts #8.... please bring em back I miss mules.... please bring em back BoxeR, Michael Schumacher, Michael Jordan (Legends never get old)
djwaters22 Profile Joined August 2014 112 Posts #9 It seems unfair to loose mules and chrono while zerg benefits. Auto injects sounds awesome! Why not just give us auto mules. But seriously we do need to revert mules and chrono. It makes the game way more fun. I am ok with auto injects but lets keep mules and chrono
Cyro Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 19163 Posts #10 It seems unfair to loose mules and chrono while zerg benefits. Auto injects sounds awesome!
Zerg doesn't benefit that much at levels where it matters from auto injects. Sure, 15, 25 minutes into the game they'll have much higher inject uptime on average - but even offracing as a diamond zerg, i hit the first 6-8 injects perfectly every game on 2 hatcheries. That's a loss of 12-16 larvae with no compensation at a time when it's extremely important. Zerg doesn't benefit that much at levels where it matters from auto injects. Sure, 15, 25 minutes into the game they'll have much higher inject uptime on average - but even offracing as a diamond zerg, i hit the first 6-8 injects perfectly every game on 2 hatcheries. That's a loss of 12-16 larvae with no compensation at a time when it's extremely important. "oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
Maniak_ Profile Joined October 2010 France 298 Posts #11 On August 23 2015 10:27 Cyro wrote:
Show nested quote +
It seems unfair to loose mules and chrono while zerg benefits. Auto injects sounds awesome!
Zerg doesn't benefit that much at levels where it matters from auto injects. Sure, 15, 25 minutes into the game they'll have much higher inject uptime on average Zerg doesn't benefit that much at levels where it matters from auto injects. Sure, 15, 25 minutes into the game they'll have much higher inject uptime on average
With half the larvae injected.
That's the part that many complainers like to skip. Early game production past the first queen is nerfed quite a bit and late game production is also slowed down by a lot. To be able to quickly remax and tech, you need larvae. You should still be able to do it the first time, but with a much longer delay afterwards. And all the larvae intensive styles got nerfed.
It also makes it even more important to keep the larva count on each hatchery below 3, in order to get the natural larva production, since the queen injects are a lot less effective.
So no, it's far from being a'simple' benefit for zerg. But it is a benefit for the game as a whole, which is much more important. With half the larvae injected.That's the part that many complainers like to skip. Early game production past the first queen is nerfed quite a bit and late game production is also slowed down by a lot. To be able to quickly remax and tech, you need larvae. You should still be able to do it the first time, but with a much longer delay afterwards. And all the larvae intensive styles got nerfed.It also makes it even more important to keep the larva count on each hatchery below 3, in order to get the natural larva production, since the queen injects are a lot less effective.So no, it's far from being a'simple' benefit for zerg. But it is a benefit for the game as a whole, which is much more important. "They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. Does that seem right to you?" -- Jubal Early - Firefly
Joedaddy Profile Blog Joined July 2010 United States 1939 Posts #12 Survey complete~ I'll do whatever I can to bring back the old macro mechanics. I miss the fast paced legacy that was pre-patch. I might be the minority on TL, but TL is the minority everywhere else.
SkyBlaze Profile Joined August 2010 Canada 191 Posts #13 Alright I did the survey based on my current opinion of the new patch of LotV, (maybe my opinion will change over the next couple of days.)
But I hope i was not bias in my survey, if I was hopely only a little bit. | （╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ | ┻━┻ ︵╰(°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
bo1b Profile Blog Joined August 2012 Australia 12615 Posts #14 On August 23 2015 10:27 Cyro wrote:
Show nested quote +
It seems unfair to loose mules and chrono while zerg benefits. Auto injects sounds awesome!
Zerg doesn't benefit that much at levels where it matters from auto injects. Sure, 15, 25 minutes into the game they'll have much higher inject uptime on average - but even offracing as a diamond zerg, i hit the first 6-8 injects perfectly every game on 2 hatcheries. That's a loss of 12-16 larvae with no compensation at a time when it's extremely important. Zerg doesn't benefit that much at levels where it matters from auto injects. Sure, 15, 25 minutes into the game they'll have much higher inject uptime on average - but even offracing as a diamond zerg, i hit the first 6-8 injects perfectly every game on 2 hatcheries. That's a loss of 12-16 larvae with no compensation at a time when it's extremely important.
playing as mutalingbling injects are insanely important until theres like 5 bases playing as mutalingbling injects are insanely important until theres like 5 bases
Cyro Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 19163 Posts #15 So no, it's far from being a'simple' benefit for zerg.
That's literally what i said, that it's at least a huge nerf in the start of the game as any decent player will hit the first 2-3 injects per hatchery almost perfectly That's literally what i said, that it's at least a huge nerf in the start of the game as any decent player will hit the first 2-3 injects per hatchery almost perfectly "oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
Roblin Profile Joined April 2010 Sweden 948 Posts #16 On August 23 2015 13:43 Joedaddy wrote:
Survey complete~ I'll do whatever I can to bring back the old macro mechanics. I miss the fast paced legacy that was pre-patch.
would you be willing to explore the possibility of an equally fast-paced game that doesn't have macro-mechanics?
or would you prefer to just revert the removal and stop the testing simply for the sake of solving the pace problem as soon as possible? (p.s. solving problems with the most immediatly available solution is informally called a bandaid solution)
because I believe thats just a balance thing and the pace is influenced but not set by the existence of macro mechanics. would you be willing to explore the possibility of an equally fast-paced game that doesn't have macro-mechanics?or would you prefer to just revert the removal and stop the testing simply for the sake of solving the pace problem as soon as possible? (p.s. solving problems with the most immediatly available solution is informally called a bandaid solution)because I believe thats just a balance thing and the pace is influenced but not set by the existence of macro mechanics. I'm better today than I was yesterday!
Joedaddy Profile Blog Joined July 2010 United States 1939 Posts #17 On August 24 2015 10:11 Roblin wrote:
Show nested quote +
On August 23 2015 13:43 Joedaddy wrote:
Survey complete~ I'll do whatever I can to bring back the old macro mechanics. I miss the fast paced legacy that was pre-patch.
would you be willing to explore the possibility of an equally fast-paced game that doesn't have macro-mechanics?
or would you prefer to just revert the removal and stop the testing simply for the sake of solving the pace problem as soon as possible? (p.s. solving problems with the most immediatly available solution is informally called a bandaid solution)
because I believe thats just a balance thing and the pace is influenced but not set by the existence of macro mechanics. would you be willing to explore the possibility of an equally fast-paced game that doesn't have macro-mechanics?or would you prefer to just revert the removal and stop the testing simply for the sake of solving the pace problem as soon as possible? (p.s. solving problems with the most immediatly available solution is informally called a bandaid solution)because I believe thats just a balance thing and the pace is influenced but not set by the existence of macro mechanics.
I think there's a lot more to it than just the speed of the game. The speed is just what I feel the most at my own level of play. BeastyQT explained it better than I can. I think there's a lot more to it than just the speed of the game. The speed is just what I feel the most at my own level of play. BeastyQT explained it better than I can. I might be the minority on TL, but TL is the minority everywhere else.
FabledIntegral Profile Blog Joined November 2008 United States 9200 Posts #18 I wish they still had mules, but maybe they mine 10 minerals instead of 30 and last a tad longer, so overall they mine around 100 minerals. I prefer toned down macro mechanics, not removed.
[Erasmus] Profile Joined September 2010 Australia 230 Posts #19 I don't think mules or chrono were essentially'skillful' mechanics. I don't think my inability to drop m |
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(Reuters) - A U.S. appeal court late on Saturday denied an emergency appeal from the U.S. Department of Justice to restore an immigration order from President Donald Trump barring citizens from seven mainly Muslim countries and temporarily banning refugees.
“Appellants’ request for an immediate administrative stay pending full consideration of the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal is denied,” the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said.
It said a reply from the Department in support of the emergency appeal was due on Monday.
The Department filed the appeal a day after a federal judge in Seattle ordered Trump’s travel ban to be lifted. The president’s Jan. 27 order had barred admission of citizens from the seven nations for 90 days.The Bank of Montreal has reimbursed one of its customers following a CBC Go Public story about how the bank wired $87,555 of his inheritance money into the hands of a scammer.
A spokesman confirmed to CBC News on Monday that BMO customer Bruce Taylor has been reimbursed with interest and the funds placed into his account.
“My parents worked all their lives and put that bit away every week and they left it to myself and my sister,” Taylor said earlier. “For 50 years they saved that money and then it’s gone — overnight.”
He had said he’s also upset because for several months his bank failed to take financial responsibility for its mistake.
“I think [BMO was] just trying to wear me out, hoping I would just fade away … or die,” he said.
Taylor is a Canadian engineering consultant who lives and works in Texas. When his account was emptied by BMO, he was in a Houston hospital having open heart surgery.
Because of his experience, he believes other customers should be warned.
“I’m living proof that [the bank’s operations] can be compromised,” he said. “In my opinion, It just means nobody’s money is safe.”
Dormant account targeted
This first email, sent by the impostor to Taylor's financial adviser, asked BMO to wire money to his cousin. (Bruce Taylor)
Taylor’s inheritance was in term deposits at BMO until July 2012, when the investments matured. The money was then automatically deposited into a BMO savings account that, as a U.S. resident, Taylor said he doesn’t use.
“This was strictly emergency money that I had left in Canada,” said Taylor.
Submit your story ideas: Go Public is an investigative news segment on CBC-TV, radio and the web. We tell your stories and hold the powers that be accountable. We want to hear from people across the country with stories they want to make public. Submit your story ideas to Kathy Tomlinson at Go Public Follow @CBCGoPublic on Twitter
In August, someone emailed Taylor’s BMO investment adviser, using Taylor’s email address, saying he needed the money wired to his cousin, immediately.
The impostor's emails had several spelling and grammatical errors.
The scammer then faxed misspelled transfer requests to Taylor’s BMO branch in Grand Falls-Windsor, N.L. – with his account number and an electronic copy of his signature.
“I don’t understand why the Bank of Montreal didn’t scrutinize those faxes,” said Taylor. “You can tell that they were written by someone whose first language was not English.”
Security questions not asked
A bank staffer asked the person by email for a phone number to verify the transfer. The impostor gave a California number — not one in Texas — but the staffer apparently didn't notice that.
The BMO wire transfer confirmations read "confirmed by phone," suggesting the staffer had talked to Taylor. However, he said the staffer had actually called the impostor and failed to ask him security questions, such as his mother’s maiden name.
Bruce Taylor's bank statements show two outgoing wire transfers within a four-day period in September 2012. Taylor was having open heart surgery at the time. (Bruce Taylor)
“The RCMP officer asked her, ‘Why didn’t you ask them?’” Taylor said. “And she said ‘Well, we had a very poor connection.’ That’s not much of an excuse for not asking a security question.”
The BMO staffer then approved and sent two wire transfers, for $47,500 and $40,000, four days apart.
Taylor found out his account had been emptied when he got out of hospital and contacted his investment adviser. She asked him if there had been recent activity with his account and he said no.
“She said, ‘Oh my, someone’s gotten into your account!’ And I said, ‘Well how much money did they get? And she said ‘Oh, they got pretty near everything,’” said Taylor.
“My goodness — that was quite a shock after having open heart surgery.”
Victim cleared
Police began investigating, then sent an email to BMO last summer, confirming Taylor wasn't involved.
"The RCMP consider Mr. Bruce Taylor a 'victim' in this fraud and is not being investigated otherwise," said the email from the investigating officer.
This faxed request for $40,000 - one of two wire transfer requests - had several grammatical and spelling errors. (Bruce Taylor)
Police also said the initial recipient of Taylor's money was another unwitting victim, in Calgary. She does not want to be identified, but she told Go Public she met the scammer through online dating.
RCMP emails to Taylor confirm the impostor told BMO to wire the money to the woman’s TD bank account. She then withdrew it and wired it to Malaysia, via Western Union, as the scammer asked her to, believing the money was his.
“Everybody can be scammed in this way — but the bank doesn’t make higher precautions?" said the Calgary victim.
“This was done too smoothly to be [the scammer's] first time doing it,” said Taylor.
Customer vs. BMO
As soon as RCMP confirmed BMO had been duped, Taylor said he expected the bank to replace his money. Instead, he went through months of wrangling with BMO lawyers and managers.
“I figured that they would fix it because they were such a well-established bank,” said Taylor. “But I don’t think they wanted to admit to their mistake.”
Bruce Taylor takes expensive cancer medication. He says he would have used the money in his BMO account to pay for it, if the bank had reimbursed him quickly for its mistake. (CBC)
During his yearlong battle over his money, Taylor was also battling cancer. He said he would have used his inheritance money to pay for his expensive cancer drugs, but instead had to work full time.
“No one knows how hard BMO made the year 2013 for me, by not replacing my money,” said Taylor. "I even [worked] for the 45 days that I was taking radiation, too, and it was a tremendous grind.”
Taylor said both he and the RCMP questioned whether the scammers had help from someone working for BMO.
“They had their inside information somehow,” said Taylor.
The RCMP investigating officer emailed BMO, saying, “I now know the monies were withdrawn and sent overseas. Unfortunately, I am still left with one important question, "Who accessed Mr. Taylor's BMO account and how?”
Insider help suspected
That question was raised because the impostor who sent the faxes to BMO included an electronic copy of Taylor’s signature, "Bruce G. Taylor."
He insists that signature is not stored anywhere in his email account, which was likely hacked, or in any of his online banking records, including cancelled cheques.
Staffers at the Bank of Montreal branch in Grand Falls-Windsor, N.L., received and processed the wire transfer requests. (CBC)
“The only time I give a signature with my middle initial is like at the bank when you are opening an account. When I sign my name like down here — if I sign a cheque — it’s either just B Taylor or Bruce Taylor. I never use the middle initial G,” he said.
“So that signature, that electronic signature, that came from inside the bank somehow.”
He said he fears overseas contractors working for BMO could be selling or using customer information. Like other Canadian banks, BMO has outsourced much of its information technology work offshore.
“The Bank of Montreal and all the banks in Canada should have all their banking, everything, done within Canada,” said Taylor.
Only after he wrote to BMO’s CEO Bill Downe in frustration — threatening to go public — the bank offered to replace his money.
Reimbursement offer has strings
In a letter to Taylor in January, BMO stated that “the bank has determined it will reimburse you the full amount, subject to the following." There were two pages of legally binding conditions, including Taylor agreeing to have no further claims against the bank.
Taylor had said he was afraid to sign the agreement.
When Bruce Taylor was finally offered a settlement after threatening to go public, it came with two pages of legally binding conditions and a demand of no further claims against the bank. (CBC)
Go Public asked BMO whether, as a result of this case, staff were disciplined or retrained. We also asked about the suspicion the scammer had inside help — possibly offshore — and what, specifically, the bank has done to prevent this happening to other customers.
It didn’t answer those questions.
Initially, BMO’s head of corporate media relations said he hadn’t had time to look at Taylor’s case, because he was too busy announcing the bank’s quarterly profits.
“I was tied up with the work around announcing our quarterly earnings and will try to take a look at this today,” Ralph Marranca said in an email last week.
When Go Public later pointed out he still hadn’t answered our questions, his only reply was, “Kathy, BMO has robust measures in place to prevent unauthorized access to our customers’ accounts. We regularly review and upgrade these measures to protect our customers.”
“The bank has, I think, a lot of explaining to do,” said former RCMP superintendent Garry Clement, who is an expert in this type of crime.
He said BMO should be taking this case more seriously.
“They’ve got to do a better job. They’ve got to get a handle on this. I think they have an onus and a responsibility and they’ve got a way to go,” said Clement.
Banks 'exposing' customer's money
He said he wants all Canadians to know that because of the huge increase in electronic crime, their deposits are now not as safe as the banks have led them to believe.
Former RCMP Supt.Garry Clement said banks should do much more to keep customer's money safe from scammers. (CBC)
“The banks are going to have to become more detailed in these areas, and I think it requires a lot more training than what’s been offered so far,” he said.
Clement said he also worries about banks outsourcing IT work to overseas contractors.
“The reservations that I have are — look at some of these countries. If you look at the corruption index they are fairly high up,” he said.
“The bottom line to all of this is criminal activity occurs in a lot of institutions because they have been able to co-opt somebody on the inside.”
The police investigation into Taylor’s case continues.
“The RCMP Federal Policing Unit is conducting an ongoing investigation. Due to the sensitive nature of this file, we cannot discuss any aspect of it at this time,” said the RCMP.
Submit your story ideas to Kathy Tomlinson at Go Public
Follow @CBCGoPublic on TwitterAbout
The Axe Cop Doc is a documentary film in progress.
ABOUT THE FILM
Comic book fans know the origin story of their favorite superheroes. The story of the artists behind those comic book heroes? Not so much. Yet a strange thing happened at the end of 2009 when Ethan Nicolle with his younger brother Malachai launched their comic Axe Cop on the web. Yes, the series about an axe-wielding cop and his flute-armed partner (who turns into a dinosaur, later a partial avocado, then a ghost) generated instant buzz. But audiences were more intrigued by the creators: the stories came from then 5-year-old Malachai and were drawn by his artist brother Ethan, then 29 years old.
Fast forward to 2012, the Ethan and Malachai duo are as well-known as the evil-fighting team they created. You may think you know the story of Ethan and Malachai, but that was only the beginning.
This is where our documentary comes in. Filming with the full collaboration of the Nicolle family, the Axe Cop Doc team has been following Ethan and Malachai since 2010. We journey from the early days of the brother’s accidental creation of Axe Cop to their latest coup: an animation deal with Fox TV.
At its heart, this is a story about family and the perks and perils of unexpected fame.
And, it is an exploration into the creative process, into the makings of an artistic life.
WHY ARE WE KICKSTARTING?
To date, this project has been running on the love, sweat, and dedication of our small team and the director’s own credit cards. But now the doc film has an opportunity that puts us on a time-crunch:
Fox TV plans to premiere the Axe Cop animated show in July 2013. As indie filmmakers, we can’t think of a better opportunity than to tie our film’s release with Fox’s big roll-out.
WHICH MEANS WE NEED TO START EDITING SOON.
Our production goal is to start editing in December, work through the holidays, post by May 2013.
Our Kickstarter goal is $55,000. This is a bare bones budget that nonetheless will pay for six months of UNINTERRUPTED work as we race to finish the film.
If we surpass our goal, the extra funds will help us get additional elements that will make this film that more special. For example, more money means we can afford more elaborate animation AND longer animation sequences.
Kickstarter funds will help cover the costs of:
Editing
Animation
Original score
Sound mix
Video mastering
OUR PLEDGE REWARDS ARE UNIQUE TO KICKSTARTER
We had a lot of fun working with Ethan to come up with the pledge rewards you see to your right.
Some KS campaigns quickly ramp-up to big-ticket items. We went in the opposite direction. Maybe because our film crew has been operating on a super-low budget for the past years, it was important for us to create rewards that 1) will fit a wide range of budgets and 2) include items not found anywhere else.
...AND THAT'S WHY OUR REWARDS LIST LOOKS LIKE AN I-HOP MENU.
Still, we hope you'll have fun with it.
CLIPS FROM AXE COP DOCUMENTARY
Axe Cop Cosplay from Comic Con 2012. Can you guess which True Blood actor this is?
AXE COP "KICK-ART" REVEALED
THE POSTER IS AVAILABLE IN EITHER COLOR OR B&W!!!!
Collectible Axe Cop Artwork & Exclusive to Kickstarter Backers
A SHORT VIDEO ON HOW THE "KICK ART" WAS CREATED:
Other Kick-Axe Rewards
Nick Offerman/AKA Ron Swanson has made this beautiful one-of-a kind mahogany wooden axe from his very own workshop. Trust us. This is something you'll want to pass on as an heirloom to future generations and beyond.
Nick Offerman has also donated 5 beautiful mustache combs for our KS Campaign. Rare and highly collectible, they’ll have Axe Cop burned onto them.
Here are some other recommendations: The $15 "Axe Cop on Your Phone" Package. You get a ringtone and an outgoing voice mail message recorded by Dave DeAndrea, the original voice of Axe Cop in the motion comics as seen on You Tube. Now, if we could only get 4,000 backers in on this, we'd have a movie!
Below is a sample preview of one of the recordings you will get in the $15 Axe Cop Ringtone Package. The full ring tone message will read: "Hey, this is Axe Cop. Somebody's trying to call you right now. Answer the phone, or I will chop your head off!"
And check out our exclusive Axe Cop Doc Kickstarter patch. A great gift for you or your nearest, dearest Axe Cop fan:
REMEMBER: Once you make your selection, you must click the green button, “Back This Project.” KS will then take you to an Amazon page for payment. You must go through the Amazon checkout for your pledge to be processed.There is much to unite us: There is near-universal hatred on the site, from all camps, for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her mismanagement of the Democratic National Committee. Her resignation is a priority.
There is strong agreement that our primary process is broken and must be reformed—caucuses are a travesty of democracy (and both sides won their share, so it’s not a partisan issue), and a calendar that gives Iowa and New Hampshire dibs on winnowing the field, while most Democrats won’t have a real say, cannot continue. It does no one any good.
There is strong agreement that we need to reform the Super Delegate system. The idea that a group of party elders could overturn the will of the party voter is deeply offensive and undemocratic. (Add to that, I’d close all primaries, because why should non-Democrats have a say in who the Democrats nominate? But I get that’s a more controversial position.)
Do you know what else we all agree on? The Supreme Court… Even assuming the worst crazy shit people say about Clinton, fact is the next president will get to determine the Supreme Court’s direction for at least a generation, if not longer than that. It will be a new liberal Supreme Court that will overturn Citizens United, that will protect voting rights, that will protect labor unions, that will end partisan gerrymandering, that will undo the myriad roadblocks to citizens participation in our democracy—the very roadblocks that are keeping the Republican Party nationally relevant when they should be a rump regional party.
Clinton critics like to cite the presidency of Bill as evidence of her various horrible traits, yet it was Bill who gave us Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and I dare any of you to find reasons to criticize either of those two judicial heroes. If Hillary is like Bill (and she’s not, but let’s assume), why wouldn’t her Supreme Court justices follow suit?
Upgrade the Senate!
There’s too much at stake in this election, both in the short and long terms. People’s real lives are at stake today, tomorrow, and 30 years from now. You may not give a shit because whatever whatever oligarchy, but I do, and l’m not alone. Daily Kos will be an organizing and rallying point for those fighting for a better America, and the choices this fall are clear. It’s not even remotely close.
So here’s what happens on March 15:
I will no longer tolerate malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee or our presidential efforts. What does that mean?
No attacks on Hillary Clinton using right-wing tropes of sources. She’s had 30 years of bullshit flung at her from the Right, there’s no need to have Daily Kos give them an assist.
. She’s had 30 years of bullshit flung at her from the Right, there’s no need to have Daily Kos give them an assist. Constructive criticism from the Left is allowed. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? It’s the difference between “We need to put pressure on her to do the right thing on TPP” versus “she’s a sell-out corporatist whore oligarch.” In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter. Again, I’m not interested in furthering the Right’s hate-fueled media machine. If that’s what you want, might I suggest Free Republic?
. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? It’s the difference between “We need to put pressure on her to do the right thing on TPP” versus “she’s a sell-out corporatist whore oligarch.” In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter. Again, I’m not interested in furthering the Right’s hate-fueled media machine. If that’s what you want, might I suggest Free Republic? Saying you won’t vote, or will vote for Trump, or will vote for Jill Stein (or another Third Party) is not allowed. If that’s how you feel, but have other places in which you can be constructive on the site, then keep your presidential feelings to yourself. Those of us who care about our country and it’s future are focused on victory. If you aren’t, then it’s a big internet, I suggest you find more hospitable grounds for your huffing, puffing, and stomping of feet.
. If that’s how you feel, but have other places in which you can be constructive on the site, then keep your presidential feelings to yourself. Those of us who care about our country and it’s future are focused on victory. If you aren’t, then it’s a big internet, I suggest you find more hospitable grounds for your huffing, puffing, and stomping of feet. If you are going to be pessimistic, you better support it. There’s a difference between “Clinton can’t beat Trump” and “Clinton can’t beat Trump in Alabama”. There is also a difference between the blanket “Clinton can’t beat Trump” and “Looking at the polling, I’m worried that Clinton is falling behind Trump because X, Y, and Z”. Obviously, that also applies to races and issues down the ballot, not just the presidential. If you are going to be a Debbie-Downer, you better have a damn good reason to justify your pessimism. Rank, unsupported pessimism is anathema to our data-driven, reality based culture.
. There’s a difference between “Clinton can’t beat Trump” and “Clinton can’t beat Trump in Alabama”. There is also a difference between the blanket “Clinton can’t beat Trump” and “Looking at the polling, I’m worried that Clinton is falling behind Trump because X, Y, and Z”. Obviously, that also applies to races and issues down the ballot, not just the presidential. If you are going to be a Debbie-Downer, you better have a damn good reason to justify your pessimism. Rank, unsupported pessimism is anathema to our data-driven, reality based culture. No re-litigating the primary. I don’t give a shit what Clinton or Sanders said in the primary anymore. It’s over. Move on. Again, if it’s not over on March 15 because Sanders has narrowed his delegate deficit, then this doesn’t apply. But once this primary is over, it’s over. Anyone who is interested in keeping our primary divisions open and festering can go do that somewhere else (and be as relevant as the 2008-vintage PUMAs were).
. I don’t give a shit what Clinton or Sanders said in the primary anymore. It’s over. Move on. Again, if it’s not over on March 15 because Sanders has narrowed his delegate deficit, then this doesn’t apply. But once this primary is over, it’s over. Anyone who is interested in keeping our primary divisions open and festering can go do that somewhere else (and be as relevant as the 2008-vintage PUMAs were). Battle “the establishment” where it makes sense. So you are angry at the establishment? Go stick it to the man in downballot races where there good anti-establishment candidates on the ballot, like the Maryland Senate race and Donna Edwards. To be clear, Daily Kos will depart from recent practice by endorsing all Senate candidates that want our help, because the Supreme Court is just that important. But you, as individuals, have choices, and you can direct your energy and money to those candidates who are more closely aligned with your values. And we will battle the establishment together on things like the primary calendar and superdelegates. But we pick our battles, and in many places, the establishment will be our allies. Or to paraphrase some dumbfuck, we go to election season with the party we have, not the one we wish we had.
. So you are angry at the establishment? Go stick it to the man in downballot races where there good anti-establishment candidates on the ballot, like the Maryland Senate race and Donna Edwards. To be clear, Daily Kos will depart from recent practice by endorsing all Senate candidates that want our help, because the Supreme Court is just that important. But you, as individuals, have choices, and you can direct your energy and money to those candidates who are more closely aligned with your values. And we will battle the establishment together on things like the primary calendar and superdelegates. But we pick our battles, and in many places, the establishment will be our allies. Or to paraphrase some dumbfuck, we go to election season with the party we have, not the one we wish we had. We are really in this together. I know there have been rough fights, and some community members have been terrible to each other. But consider this a sorts of amnesty period. Let bygones be bygones. Don’t bring in comments from past battles into new ones. Wipe the slate clean, and let’s move forward together as allies, not enemies or, at worst, frenemies.
After Clinton is elected, we’ll all have plenty of reasons to be upset at her and criticize her actions. That’s what would happen even if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren got elected, because no one can ever live up to any good liberal’s hopes and expectations. Politics is messy and requires compromises and decisions that will never match our ideal. But hey, we’ll push Clinton hard when it requires, and we’ll keep working for a more inclusive and democratic Democratic Party.
But now, we’ve got to start focusing on the immediate task at hand, making sure we keep the White House, win back the Senate and maybe even the House, and lock down the Supreme Court for a liberal generation. Sound good?
So work hard for your primary choice, and vote for whoever you want when it’s your time to vote, but the countdown clock is ticking and we have a long, hard, critical task ahead of us.
[Update] I thought this was implied in several bullet points above, but let me make this crystal clear: If you are a Clinton supporter, spiking the football in the face of Sanders supporters isn’t a productive way to move us forward. After March 15, “relitigating the primary battles” and “we are really in this together” bullet points make such spiking bannable, but you could start early and help ease the transition to March 15.Part 2 here.
Judy Chu, Congressional Representative of California’s 32nd District, is a long term affiliate of the now defunct Communist Workers Party and its still existing activist networks.
While officially extinct for 25 years gone, the ultra-militant, habitually violent and loyally pro-China CWP is still having an impact in New York, The Bay Area and Southern California, through covert networks of former members.
Judy Chu led a CWP front, the Federation for Progress, in the 1980s, while beginning her ascent of the Democratic Party ladder. Now it appears that Chu is still working closely with residual CWP networks.
In 1985, the CWP dropped Maoism, changed its name to the New Democratic Movement and began a deliberate program of infiltrating the Democratic Party at the highest levels. The CWP never abandoned Marxist revolution as its goal. It merely exchanged the subtle long term infiltration of the institutions as recommended by Italian Communist Party leader, Antonio Gramsci, for the outdated, confrontational street-marching tactics of Mao Tse Tung.
A key part of CWP/NDM strategy was to exploit racial and ethnic divisions as a means of achieving p0wer.
A perfect example occurred in Monterey Park, East Los Angeles, in the mid-1980s. The area, previously largely white and Latino, was experiencing an influx of immigrants from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Eventually, some longtime residents sought a ban on Chinese-language storefront signs. When a divided City Council voted in 1986 to support a resolution endorsing, among other things, English as the nation’s official language, Judy Chu, by then on the local school board and her husband Mike Eng (a lawyer), fought back by forming the Coalition for Harmony in Monterey Park.
Another key CHAMP member was Jose Zapata Calderon, then an academic in Sociology and Chicano Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.
“Judy and Mike were always trying to find ways to bring people together,” said Jose Calderon, another member of CHAMP who is now an associate professor at Pitzer College in Claremont. They started “harmony days” to celebrate the city’s various cultures and they led a petition drive that moved the council to rescind its divisive resolution.
Chu, Eng and Calderon did succeed in reversing the language ban, an action which boosted Judy Chu’s political career through a local Mayoralty, Assembly, and eventually onto Congress.
Coincidentally, all three activists were linked to the Communist Workers Party – with Calderon, a confirmed leader of the group.
Calderon was not a local. He grew up in a small town in Colorado, where he went on to earn a B.A. from the University of Colorado, Greeley, in Communications.
In Greeley in the 1970s, Calderon started the Al Frente de Lucha (meaning in the forefront of the struggle), which worked on the United Farm Workers boycott of lettuce and grapes. He took California students to work with the UFW and also worked with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan or MEChA, a radical Marxist/separatist Chicano group, as well as the League of United Latin American Citizens.
One of Calderon’s first actions after graduation, was a visit to the National Headquarters of the United Farm Workers in Delano, California. The organization’s radical leader, Cesar Chavez, told the young graduate: “You have only so much time in your life… And you can easily throw your life away… Or, you can use your life in service to others; empower others in building a more just and equal society.”
By the late 1970s, Calderon was a full fledged member of the Colorado branch of the Communist Workers Party.
After 5 CWP members were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan at Greensboro North Carolina – the infamous “Greensboro Massacre,” Calderon protested the killings in downtown Denver.
Calderon got his name splashed nationwide in August 1980 when he infiltrated the National Governor’s Conference to protest lack of punishment for the killers of his comrades.
Independent Presidential candidate John Anderson was midway through his speech to the conference, when Jose Calderon ran to the front of the meeting room screaming at the candidate and threw eggs at both of them. The eggs missed their mark and security agents quickly subdued the 33 year-old comrade Calderon.
Calderon has since developed more affinity for the political process and in 2012, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
After his burst of glory in Colorado, Calderon moved to Los Angeles to pursue his studies at UCLA.
He quickly hooked up with Mike Eng and Judy Chu, and he and his wife Marilyn Calderon have worked closely with them ever since.
Marilyn Calderon actually served on Chu’s legislative staff in the California Assembly. Mrs Calderon, who later became president of the United Farm Workers, worked closely with Chu in the mid-2000s, trying to build support for Chu’s proposed legislation to protect field hands from sunstroke.
Judy Chu has always supported Jose Calderon’s militant actions. In a show of opposition to Pomona College’s decision to terminate 17 employees who could not verify their employment documentation before a December 1, 2011, 5 p.m. deadline, 15 supporters of the terminated employees were arrested for refusing to move from the middle of an intersection.
CPD officers arrested the protesters, a group that included professor Jose Calderon.
“Many years from now, I know your children and students will ask you, ‘Where were you on that day when they fired those workers that brought the food to your table?’” Calderón told the assembled protestors, “All of you are going to be able to say to your children, ‘I was there and I was fighting injustice.’”
The terminated workers received a message of support from only one politician – Judy Chu. Bryan Urias, a member of Chu’s staff, attended the protest on behalf of the Congresswoman.
“She wanted me to be here to let |
(and now five grandchildren) and then there’s the prime minister he served so loyally. Tebbit smiles: “I always used to say it was very easy for me when I was in government because if I’d nodded off to sleep and woke up suddenly, it didn’t matter whether I was in bed or in the Cabinet, I just had to say, 'Yes, Margaret’ and all would be well.”
There is a school of thought that, had the Brighton bomb not happened, politician Margaret’s departure would have been managed in a more orderly way and Tebbit could have become prime minister. Instead, after wife Margaret was injured, he was forced to choose.
When we think about that IRA bomb, it is Margaret Tebbit’s injuries we remember. Lord Tebbit put on such a good show that he was widely believed to have got away lightly. This was far from the case. A friend says that his stomach was “pretty much shot to pieces”. God knows how he managed to resume public life. Recently, things have become “as bad as they possibly could be”. I am told by another source that Margaret Tebbit now has a form of dementia which comes with severe paranoia. It is a dreadful late-life echo of the post-natal depression which hospitalised Margaret after the Tebbits’ third child was born, when Norman effectively became a mum for several months, washing, cooking and changing nappies.
Not a whisper of this suffering intrudes on our interview and I don’t mention that I know. Lord Tebbit continues to give the most brilliant, beautifully honed, wily-fox answers when he must be suffering great distress. It is a remarkable performance which almost brings me to tears, but I know that would horrify him. He may do political bitterness, but he doesn’t do self-pity.
I’m worried that, by writing this, I will embarrass him and invade his privacy. But maybe people should know what a remarkable man he is, what courage and decency he has, while he’s still around. “The guy on the black horse has swung his scythe at me and I’ve ducked twice. But I know he will be back again,” he smiles.
As I’m leaving, he tells me that Lady Thatcher sent him a limited edition copy of her memoirs. She inscribed it with a quotation from Kipling: “But the Thousandth man will stand your friend/With the whole world round agin you.”
The Conservative Party will never have a better friend than Norman Tebbit.The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has been asked to look into how $19 million of gold bullion came to be unaccounted for at the national mint.
It was discovered last October that 17,500 troy ounces of gold appeared to be missing at the mint in Ottawa. At that time, the Royal Canadian Mint arranged for an independent review by the accounting firmDeloitte & Touche.
The mint issued a statement Monday saying the discrepancy “does not appear to relate to an accounting error in the reconciliation process, an accounting error in the physical stock count schedules or an accounting error in the record keeping of transactions during the year”…
In a joint statement Monday night, Transport Minister John Baird and Minister of State for Transport Rob Merrifield were scornful.
“The mint’s still unexplained loss of precious metals is inexcusable,” the statement said. “The mint will be held accountable.”
The government said the mint will be required to report on inventory of all precious metals on a quarterly basis. Additionally, all bonuses payable to executives are being withheld until the investigation is completed.
How the frack do you not manage to notice that $19 million in gold has gone missing? This comic opera routine has been going on long enough for Sarah Palin to give birth one more time.
Does anyone check who’s walking out the door with what?PHOTOS: The best mac and cheese in Houston
Dig out your stretchy carb-eatin' pants, Houstonians. This Saturday afternoon comes the first Houston Mac and Cheese Fest, featuring dozens of restaurants offering up their own spin on the popular comfort dish alongside a selection of breweries serving up suds to wash it all down.
Click through to see where to get your noodles and cheese fix in Houston... less PHOTOS: The best mac and cheese in Houston
Dig out your stretchy carb-eatin' pants, Houstonians. This Saturday afternoon comes the first Houston Mac and Cheese Fest, featuring dozens of restaurants offering... more Photo: Michael Paulsen, Staff Photo: Michael Paulsen, Staff Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Mac and Cheese Fest will offer up samples of the best in Houston this weekend 1 / 14 Back to Gallery
Dig out your stretchy carb-eatin' pants, Houstonians, there is a new fun food festival coming to town.
The first Houston Mac and Cheese Fest kicks off Saturday afternoon, featuring dozens of restaurants offering up their own spin on the popular comfort dish, alongside a selection of breweries serving up suds to wash it all down.
QUESO PARADISE: Tex-Mex is Texas' comfort food
More than two dozen eateries will be competing at Silver Street Studios (2000 Edwards) to have their submission named one of the best in the city of Houston. Visitors can expect a variety of variations on noodles and cheese, which is beloved by people of all ages.
General admission tickets run $50 and that includes unlimited samples from vendors, a vote for "Best Mac & Cheese" and five drink tickets. The $80 VIP package includes all of the previously mentioned perks but with quick entry, a special T-shirt and access to the VIP section.
Restaurants and breweries that are bringing their mac game to the fest include Beaver’s, Harlem Road Texas BBQ, Peli Peli, Ritual, Max’s Wine Drive, Saint Arnold, La Grange, Karbach, Hughies Tavern and even Luby’s, which serves a mac and cheese that seems to bridge generations.
The full list can be found on the Mac & Cheese Fest official ticketing page.
Two-ounce servings are what festival goers can expect from the vendors.
Whether it’s made from ingredients in a box or from scratch with homegrown ingredients mac and cheese is a versatile dining staple. Kids love it paired with chicken nuggets or fish sticks and adults can’t help but adding in things like jalapenos or bacon to jazz it up.
ALMOST LIKE HOMECOOKING: Luby's famous, original mac and cheese is coming to H-E-B stores around Texas
It’s also rather economical in its base state, as parents and college kids can attest.
This festival though will see the dish get teased and pulled in ways that attendees would have likely never imagined.
Local breweries 8th Wonder, Town in City, City Acre and Buffalo Bayou will be serving beer to wash down all those cheesy carbs.
A portion of the proceeds from the event will benefit the Washington Avenue Arts District.
Click through the slideshow above to learn which Houston-area restaurants we think have macaroni and cheese worth raving about...Most world leaders reacted with horror to President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. French President Emmanuel Macron responded with what was largely considered a troll: a short address in which he invites scientists and entrepreneurs to move to France and "make our planet great again." But it turned out to be more than just a troll; France has put research funding on the table and has apparently been drawing lots of interest from scientists.
Macron's invitation was more than simply a troll from the start. It involved Business France, a government agency that's dedicated to promoting French businesses overseas. The organization put together a Make Our Planet Great Again website, in which it declared "France has always led fights for human rights. Today, more than ever, we are determined to lead (and win!) this battle on climate change."
If you follow the link that indicates you want to contribute to planetary greatness, it takes you to a short survey that seems to indicate France is looking for entrepreneurs, students, teachers, and researchers. (You can also apparently be an NGO or "other" and complete the survey.)
Should you choose the researcher option, you'll eventually make your way to a page with details on the research program and how to apply for it if you're in the US. France is specifically interested in researchers with expertise in climate change, the earth sciences, and energy transitions, which it defines as including "Renewable energies, innovative zero-carbon energy sources, energy storage, smart energy-management systems, hydrogen vector, carbon storage, electrification of vehicles, as well as human and social sciences to understand, accompany, or open options for energy transition."
The page invites you to upload a short research plan, along with a summary of your academic record. But the big item is in the "How do I finance my project?" section, which lists the grants that are being made available for the program. They run for four years and start at one million Euros for a junior researcher to €1.5 million for senior researchers. According to France, the lower amount provides enough to cover salary, two grad students, and research expenses; the senior researchers also get to hire two full-time research staff.
Given that the Trump administration hopes to massively cut scientific research, the French grants must sound pretty appealing (although Congress has been aggressively supporting science funding so far). So, it's not really a surprise to find out that many researchers are interested in Make Our Planet Great Again. Nature News quotes the chief research officer of the national research agency as saying "Applications continue to come in every hour." She also notes that there are a number of senior climate scientists that France plans to directly recruit, even if they don't apply.
Unfortunately, the article notes, science funding in France is also slated for a cut, this program notwithstanding.Reliance Jio hacked: The company has said that the database is safe and that a probe has been ordered to find out what exactly had happened. (PTI)
Reliance Jio hacked: In a major setback to Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries today, it has been revealed that its new telco arm Reliance Jio database has been hacked. The company has said that the database is safe and that a probe has been ordered t find out what exactly had happened. The numbers involved are as high as 120 mn, but their exact status is not known yet and this could well turn out to be the biggest data breach ever in India. According to a statement released by Reliance Jio spokesperson, “We have come across the unverified and unsubstantiated claims of the website and are investigating it. Prima facie the data appears to be unauthentic. We want to assure our subscribers that their data is safe and maintained with highest security. Data is only shared with authorities as per their requirement. We have informed law enforcement agencies about the claims of the website and will follow through to ensure strict action is taken.
After the alleged breach, the data of customers has been uploaded on magicapk.com website, according to Indian Express Online. Among the first to report the hacking was Fonearena.com. IE spoke to Editor Varun Krish who expressed his shock at being able to find the particulars of his and those of his colleagues accounts available.
Reliance Jio database breached: Company says data on site authentichttps://t.co/EW0lt8gKIi@IndianExpress — Vijay Chauthaiwale (@vijai63) July 9, 2017
The website concerned is open for search and if anyone puts in a query about any Reliance Jio account, the details are instantly made available. The traffic on the site has surged so much it is crashing frequently. Worryingly, according to Fonearena, Aadhaar numbers are being made available too.A federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit claiming that NBC’s “Timeless” is a ripoff of a Spanish TV time travel series.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson, in a ruling issued on Wednesday, denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Sony and other defendants had asked the court to toss the case.
Onza Partners, producers of the Spanish series “El Ministerio del Tiempo,” contend that their storyline was stolen for “Timeless,” in which a trio travels through time to try to stop a criminal trying to alter the course of history.
Wilson wrote that the issue of whether the Spanish TV series and “Timeless” are “substantially similar” is better left to the summary judgment phase of litigation. He wrote that “an examination of more than just the pilots is required” to make such a determination.
He also wrote that Onza’s “well pleaded facts state a plausible claim for an implied contract.”
The lawsuit claims “numerous similarities” between the two shows, including that the antagonist is a suspected double agent. It also points to the presence of a three person team of one woman and two men. In both, the woman has “an academic background (with unorthodox elements) and knowledge of historical accuracy helpful — or crucial — to carrying out the given missions.”
Related ‘Timeless’ Gets Additional-Episode Order as NBC Sets ‘Taken’ Premiere Date
Onza claims that they began negotiating with Sony on a deal for a U.S. version of the series in July, 2015, and even exchanged deal proposals. But on Aug. 26, 2015, Deadline published a release that Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan were producing a TV pilot titled “Time,” later retitled “Timeless,” for NBC.
“Oddly, at the moment of the August 26, 2015 publication of the Deadline [r]elease, Sony abruptly and without any warning terminated all negotiations relative to Onza’s American version,” the Onza lawsuit claims.
The suit contends that its attorney, David Tenzer, contacted Sony attorneys, one of whom eventually responded that they didn’t “feel that our project violates your client’s rights.”
Onza is represented by Devin McRae and Michael Smarinsky of Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae.I T would seem that some of our great clothing establishments, with an eye to our polyglot ancestry, have attempted to incorporate some feature of every European national costume into a harmonious whole, and have thus given us that abiding horror, the freak American suit, You will see it everywhere, on Broadway of every city and Main Street of every town, on the boardwalks and beaches of coast resorts, and even in remote farming villages. It comes up to hit you in the face year after year in all its amazing variations: waist-line under the arm pits, trick little belts, what-nots in the cuffs; trousers so narrow you fear they will burst before your eyes, pockets placed in every position, buttons clustered together in a tight little row or reduced to one. And the worst of it is, few of our younger men know any better until they go abroad and find their wardrobe a subject for jest and derision. 1
If you would dress like a gentleman, you must do one of two things; either study the subject of a gentlemans wardrobe until you are competent to pick out good suits from freaks and direct your misguided tailor, or, at least until your perceptions are trained, go to an English one. This latter method is the easiest, and, by all odds, the safest. It is not Anglomania but plain common sense to admit that, just as the Rue de la Paix in Paris is the fountainhead of fashions for women, Bond Street in London is the home of irreproachable clothes for men. 2
And yet, curiously enough, just as a woman shopping in Paris can buy frightful clothesor the most beautiful; a man can in America buy the worst clothes in the worldand the best. 3
The ordinary run of English clothes may not be especially good, but they are, on the other hand, never bad; whereas American freak clothes are distortions like the reflections seen in the convex and concave mirrors of the amusement parks. But not even the leading tailors of Bond Street can excel the supremely good American tailorwhose clothes however are identical in every particular with those of London, and their right to be called best is for greater perfection of workmanship and fit. This last is a dangerous phrase; fit means perfect set and line, not plaster tightness. 4
However, let us suppose that you are either young, or at least fairly young; that you have unquestioned social position, and that you are going to get yourself an entire wardrobe. Let us also suppose your money is not unlimited, so that it may also be seen where you may not, or may if necessary, economize. 5
FORMAL EVENING CLOTHES
Your full dress is the last thing to economize on. It must be perfect in fit, cut and material, and this means a first-rate tailor. It must be made of a dull-faced worsted, either black or night blue, on no account of broadcloth. Aside from satin facing and collar, which can have lapels or be cut shawl-shaped, and wide braid on the trousers, it must have no trimming whatever. Avoid satin or velvet cuffs, moiré neck ribbons and fancy coat buttons as you would the plague. 6
Wear a plain white linen waistcoat, not one of cream colored silk, or figured or even black brocade. Have all your linen faultlessly cleanalwaysand your tie of plain white lawn, tied so it will not only stay in place but look as though nothing short of a backward somersault could disarrange it. 7
Your handkerchief must be white; gloves (at opera or ball) white; flower in buttonhole (if any) white. If you are a normal size, you can in America buy inexpensive shirts, and white waistcoats that are above reproach, but if you are abnormally tall or otherwise an out size so that everything has to be made to order, you will have to pay anywhere from double to four times as much for each article you put on. 8
When you go out on the street, wear an English silk hat, not one of the taper crowned variety popular in the movies. And wear it on your head, not on the back of your neck. Have your overcoat of plain black or dark blue material, for you must wear an overcoat with full dress even in summer. Use a plain white or black and white muffler. Colored ones are impossible. Wear white buckskin gloves if you can afford them; otherwise gray or khaki doeskin, and leave them in your overcoat pocket. Your stick should be of plain Malacca or other wood, with either a crooked or straight handle. The only ornamentation allowable is a plain silver or gold band, or top; but perfectly plain is best form. 9
And lastly, wear patent leather pumps, shoes or ties, and plain black silk socks, and leave your rubbersif you must wear them, in the coat room. 10
THE TUXEDO
The Tuxedo, which is the essential evening dress of a gentleman, is simply the English dinner coat. It was first introduced in this country at the Tuxedo Club to provide something less formal than the swallow-tail, and the name has clung ever since. To a man who can not afford to get two suits of evening clothes, the Tuxedo is of greater importance. It is worn every evening and nearly everywhere, whereas the tail coat is necessary only at balls, formal dinners, and in a box at the opera. Tuxedo clothes are made of the same materials and differ from full dress ones in only three particulars: the cut of the coat, the braid on the trousers, and the use of a black tie instead of a white one. The dinner coat has no tails and is cut like a sack suit except that it is held closed in front by one button at the waist line. (A full dress coat, naturally, hangs open.) The lapels are satin faced, and the collar left in cloth, or if it is shawl-shaped the whole collar is of satin. 11
The trousers are identical with full dress ones except that braid, if used at all, should be narrow. Cuffed trousers are not good form, nor should a dinner coat be double-breasted. 12
Fancy ties are bad form. Choose a plain black silk or satin one. Wear a white waistcoat if you can afford the strain on your laundry bill, otherwise a plain black one. By no means wear a gray one nor a gray tie. 13
The smartest hat for town wear is an opera, but a straw or felt which is proper in the country, is not out of place in town. Otherwise, in the street the accessories are the same as those already given under the previous heading. 14
THE HOUSE SUIT
The house suit is an extravagance that may be avoided, and an old Tuxedo suit worn instead. 15
A gentleman is always supposed to change his clothes for dinner, whether he is going out or dining at home alone or with his family, and for this latter occasion some inspired person evolved the house, or lounge, suit, which is simply a dinner coat and trousers cut somewhat looser than ordinary evening ones, made of an all-silk or silk and wool fabric in some dark color, and lined with either satin or silk. Nothing more comfortableor luxuriouscould be devised for sitting in a deep easy-chair after dinner, in a reclining position that is ruinous to best evening clothes. 16
Its purpose is really to save wear on evening clothes, and to avoid some of their discomfort also, because they can not be given hard or careless usage and long survive. A house suit is distinctly what the name implies, and is not an appropriate garment to wear out for dinner or to receive any but intimate guests in at home. The accessories are a pleated shirt, with turndown stiff collar, and black bow tie, or even an unstarched shirt with collar attached (white of course). The coat is made with two buttons instead of one, because no waistcoat is worn with it. 17
FORMAL AFTERNOON DRESS
Formal afternoon dress consists of a black cutaway coat with white piqué or black cloth waistcoat, and gray-and-black striped trousers. The coat may be bound with braid, or, even in better taste, plain. A satin-faced lapel is not conservative on a cutaway, but it is the correct facing for the more formal (and elderly) frock coat. Either a cutaway or a frock coat is always accompanied by a silk hat, and best worn with plain black waistcoat and a black bow tie or a black and white four-in-hand tie. A gray silk ascot worn with the frock coat is supposed to be the correct wedding garment of the brides father. (For details of clothes worn by groom and ushers at a wedding, see chapter on weddings.) 18
Shoes may be patent leather, although black calf-skin are at present the fashion, either with or without spats. If with spats, be sure that they fit close; nothing is worse than a wrinkled spat or one that sticks out over the instep like the opened bill of a duck! 19
Though gray cutaway suits and gray top hats have always been worn to the races in England, they do not seem suitable here, as races in America are not such full-dress occasions as in France and England. But at a spring wedding or other formal occasions a sand-colored double-breasted linen waistcoat with spats and bow tie to match looks very well with a black cutaway and almost black trousers, on a man who is young. 20
THE BUSINESS SUIT
The business suit or three-piece sack is made or marred by its cut alone. It is supposed to be an every-day inconspicuous garment and should be. A few rules to follow are: 21
Dont choose striking patterns of materials; suitable woolen stuffs come in endless variety, and any which look plain at a short distance are safe, though they may show a mixture of colors or pattern when viewed closely. 22
Dont get too light a blue, too bright a green, or anything suggesting a horse blanket. At the present moment trousers are made with a cuff; sleeves are not. Lapels are moderately small. Padded shoulders are an abomination. Peg-topped trousers equally bad. If you must be eccentric, save your efforts for the next fancy dress ball, where you may wear what you please, but in your business clothing be reasonable. 23
Above everything, dont wear white socks, and dont cover yourself with chains, fobs, scarf pins, lodge emblems, etc., and dont wear horsey shirts and neckties. You will only make a bad impression on every one you meet. The clothes of a gentleman are always conservative; and it is safe to avoid everything that can possibly come under the heading of novelty. 24
JEWELRY
In your jewelry let diamonds be conspicuous by their absence. Nothing is more vulgar than a display of ice on a mans shirt front, or on his fingers. 25
There is a good deal of jewelry that a gentleman may be allowed to wear, but it must be chosen with discrimination. Pearl shirt-studs (real ones) are correct for full dress only, and not to be worn with a dinner coat unless they are so small as to be entirely inconspicuous. Otherwise you may wear enamel studs (that look like white linen) or black onyx with a rim of platinum, or with a very inconspicuous pattern in diamond chips, but so tiny that they can not be told from a threadlike design in platinumor others equally moderate. 26
Waistcoat buttons, studs and cuff links, worn in sets, is an American custom that is permissible. Both waistcoat buttons and cuff links may be jewelled and valuable, but they must not have big precious stones or be conspicuous. 27
A watch chain should be very thin and a mans ring is usually a seal ring of plain gold or a dark stone. If a man wears a jewel at all it should be sunk into a plain gypsy hoop setting that has no ornamentation, and worn on his little, not his third, finger. 28
IN THE COUNTRY
Gay-colored socks and ties are quite appropriate with flannels or golf tweeds. Only in your riding clothes you must again be conservative. If you can get boots built on English lines, wear them; otherwise wear leggings. And remember that all leather must be real leather in the first place and polished until its surface is like glass. 29
Have your breeches fit you. The coat is less important, in fact, any odd coat will do. Your legs are the cynosure of attention in riding. 30
Most men in the country wear knickerbockers with golf stockings, with a sack or a belted or a semi-belted coat, and in any variety of homespuns or tweeds or rough worsted materials. Or they wear long trousered flannels. Coats are of the polo or ulster variety. For golf or tennis many men wear sweater coats. Shirts are of cheviot or silk or flannel, all with soft collars attached and to match. 31
The main thing is to dress appropriately. If you are going to play golf, wear golf clothes; if tennis, wear flannels. Do not wear a yachting cap ashore unless you are living on board a yacht. 32
White woolen socks are correct with white buckskin shoes in the country, but not in town. 33
If some semi-formal occasion comes up, such as a country tea, the time-worn conservative blue coat with white flannel trousers is perennially good. 34
OTHER HINTS
The well-dressed man is always a paradox. He must look as though he gave his clothes no thought and as though literally they grew on him like a dogs fur, and yet he must be perfectly groomed. He must be close-shaved and have his hair cut and his nails in good order (not too polished). His linen must always be immaculate, his clothes in press, his shoes perfectly done. His brown shoes must shine like old mahogany, and his white buckskin must be whitened and polished like a prize bull terrier at a bench show. Ties and socks and handkerchief may go together, but too perfect a match betrays an effort for effect which is always bad. 35
The well-dressed man never wears the same suit or the same pair of shoes two days running. He may have only two suits, but he wears them alternately; if he has four suits he should wear each every fourth day. The longer time they have to recover their shape, the better. 36Sun Microsystems has been showing off it knows how to build an eco-friendly, efficient data center in the hope it can scare up a little business helping other companies cope with their own inefficient centers.
The server and operating system company has done this as it moves and consolidates a center that it inherited through its $4.1bn StorageTek acquisition four years ago.
If this isn't eating your own dog food, then is at least living in its own dog house. And, not coincidentally, it's trying to get out of the dog house with Wall Street by cutting costs and moving in the direction of profitability.
StorageTek was founded in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, in a burg called Louisville, and Sun just coincidentally had offices of its own a little bit down the road in Broomfield. Both companies had about 4,000 employees in the area, according to Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun, with the facilities about two-thirds full. By using teleworking, Sun was able to fill up the Broomfield campus. (There have, of course, been some layoffs that create room too).
StorageTek had its big data center in Louisville, which was used to run its operations as well as for development and testing of its disk and tape products. Sun could not leave the data center there because it sold the facility to oil giant ConocoPhilips a year ago in order to raise cash - $58.5m in this case. ConocoPhilips will be using the Louisville campus as an energy research center focusing on for fuel cell, solar, wind and clean diesel power.
In the past eight months, the StorageTek data center, which was weighed in at 496,000 square feet, was consolidated onto three floors of an office building in Broomfield. This is the largest data center consolidation project Sun has ever done, according to Monroe. The StorageTek facility had 165,000 square feet of raised floor space, and by ditching old servers that require raised floors, Sun was able to compress this down to 700 square feet. The raised floor part of the data center is necessary to support some mainframes and big Sparc iron.
Sun squeezes into Broomfield
The new Broomfield data center has been equipped with Sun's latest Sparc and x64 servers, including T2000 and T5440 (Niagara), X4600 M2 (Galaxy), and M5000 (Fujitsu) servers and its 7000 series of unified storage servers.
The density of these boxes has allowed Sun to cram all the computing that the storage division needs into 126,000 square feet of space. About 11,000 square feet of that is to run applications that are part of Sun's back office operations; the rest is for development and engineering work.
Sun says that building as much raised floor space as StorageTek had would have cost it $4m in the Broomfield center, which it characterized as savings. But if you think about it, Sun didn't really save that money because as Sun so correctly demonstrated, modern servers don't need raised floors. The data center has a seven megawatt capacity that can be boosted to 10 megawatts if needed.Play It Again And Again, Sam
Enlarge this image toggle caption The Kobal Collection The Kobal Collection
A couple of years ago, music psychologist Elizabeth Margulis decided to make some alterations to the music of Luciano Berio. Berio was one of the most famous classical composers of the 20th century, a man internationally recognized for the dramatic power of his compositions. But Margulis didn't worry much about disrupting Berio's finely crafted music. After loading his most famous piece into a computer editing program, she just randomly started cutting.
"I just went in and whenever there was a little pause on either side of something, I grabbed that out and then I'd stick it back in — truly without regard to aesthetic intent," she says. "I wasn't trying to craft anything compelling."
The idea behind this vandalism was simple: Margulis wanted to see if she could make people like Berio's music more by making it more repetitive.
Margulis knew that 90 percent of the music we listen to is music we've heard before. We return again and again to our favorite songs, listening over and over to the same musical riffs, which themselves repeat over and over inside the music, and she'd become obsessed with understanding why repetition is so compelling.
This is why she was razoring the music of Berio — because, though his work is considered brilliant (as you can hear from the sample below of his Sequenza IXa for clarinet), his music isn't at all repetitive. In fact, he was part of a musical school that actively wanted to move music away from too much repetition.
Excerpt Of Sequenza IXa For Clarinet, Luciano Berio
So Margulis took Berio's music and randomly looped it...
Margulis' Modified Excerpt Of Sequenza IXa For Clarinet
... and then had all kinds of people evaluate the two excerpts, comparing the work of one of the most famous composers of the 20th century with the work of a music psychologist from the University of Arkansas with access to digital editing equipment.
But it wasn't even close.
"They reported enjoying the excerpts that had repetition more," Margulis says. "They reported finding them more interesting, and — most surprising to me — they reported them as more likely to have been crafted by a human artist, rather than randomly generated by a computer."
What's So Seductive About Repeats?
We are drawn to repetition. It surrounds us, not just in modern American pop music, Margulis says, but everywhere.
"Musical repetitiveness isn't really an idiosyncratic feature of music that's arisen over the past few hundred years in the West," she says. "It seems to be a cultural universal. Not only does every known human culture make music, but also, every known human culture makes music [in which] repetition is a defining element."
Why?
One part of the answer, Margulis says, is what's known as the mere exposure effect.
Psychologists have found that people tend to start off wary of — or even hostile to — new things, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. But then the act of mere exposure — nothing more than further exposure — changes our feelings. We typically feel more warmly toward things we encounter again and again.
"Let's say you've heard a little tune before, but you don't even know that you've heard it, and then you hear it again. The second time you hear it you know what to expect to a certain extent, even if you don't know you know," Maugulis says. "You are just better able to handle that sequence of sounds. And what it seems like [your mind is saying] is just, 'Oh I like this! This is a good tune!' But that's a misattribution."
Why Political Ads Work (In Part)
And the power of repeated exposure isn't just limited to music. Research has shown that the mere exposure effect makes stockbrokers feel more warmly toward stocks they've seen before; it also works when looking at art or fashion or random geometric shapes. And, as the psychologist Robert Bornstein, of Adelphi University, points out, the mere exposure effect is part of the reason we see so many political ads before elections.
"It doesn't matter what's in the ads," Bornstein says. "It's the repetition. You keep seeing the face and you keep hearing the name and that causes some degree of attraction. And the fact that they know that you're making dinner and not really attending closely... that is all to their advantage. They like that you are being repeatedly exposed without thinking too hard about the fact that you are being repeatedly exposed."
So mere exposure is one of the reasons we respond so well to repetition — both of music and in music — but Margulis clearly doesn't think it's the whole story. She says repetition also allows us to shift our attention around, from the surface aspects of the music to other aspects.
And in that way, she says, it allows us to shift our experience of the reality around us.
"You can experience this yourself," Margulis says, "by just having someone repeat a word to you a number of times over the course of a minute. After about a minute or so, you lose the semantic association that those sounds normally have... [and] what's really salient [instead] is strange things about the syllables and the sounds themselves."
So basically, part of what the repetition in music allows us to do is leave ourselves. In some small way, it allows us to shift and adjust our reality.
And reality (let's be honest) can often use some adjusting.
So in the spirit of offering you "news you can use" to make your life at least temporarily better, we leave you with this. Adjust away:This post may contain affiliate links; please read the disclosure for more information.
Pizza Planet at Disney’s Hollywood Studios is closing January 11th, 2016. If no further information was provided, we would assume this has something to do with the construction of the Star Wars themed land, but the restaurant is scheduled to re-open in late 2016. So… are the Muppets moving in?
Provided Muppetvision 3-D is staying, it would make sense to finally turn this establishment into a Muppets themed restaurant, as originally intended back in 1991. With a refurbishment this long and an entire Toy Story Land being built on the other side of the park, it makes little sense for it to return as a Toy Story-themed eatery. While it may not be a Muppets re-theme, something is definitely happening to Pizza Planet in 2016.
We have no solid details at this time, but stay tuned for more on this as it develops.It turns out that there are many ways to be bilingual, according to HGSE Associate Professor Gigi Luk, who studies the lasting cognitive consequences of speaking multiple languages. “Bilingualism is a complex and multifaceted life experience,” she says; it’s an “interactional experience” that |
April Fool Skype was pushed onto Apple's iPhone at the instigation of the VoIP app's corporate owner eBay, the Reg can exclusively reveal - in order to reap huge sums from government listening agencies interested in spying on Jesus-mobe-toting terrorists.
The revelations come from a disgruntled eBay insider familiar with the matter, known to Reg handlers only by the randomly-assigned codename "Click Jezebel". This individual, already sickened by years spent living off the proceeds of artificially hyped repeat sales of bug-infested rugs and defective lava lamps, found the latest attempt to wring value from Skype a step too far.
According to this source, cynical eBay profiteers have long been intent on squeezing some revenue out of Skype, but the customer base has stubbornly resisted monetisation. It's also well known that Skype is considered extremely difficult to listen in on by plods, spooks and so on - partly because of its peer-to-peer nature, which routes calls unpredictably, and partly because of its obscure encryption. The Reg has reported before on the difficulties faced by Italian and German police - not to mention Britain's GCHQ - in eavesdropping on Skype calls.
When news broke recently that America's NSA was offering "billions" to any company which could offer a bona-fide solution for Skype eavesdropping, unscrupulous tat-bazaar overlords saw their chance at last. Secret top-level negotiations were opened with the NSA: these were time-consuming as they had to be carried out via courier-delivered, one-time-pad encrypted hardcopy letters owing to understandable paranoia on both sides.
The idea was that eBay would order Skype engineers to develop a Skype update which would cause user clients to relay details of every call or chat to secretly-established NSA "black servers", located in China to provide plausible deniability. In the event of the NSA wishing to listen in on a given call, the clients at either terminus - in addition to sending the normal Skype encrypted traffic to each other - would also send the voice or text to the spooks.
Within the NSA the ploy is known as the "man-at-each-end" attack, according to our source. Company engineers prefer the term "p2p2pwn", apparently.
It appears that negotiations initially proceeded well, with payment arrangements swiftly hammered out. Each time the NSA Skype backdoor is used, US black-budget funds will be used to purchase an agreed, substantial amount of tat on eBay, causing clean untraceable revenue to flow into the online gumble-bazaar's coffers. The purchases will then normally be put straight back up for re-auction, maximising the payment to eBay and minimising losses to the US taxpayer.
But at the final stages a sticking point emerged. It's well known that many targets of interest to the NSA dislike platforms which have long been able to run Skype, such as Windows Mobile phones. These individuals - Taliban warlords, Afghan politicians, celebrities, ruthless criminal biz-kingpin supervillains etc. - typically favour the added bling factor of Apple's Jesus Phone.
"They said to us, get backdoored-up Skype on the iPhone, we'll pay full price," according to our person familiar with the matter. "Otherwise we knock off $2bn."
Thus Skype at once entered into negotiations with Apple, while telco objections to free VoIP on the iPhone were stifled behind the scenes by NSA arm-twisting. This part of the plan, according to our informant, was known as "Project Judas Phone", and has now reached fruition.
Our source, possibly exposed after the Reg accounts department called him at work to verify an expense-account lunch claim from one of our scribes, was forced to flee his job and home last week. He is now thought to be in hiding, or perhaps in a secret prison overseas somewhere.
Attempts to contact eBay's Swiss alpine mountaintop HQ for comment have so far proved fruitless. We also tried to reach the NSA, but negotiating a secure comms protocol has so far proved impossible. ®At present, Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, only has the power to intervene after a broadcast has been made.
However, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is considering extending the regulator's powers to allow it to stop broadcasts of radical preachers.
Her intervention comes after the BBC was criticised for broadcasting an interview with Anjem Choudary, the radical preacher and founder of a banned Islamist group.
Theresa May said people were right to complain about Mr Choudary's appearance on Newsnight, during which he repeatedly refused to condemn the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.
Mrs May said: "I think Anjem Choudary has disgusting views and I think it is right that we look at how those views are being presented and I think there were many people who did indeed say 'What is the BBC doing interviewing Anjem Choudary?"
However Greg Dyke, the former BBC director-general, said the BBC's editorial independence must be protected.
He said: "The point is that the BBC makes its own editorial decisions. If they turn out to be wrong someone can make a complaint to Ofcom afterwards. But you fundamentally change the BBC's role if they can intervene before. It isn't workable."
Baroness Warsi, a leading minister, condemned the amount of coverage given to Choudary and other militant Islamists on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 News.
The BBC was criticised for offering the radical preacher a slot on last night’s Newsnight programme on BBC2, in a decision branded ‘idiotic’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘insensitive’.
The corporation has earlier released footage of Michael Adebolajo standing behind Choudary at a 2007 demonstration.
Baroness Warsi said: "We all have a responsibility, including the media, not to give airtime to extremist voices – idiots and nutters who speak for no one but themselves.
"The heartening thing in the midst of all this tragedy is that the British Muslim community has, with a unified, unreserved voice, condemned the killing and pledged support for our armed forces.
"This is a real maturing of the community which has taken years of painstaking work and frank discussions behind closed doors.
"This time everyone has stepped up to the mark. Yet here broadcasters are undoing all this by giving a platform to one appalling man who represents nobody. I am really angry."
Choudary, former head of banned Islamist organisation Al Muhajiroun, was behind the planned protest march in 2010 through Royal Wootton Bassett, the town where dead British soldiers were repatriated, the Daily Mail reported.
He has been accused of radicalising Adebolajo, who wielded a meat cleaver in the attack on Drummer Lee Rigby, in the mid-2000s.
Defence Secretary Jim Murphy said on Twitter: "Banned from France but welcome on Newsnight. A mistake of the BBC to invite Anjem Choudary onto the telly tonight."
Among others criticising the BBC's decision to give the preacher airtime was Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary, who told LBC radio that the Choudary was an "offensive and obnoxious media tart" with no followers.
Choudary also appeared on the BBC’s rolling news channel and has been on ITV News, as well as on Channel 4's news.
Channel 4 had also previously given Choudary and another Islamist called Abu Nusaybah their own slot on the broadcaster's 4thought.tv, a two-minute opinion show that airs immediately after its nightly news bulletin.
The decision by the broadcaster to hand over its airwaves to both men had sparked anger from moderate Muslims.
A BBC spokesperson said: "We have given great consideration to our reporting of the Woolwich murder and have a responsibility to both report on the story and try to shed light on why it happened. We believe it is important to reflect the fact that such opinions exist and feel that Choudary’s comments may offer some insight into how this crime came about. His views were robustly challenged by both the presenter, Kirsty Wark and the other participants."It hasn’t yet seeped into the political media’s central narrative about the Benghazi attacks yet — and if the past is a guide, it probably never will — but there has finally been a bona fide revelation of doctoring information about the attacks for political purposes, just as Republicans have claimed from the outset of the attack on September 11, 2012, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed at what is now being described as a CIA outpost.
The culprits who have been caught red-handed are not the administration officials Republicans have accused of spinning intel in order to make Pres. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton look good, but rather the Republican accusers themselves.
Last Friday, Republicans, probably from the House, leaked a document to right-wing ABC reporter Jonathan Karl that was said to contain paraphrased selections from emails circulated among CIA, State Department and other officials who were charged with developing talking points in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
On Tuesday, former ABC reporter Jake Tapper, who now works for CNN, acquired one of the actual emails Republicans had included in the leaked document. When he compared it to the Republican version, he found that Republicans had substantively altered the text:
In the e-mail sent on Friday, September 14, 2012, at 9:34 p.m., obtained by CNN from a U.S. government source, [then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben] Rhodes wrote: “All – “Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation. “There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don’t compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression. “We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies.” ABC News reported that Rhodes wrote: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.” ABC News notes in its report that it was provided summaries of White House and State Department emails, not the emails themselves.
After the White House released the full set of emails to reporters Wednesday night, CBS News compared the actual text of an email sent by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland with the version of it in the Republican leak document and found that it, too, had been altered:
The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.” The actual email from Nuland says: “The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.” The CIA agreed with the concerns raised by the State Department and revised the talking points to make them less specific than the CIA’s original version, eliminating references to al Qaeda and affiliates and earlier security warnings. There is no evidence that the White House orchestrated the changes.
Analysts who have read the full set of emails say they prove that, contrary to Republican accusations, no one in the government tried to spin the incident for political purposes — the CIA removed certain references in order to protect its investigation into the group behind the attack.
The emails also prove that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice did nothing wrong when she relied upon the talking points during her appearance on the Sunday morning political shows immediately after the attack.After her appearance, Republicans used their Fox News propaganda outlet to manufacture outrage by accusing Rice of downplaying the role of terrorism in the attack in order to bolster the president’s campaign.
Rice later withdrew her nomination for secretary of state because of the criticism — which we now know was based on nothing but Republican spin.House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Tuesday downplayed the importance of an upcoming Congressional Budget Office report on House Republicans’ health bill, despite his delay in sending the bill over to the Senate for now nearly three weeks as he waits for the report.
Ryan has delayed formally sending the American Health Care Act to the Senate after his chamber’s May 4 vote, Bloomberg reported last week, in order to receive a confirmation from the CBO that the bill cuts the deficit enough to qualify for reconciliation in the Senate — that is, the Senate’s ability to pass the bill on a simple majority vote, foregoing the threat of a Democratic filibuster.
“We just want to have an abundance of caution to make sure,” Ryan said at his weekly press briefing Tuesday, explaining why he had rushed a House vote and then delayed sending the bill to the Senate. “CBO scores have been unpredictable in cases in the past. We don’t think that’s going to be the case, but again, we just want to make sure that we dot our ‘I’s and cross our ‘T’s exactly the right way, so that when we send the bill over to the Senate, it is not, as we say, fatal.”
The CBO found in March that Republicans’ original, failed health bill would have resulted in 24 million more uninsured people by 2026. However, the office hasn’t yet scored the amended version of that bill, which would allow states to opt out of many of Obamacare’s pricing protections and other regulatory measures, and authorized $8 billion over five years to fund high risk insurance pools. The CBO report on the amended bill is expected to come out this week.
House Democrats criticized Ryan for pushing a vote without a CBO score. In the days before and immediately after the bill passed the House, he scolded them for placing too much importance on the analysis.
“A three-page amendment is not going to dramatically alter that bill,” Ryan said on May 7. “It does a narrow change to the bill.”
But Ryan acknowledged Tuesday that the same amendment — and the same missing CBO score — were responsible for holding up Republicans’ health care effort.The health and human services secretary, Tom Price, has resigned, after revelations that he spent more than $1m of taxpayers’ money on travel including chartered flights.
'Close to genocide': San Juan mayor's dire appeal to US for Puerto Rico relief Read more
Reports about such travel by Price and other cabinet members – including the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, interior secretary, Ryan Zinke and veterans affairs director, David Shulkin – had undermined Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington.
Price, already in a precarious position with the president after repeated failures to repeal the Affordable Care Act, had come under fire for spending so much money on private flights instead of commercial travel. On Thursday, he apologized for taking the flights and offered to reimburse the treasury for the relevant costs.
In statement on Friday, the White House said Price offered his resignation and Trump accepted it. Trump had teased the news, telling reporters an announcement was forthcoming.
Trump called Price a “very fine man” but said he did not like the “optics” of members of his cabinet – the wealthiest ever assembled – flying at great expense to taxpayers.
“I’m not happy, OK?” Trump said, before departing Washington to spend the weekend at his New Jersey golf club. “I can tell you, I’m not happy.”
The statement said Trump intended to tap Don Wright to serve as acting secretary, starting at midnight on Friday. Wright is currently deputy assistant secretary for health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
In a copy of his resignation letter posted to Twitter, Price thanked Trump for the “opportunity to serve the American people”.
“I have spent 40 years both as a doctor and public servant putting people first,” he wrote. “I regret that the recent events have created a distraction from those important objectives.”
Tom Price, M.D. (@SecPriceMD) Thank you @POTUS for the opportunity to serve the American people alongside the dedicated folks of @HHSGov. It's been an honor & privilege. pic.twitter.com/nUBNsEDsPv
In his statement of apology on Thursday, he had said: “All of my political career I’ve fought for taxpayers. It is clear to me that in this case, I was not sensitive enough to my concern for the taxpayer. I know as well as anyone that the American people want to know that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely by government officials.”
As a Georgia congressman, Price branded himself as a fiscal conservative, railing against the use of private jets by members of Congress. In a 2009 interview with CNBC, he called such expenditure “fiscal irresponsibility run amok” and criticized a Democrat who argued such flights were necessary for certain department heads.
Trump became frustrated with Price as a series of reports by Politico detailed his secretary’s spending over the last several months.
Politico first reported Price’s extensive use of private charter planes for business travel last week, revealing that the secretary had taken at least 24 flights since May at a cost of more than $300,000. His predecessors in the job flew commercially when traveling within the continental US.
Price traveled twice on government-funded private jets to destinations where he and his wife own property, and paired official visits with meetings with colleagues and family members, according to Politico.
On Thursday, the website reported that the White House approved Price’s use of military aircraft to travel to Europe, Asia and Africa for official business, at a cost of more than $500,000.
Trump tax plan for 'average Americans' would mainly help richest 1%, study finds Read more
The total combined cost for Price’s flights exceeded $1m, according to a Politico analysis.
In an appearance on Fox News on Thursday, Price said he believed he had the confidence of the president and called Trump a “remarkable leader”. But he said Trump had expressed his displeasure “clearly”.
On Friday, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, called Price a “good man” who he said had “spent his entire adult life fighting for others”.
Ryan said: “He was a leader in the House and a superb health secretary. His vision and hard work were vital to the House’s success passing our healthcare legislation. I will always be grateful for Tom’s service to this country and, above all, his continued friendship.”
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, criticized Price’s determination to repeal the ACA, saying: “The mission of the health and human services secretary should be to support Americans’ healthcare, not take it away. The next HHS secretary must follow the law when it comes to the Affordable Care Act instead of trying to sabotage it.”UPDATE 12/27/2016: To see 2017 winter events, and find routes up Cadillac in winter, see our December 2016 update.
UPDATE 1/23/2016: To see 2016 winter events, go to our Bangor Daily News blog.
(To plan your trip, see Acadia National Park year-round lodging, restaurants, shopping)
Snow falling on pink granite shores, sea smoke rising from Frenchman Bay, cross-country skiers gliding along freshly groomed trails: It’s winter in Acadia National Park, the quiet season.
You may not be able to drive up Cadillac Mountain or around the entire length of the Park Loop Road this time of year, or enjoy a popover on the lawn of the Jordan Pond House.
But the rewards for the hardy and adventurous soul are plenty: Solitude, winter’s beauty and such activities as cross-country skiing, winter hiking or watching for Snowy Owls and other migratory birds.
Winter is a secret wonderland in Acadia National Park, and it’s not a time to hibernate.
While many of the places to visit, stay and eat in area communities are closed, dozens of local businesses and cultural institutions are open for all or some of the winter.
There’s even a first-ever winter festival at Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park, from Feb. 19-22, featuring science, art and fun outdoor activities for kids and adults, and a talk by noted biologist and author, Bernd Heinrich.
This week, for the first time this winter, conditions have been right for volunteers with the Acadia Winter Trails Association to groom and track some of the carriage roads for cross-country skiing.
And so far this month, serious birders have reported 5 sightings of Snowy Owls on top of Sargent Mountain to eBird.org, which offers an online bird checklist.
Here are some ideas and resources to plan your trip to Acadia in winter. The winter visitor center at park headquarters on ME 233 is open Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. during January and February, and the same hours 7 days a week from March through April 14. No park entrance fee applies this time of year.
You can check snow conditions by linking to Bar Harbor area live Webcams.
Winter in Acadia National Park a time to get outdoors
Take a scenic drive – Though much of the Park Loop Road and the road to Cadillac are closed to cars, a couple of sections of the loop road are open: Ocean Drive accessible off Schooner Head Road, to Otter Cliff, and off Jordan Pond Road in Seal Harbor, to Jordan Pond House. Other picturesque routes: Sargeant Drive along Somes Sound with a view to Acadia Mountain, and ME 102A to Bass Harbor Head Light, where the grounds are open to visitors year-round.
Cross-country ski – When the conditions are right, as over the last several days, volunteers with the Acadia Winter Trails Association groom and track some of the carriage roads for classic and skate-style cross-country skiing. The Acadia Winter Trails Association, partly funded by the Elizabeth R. Bright Endowment, works in partnership with the Friends of Acadia and the park. To check on conditions, bookmark this page, or check the park Twitter feed @AcadiaNPS or the park’s winter activities Web page. If you’re new to cross-country skiing in Acadia, the Friends of Acadia just posted this helpful article on elevation gain and views at different spots along the carriage roads. Cadillac Mountain Sports in Bar Harbor and Ellsworth rents cross-country skis and offers other winter gear. You can also buy gear at the L.L. Bean Outlet in Ellsworth.
Take a winter hike – If there’s not too much snow or any ice, flat easy hikes such as Ocean Path, Compass Harbor Trail, Wonderland Trail, Ship Harbor Trail or the low-tide walk to Bar Island may be done without special gear. (Check out our book “Best Easy Day Hikes, Acadia National Park,” see sidebar, for other easy trail ideas.) Other easy walks can be taken along the carriage roads, but please avoid the groomed and tracked cross-country ski trails. If you’re tackling a summit, such as Cadillac to catch the first US sunrise as about 100 people did on New Year’s Day 2015, you may want to invest in something like Kahtoola MICROspikes(R), Hillsound Trail Crampons, or snowshoes, depending upon conditions. (See note in sidebar about Amazon.com links in this blog.) Or sign up with a guided snowshoeing or ice climbing course through the Atlantic Climbing School. The park offers winter hiking tips here.
Go snowmobiling – No snowmobile rentals are available locally, but the park allows snowmobiling on the Park Loop Road, most fire roads and up the Cadillac Summit Road. The park lists snowmobile routes and rules and regulations here.
Go birdwatching – Once a month on Tuesday morning through March, there’s an organized birding trip on Schoodic Peninsula, led by the Schoodic Institute Bird Ecology Program. You can also check local nature tour companies, such as Down East Nature Tours and The Natural History Center, to see what trips they’re doing this time of year. Michael J. Good, a Registered Maine Guide and owner of Down East Nature Tours, was responsible for 4 of the 5 Snowy Owl sightings on Sargent Mountain reported on eBird.org so far this month, as of the writing of this blog post. Rich MacDonald, naturalist and field biologist of The Natural History Center, said the center’s retail store off the Bar Harbor Village Green is open by appointment this time of year, while the center leads birding and nature tours year-round and around the world (next one is to Antarctica).
Take a boat trip to see seal pupping – On Jan. 25, Isle au Haut Boat Services – familiar to those who’ve taken the mail boat to the most remote part of Acadia National Park – is providing a winter excursion to Seal Island, the 2nd largest pupping colony in the US. The tour will also offer the chance to see Snowy Owls, eagles and other birds that winter in the waters off Isle au Haut and nearby islands. The company’s Facebook page has more details. (UPDATE 1/29/15: Trip, cancelled because of storm, to be rescheduled for 2016.)
Where to find out more about places to stay, eat and recreate
– The park offers a Winter in Acadia brochure and a Web page listing winter activities, including information about primitive winter camping in Blackwoods Campground
– Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park offers a full calendar of activities this time of year, including its first-ever Winter Festival
– The Bar Harbor Merchants Association is made up of businesses and cultural institutions that are open four seasons, and features a handy calendar of current events on its home page. It also has a page featuring member lodging establishments that are open year round.
– Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce lists more than a dozen businesses in the search results for the phrase “open year round”
– Bar Harbor Bed and Breakfast Association lists member B&Bs that are open year round.
– Southwest Harbor and Tremont Chamber of Commerce offers a handy “Who’s Open?” on its Web site
For your convenience, we’ve compiled the above year-round business listings from Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor and Tremont in a series of evolving pages on this blog.
Other local chambers of commerce may not be open full-time during the winter, but you may still be able to leave a message, request information or check out their Web sites for winter events. And we’ll be incorporating businesses from these other chambers in the evolving year-round listings.
– DownEast and Acadia Regional Tourism
– Schoodic Chamber of Commerce
The secret is out: Acadia is a winter wonderland, and there are plenty of activities, indoors and out, to keep you busy, and enough businesses and cultural institutions open to cater to your needs.
But don’t worry. There will still be far fewer crowds than in the traditional peak month of August, or the record-setting leaf-peeping month of October 2014.Labor leader Bill Shorten has branded outspoken Liberal senator Cory Bernardi a member of "team idiot" for trying to weaken race hate laws during a national security crisis.
The conservative senator has joined forces with Liberal colleague Dean Smith, Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm and Family First's Bob Day in an attempt to revive dumped government plans to change a contentious section of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Under a private bill, co-sponsored by the four senators, the words "offend" and "insult" would be struck from section 18C of the act.
Senator Day said the changes had been revived because the Muslim community had not joined "Team Australia" in the fight against home-grown extremism.
Mr Shorten called on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to pull Senator Bernardi into line at a time when Australians were fearful of the Islamic State terror threat.
Liberal senator Cory Bernardi. (AAP) ()
The senator's support for changing race-hate laws on top of his call to ban the burqa from Parliament House was "dramatically unhelpful to maintaining calm".
"If we want to starve extremists of oxygen, this country doesn't have time to play cheap rabble-rousing games," Mr Shorten said.
"We need unity in Australia at the moment, we don't need people who should know better fuelling and fanning the flames of intolerance."
Mr Shorten lumped Senator Bernardi into "team idiot", with George Christensen, another Liberal and a burqa-ban advocate.
"I don't know what book they're reading from, but it's not any book I want to pick up," he said.
Mr Abbott cited the need to get everybody on "Team Australia" as the reason for dumping a government plan to change the act.
"When the Muslim community didn't come on board with his Team Australia project, I would have thought all bets are off," Senator Day told ABC radio.
© AAP 20191
An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.
The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night
is thinking. It’s thinking of love.
It’s thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.
Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife
carves the likeness of his lover’s face into the motel wall. I like him
and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.
2
Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.
3
History repeats itself. Somebody says this.
History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,
over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is a little man in a brown suit
trying to define a room he is outside of.
I know history. There are many names in history
but none of them are ours.
4
He had green eyes,
so I wanted to sleep with him—
green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool-
You could drown in those eyes, I said.
The fact of his pulse,
the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire
not to disturb the air around him.
Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,
the way we look like animals,
his skin barely keeping him inside.
I wanted to take him home
and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his
like a crash test car.
I wanted to be wanted and he was
very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.
You could drown in those eyes, I said,
so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,
so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.
5
It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it
that we realized
the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,
far from being subverted,
had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.
Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,
replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes
and not the doorways we had hoped for.
His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker than before,
scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.
6
We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars
as the roads around us
grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through a glass
already laced with frost,
but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out
of lullabies.
But damn if there isn’t anything sexier
than a slender boy with a handgun,
a fast car, a bottle of pills.
7
What would you like? I’d like my money’s worth.
Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this—
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood
on the first four knuckles.
We pull our boots on with both hands
but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do
is stand on the curb and say Sorry
about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.
I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.
Further Reading:The ongoing Doklam standoff between India and China has to be seen in the larger context.
New Delhi/Beijing: After three months of standoff at Doklam India has agreed to expeditious disengagement of border personnel but not going to reduce the guard along the Indo-China border.
Disclosing that India showed its maturity by agreeing to deescalate the situation and China has also indicated its understanding, security sources engaged in diplomatic negotiations told this newspaper that possibility of China resorting to some other mischievous acts on other frontiers cannot be ruled out.
Informing that border guards have been asked to remain alert and vigilant to the activities of China, security sources said that there are indications of China continuing with its malicious campaign against India because of their internal political compulsions.
Earlier, spokesperson of external affairs ministry in a statement said, “In recent weeks, India and China have maintained diplomatic communication in respect of the incident at Doklam. During these communications, we were able to express our views and convey our concerns and interests.
On this basis, expeditious disengagement of border personnel at the face-off site in Doklam has been agreed-to and is ongoing.”
Pointing out that status quo in Doklam would be maintained, security sources said that both the countries have also agreed to continue their routine patrolling in the areas.
Refusing to divulge more on resolution of the standoff, security sources however said that it was a win-win situation for both the countries.
MEA Press Statement on Doklam Disengagement Understanding pic.twitter.com/fVo4N0eaf8 — Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) August 28, 2017
The move of resolving the standoff comes ahead of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Beijing for the 9th annual BRICS summit.
Meanwhile, China said it was "pleased" that India had agreed to withdraw troops from a disputed border with Bhutan following a months-long standoff in the Himalayas.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying confirmed that Indian troops and equipment had pulled back while "Chinese troops continue to patrol on the Chinese side of the boundary".
Chunying said, "China continues to exercise sovereignty. China will make adjustments according to the situation."
Asked if the Chinese statement means that China has not made any concession, officials in New Delhi said expeditious disengagement implies withdrawal of both parties because a unilateral withdrawal by India would not have needed or required an agreement with China.
The military standoff which began in mid June with India’s opposition to China’s road construction in Doklam, a disputed tri-junction point between India-Bhutan-China basically belongs to Bhutan but allegedly claimed by China as its territory.
Doklam is a few kilometres away from India’s strategically important Chicken neck passage, which connects mainland India with its northeastern part.
Small incursions and troop stand-offs are common along other parts of the contested 3,500-km (2,175-mile) frontier, but the recent impasse was marked by its length and the failure of talks to resolve the dispute, raising fears of a wider escalation as both neighbouring countries compete for influence.
The Nathu La Pass on the frontier between the Indian state of Sikkim and Chinese-controlled Tibet, was the site of a fierce border clash between Chinese and Indian troops in 1967.
(With agency inputs)Ed Miliband has warned that elderly Scots would be frozen out of the UK state pension system under the SNP’s flagship plan for sweeping economic freedoms from Westminster.
Retired Scots face losing £18 a week – or £940 a year – under the Nationalists’ proposals for full control over tax and spend in Scotland, the Labour leader warned on a trip to Edinburgh.
Fiscal autonomy will mean a £7.6 billion hole in Scotland’s finances. Ed Miliband
But the claims were branded “despicable scaremongering” by Deputy First Minister John Swinney, who said similar “smear” tactics during the referendum campaign had fuelled the current surge in support for the SNP.
New polls showed the SNP racing ahead in the election race north of the Border. They suggest 49 per cent of Scots are poised to vote for the Nationalists in next month’s UK’s election, with the Labour vote plunging to 25 per cent, which could leave Mr Miliband with only four Scottish seats.
Yesterday’s bitter exchanges appear to cast even more doubt on the prospect of any post-election deal between the SNP and Labour, after Mr Miliband said there was a “wide gulf” between the parties.
The SNP’s policy of “full fiscal autonomy” would effectively give Scotland complete freedom over taxes raised and how they are spent.
But it came under fire from Labour’s big guns as Mr Miliband was joined by shadow chancellor Ed Balls and Scottish party leader Jim Murphy to launch a dossier entitled Full Fiscal Austerity. It set out how the plan would mean a £7.6 billion “black hole” in Scotland’s public finances.
Mr Miliband said it would mean an end to the “pooling and sharing” of resources throughout the United Kingdom at a time when Scotland’s economy is struggling as a result of the global oil price crash.
It would be a “devastating blow for working people”, the Labour leader said.
“Today I challenge Nicola Sturgeon to set out how she will fill this £7.6 billion gap – which services will be cut?
“Which taxes will be raised and what cuts will it mean for pensioners in Scotland when they’re taken out of the UK pension system?”
Mr Miliband went on: “The SNP claims in this campaign to be proposing no reductions in spending – in fact they’re planning dramatic reductions in spending. They must come clean.”
SNP leader Ms Sturgeon said this week that Nationalist MPs would vote for full fiscal autonomy “next year” at Westminster, although the prospect of it being implemented seems remote, with Mr Miliband admitting he would block it. “I will never sell Scotland short by signing up to the SNP plan,” he said.
Labour was buoyed yesterday by three UK opinion polls giving them a national lead of between three and six points, after weeks in which the Tories appeared to be very slowly edging into a lead.
But the slump in support in Scotland could deny them the seats needed to form a majority government. However, the prospect of a working arrangement with the SNP is growing more unlikely, with a formal coalition already ruled out and disagreement over the renewal of the Clyde-based Trident nuclear weapons system likely to scupper a less formal “confidence and supply” arrangement.
“The gulf is very wide because they’ve got a totally different set of priorities: their priority is not social justice,” Mr Miliband said.
Mr Murphy stressed yesterday that the UK’s pensions were funded by UK taxpayers.
“Pensions contributions from today’s pensioners are paid in real time by today’s workers,” he said. “If Scotland removes itself from the UK tax system, we remove ourselves from the UK pension system.
“To suggest that we can have full fiscal autonomy and the UK pension system is to suggest that English, Welsh and Northern Irish workers should continue to pay for Scottish pensions and Scottish pensioners while we’ve stopped contributing into the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK.
“That argument asks the rest of the UK to share the risks while we refuse to share in the resources. Full fiscal |
of nearby Greenfield, said.
Sunny Singh, 21, of Milwaukee, said a friend pulled into the temple's parking lot, heard shots and saw two people fall down.
The friend then saw the shooter reload his weapons and head to the temple's entrance, Singh said.
The first police officer to arrive at the temple engaged in gunfire outside the building with a man police believe was the shooter, Wentlandt said. The suspect was killed, he said.
Tactical units went through the temple, and authorities do not believe a second shooter was involved, Wentlandt said.
Shot multiple times
It is unclear how many others were wounded. Wentlandt said he had been told the officer who exchanged gunfire with the suspect and another person had been taken to hospitals.
He said the officer was shot multiple times and is in surgery and is expected to survive.
The spokeswoman for the area trauma center said three victims were being treated there, including one who was in surgery.
Jatin Der Mangat, 38, of Racine, the nephew of the temple's president, Satwant Singh Kaleka, said his uncle was one of those shot, but he didn't know how serious his injuries were.
He was among those waiting for news when police announced the deaths.
"It was like the heart just sat down," he said. "This shouldn't happen anywhere."
Sukhwindar Nagr, also of Racine, said he called his brother-in-law's phone and a priest at the temple answered and told him that his brother-in-law had been shot, along with three priests.
The priest also said women and children were hiding in closets in the temple, Nagr said.
Wentlandt did not identify the suspect or say what might have motivated the shootings.
'Mistaken for Muslims'
Sikhism is a monotheistic faith that was founded in South Asia more than 500 years ago. It has roughly 27 million followers worldwide.
Observant Sikhs do not cut their hair; male followers often cover their heads with turbans - which are considered sacred - and refrain from shaving their beards.
There are roughly 500,000 Sikhs in the US, according to estimates. The majority worldwide live in India.
Sikh rights groups have reported a rise in bias attacks since the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
The Washington-based Sikh Coalition has reported more than 700 incidents in the US since then, which advocates blame on anti-Islamic sentiment.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Rajdeep Singh, policy adviser for the US-based Sikh Coalition, said that Sikhs in the US have been subjected to “hate crimes and other forms of discrimination” since the attacks in New York on September 11, 2001.
“It’s not just Sikhs, it’s also Arab Americans, Muslim Americans and south Asian Americans,” Singh said. “Unfortunately the prevailing stereotype these days is that if somebody wears a turban they’re somehow associated with extremism.
“That’s obviously not the case.”Yields on 10-year Treasury bonds have risen relentlessly since March when the Fed first announced its plan to buy $300bn (£188bn) of US government debt directly, a move that briefly forced rates down to nearly 2.5pc, a level thought to be the Fed's implicit target.
Yields have jumped to 3.69pc – after spiking as high as 3.74pc on Wednesday – pushing up the standard 30-year mortgage loan to 5.08pc and lifting the borrowing cost for corporations.
"The Fed is going to have to consider doubling its purchases of Treasuries," said Ashraf Laidi, from CMC Capital Markets. "We could be nearing the end-game for the US dollar but the Fed has little choice at this point. We're in a vicious circle where any policy aimed at supporting the US economy must be at the expense of the dollar."
The US Mortgage Bankers Association yesterday highlighted the fragility of the US housing market, reporting that 12pc of homeowners are either behind on their payments or facing foreclosure, the highest level since records began.
Almost 6pc of "prime" borrowers are in arrears, showing how far the crisis has moved beyond the sub-prime. Most arrears are caused by job losses. The US unemployment rate has reached 8.1pc, and is even higher under older definitions, running at 15.8pc under Clinton-era metrics.
It is unclear why US bond yields have spiked so violently, with spill-over effects on gilts and bunds. One camp of investors is worried that inflation is rearing its ugly head again: others fear a sovereign debt crisis as over-extended states loses their AAA ratings.
What is clear is that the market choked on $100bn of US Treasury debt issued in three auctions this week, and on the knowledge that Washington must raise a further $900bn by September. Governments around the world must fund $6 trillion of deficits this year, exhausting the capital markets.
The US is at the front of the firing line. Beijing is clearly losing its patience with the Fed's policy of printing paper, seen as a form of stealth default. There is some risk that further moves to step up quantitative easing could cause China to boycott US Treasury auctions. China and Japan together hold 23pc of all US federal debt.
Dallas Fed chief Richard Fisher said his recent trip to Asia was an eye opener. "Chinese government senior officials grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."SENATOR RAND PAUL ENDORSES GREG BRANNON for U.S. SENATE
“Dr. Brannon will stand up against the Washington establishment”
Raleigh, NC – Today, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) announced his endorsement of Dr. Greg Brannon for U.S. Senate in North Carolina.
“I enthusiastically endorse Greg Brannon for U.S. Senate because he’s a true constitutional conservative who will join me in fighting against business as usual in Washington.”
“Americans are looking for leaders who will honor their oath of office by fighting to ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution and Greg is the clear choice for conservatives in North Carolina.“
“The American people don’t want more politicians in the U.S. Senate who will continue to expand the size of government. We need Greg in the Senate to provide vital reinforcements to help reverse out-of-control spending, restore constitutional limitations on our federal government, and fight back against President Obama’s agenda.”
"And as Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and I showed clearly in our campaigns, when you run on principle and excite the grass-roots Republicans, and Independents and even Democrats hungry for a change, you win. That's why I support Greg Brannon, and expect him to be North Carolina's next Senator," concluded Senator Paul.
Senator Paul's endorsement is sure to take the Brannon campaign’s momentum to an all new level as conservative support from across the state has surged in recent weeks.
The pro-life Obstetrician’s campaign has energized conservatives who are excited to have an anti-establishment candidate in the race who will oppose the Big Government, big spending status quo in both political parties.
“I urge conservatives in the state of North Carolina and across the nation to rally around Greg Brannon by contributing generously to his campaign and joining the grassroots volunteer effort to ensure that there is a strong Constitutional conservative Senator from North Carolina,” said Paul.
Brannon thanked Senator Paul for his endorsement.
“I’m honored to receive the endorsement of Senator Paul, a true champion for liberty in Washington. Senator Paul has shown principled leadership in the U.S. Senate and I look forward to the opportunity to join him in this fight,” said Brannon.
Opportunities to speak with the candidate are available for members of the media upon request. Please contact Campaign Manager, Reilly O'Neal, at (919) 508-6087 or email press@gregbrannon.com with questions.Longtime trans advocate Naiymah A. Sanchez will serve on the city’s revived Police Advisory Commission, a civilian watchdog agency that investigates complaints of police misconduct.
Sanchez’ appointment, effective Oct. 16, was announced last week by Mayor Kenney’s press office.
The 13-member commission was without a trans commissioner for more than a decade, after the departure of trans woman Kathleen R. Padilla.
“I am privileged to be selected by the mayor to be a PAC commissioner,” Sanchez told PGN. “It is an honor not just for myself and my family but for the community to have a Latina trans woman on the commission — to make sure all of our voices are heard.”
Sanchez, a North Philadelphia resident, expressed a desire for improved police-community relations.
“A lot of communities don’t feel safe with the police,” she noted. “That’s to be understood. I’m hoping to improve that relationship. Being a minority, I feel that I bring an important perspective to the table — not only the perspective of the LGBTQ community but the Latina community.”
Sanchez also said she’ll try to help with transparency in the Nizah Morris case. Morris was a trans woman found with a fatal head wound in 2002, shortly after a police “courtesy ride.”
“I will raise my voice and see what we can do,” Sanchez said. “That’s true with any police-involved incidents and shootings.”
Padilla praised Sanchez’s appointment.
“I congratulate Ms. Sanchez and thank her for stepping up to provide her leadership. This commission is particularly in need of this voice. I also would like to thank Mayor Kenney for recognizing this need and always standing with transgender people.”
Sanchez will serve on a volunteer basis. She’s employed full-time as a trans-education coordinator for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
In addition to Sanchez, eight others were appointed by Kenney as new PAC commissioners: Shawn Aleong, a social-justice advocate; Erica D. Atwood, PAC’s interim director; Marvin R. Lazenbury, a human-services manager; Michael Rahming, an anti-violence advocate; George D. Mosee, former first-assistant district attorney; Bilal Abdul Qayyum, an anti-gun violence advocate; Sonia E. Velazquez, a retired police inspector; and Sarah Yeung, director of planning at Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation.
They’ll join four current PAC commissioners who’ve been reappointed: Mujeeb Chaudhary, a pharmacist and youth advocate; Benjamin D. Geffen, a civil-rights attorney; Ronda B. Goldfein, a legal advocate for people with HIV/AIDS; and Michael M. Wehrman, a community-police relations specialist.
In a related development, New York victim-rights advocate Hans Menos recently was hired to serve as PAC’s executive director, effective Oct. 2.
“We’re optimistic that the hiring of the new executive director and the appointment of a full complement of commissioners will enable the PAC to do its important work,” said Goldfein, who serves as PAC’s chair.
The PAC, established in 1994, has a six-member staff and an annual budget of about $200,000. In an Aug. 16 tweet, Kenney pledged to increase PAC’s budget and staff.
Menos, 34, currently works in New York City for Safe Horizon, which provides services to crime victims. His annual salary as PAC’s executive director will be $120,000.
On Feb. 3, then-PAC executive director Kelvyn Anderson resigned under a cloud, after allegedly having an inappropriate relationship with a woman who visited the PAC office for assistance.Mozilla has officially declared Firefox OS dead.
Today, in an email sent to developers, Mozilla said that “we will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the version 2.6 release” as well as ceasing to accept app submissions for Android, desktop or tablet to the marketplace from March 29.
According to that email, the devices team has “has been testing out a new product innovation process” which indicates a replacement platform may be on the way — but we’ll have to wait until sometime in the “first half of the year” to find out more.
The company says it will continue the “foxfooding” program that tests handsets, but it won’t be using a “Firefox OS build as we know it today.”
Firefox OS, which only got its first official device in 2013, will reach end of support in May with the company removing all staff and supporting team members from the project at that point.
It’s not a complete surprise, with Mozilla indicating an impending pivot in December, though this gives the project some finality.
The team admits that it was a hard decision, but says that “the main reason they are being made is to ensure we are focusing our energies and resources on bringing the power of the web to IoT.”
Developers and maintainers on the thread are extremely disappointed in the news, saying “please don’t throw the towel on phones” and that “killing off a community effort that finally had potential by removing every single person on staff from supporting it is utterly sad and disappointing.”
The cryptic “product innovation” process indicates Mozilla isn’t done yet, but it’s unclear what that really means.
➤ Firefox OS/Connected Devices Announcement [Mozilla]
Read next: Facebook cripples chat encryption app that promised users extra privacyTIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images Protesters wearing masks of Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin demonstrate in front of the U.N. Security Council building on Jan. 24, 2012.
WASHINGTON -- The last time he visited the U.S., in September of 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought the ideal message for war-weary observers of U.S. foreign policy.
At the United Nations' annual General Assembly, he indicated he wanted to address international players involved in the Middle East -- the most prominent of which, of course, is the U.S. In the region now, Putin said, "nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life."
"I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation: Do you realize now what you have done?"
Putin's message resonates in an America that believes most of the chaos in the Middle East is a result of U.S. actions. His view is especially popular among Americans skeptical of the elites who shape U.S. foreign policy.
That's why American politicians generally try to distance themselves from the most widely condemned product of that policy, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hillary Clinton’s vote in favor of the war is a big reason she lost the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. And this year, as Clinton again tries to play defense on that vote, political hopefuls wanting to show they are different from the establishment are making the same argument Putin did back in September.
Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the anti-establishment stars of 2016, have both bashed U.S. policies for enabling the rise of the self-styled Islamic State. Trump has directly accused President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton of "creating ISIS," implying the group grew from Obama's policy of supporting nationalist Syrian rebels opposed to dictator Bashar Assad. Though Sanders has stopped short of that claim, the Democratic hopeful has associated Clinton with ISIS by talking about the militant group as a product of the Iraq war and U.S. military intervention in Libya in 2011.
Bush's Iraq war and Obama's disastrous political mismanagement of the Iraqi state did offer radical militants space to operate, thousands of unhappy potential recruits, and weak targets to attack to gain advanced American weaponry.
But by focusing on only those reasons for ISIS's success, critics of American foreign policy are adopting the same view they ascribe to Clinton and other interventionists: that the U.S. is responsible for everything.
Putin's particular style of disinformation relies heavily on that assumption to sow international distrust of American actions. Now a fascinating report from Reuters challenges it. It turns Putin's question back at him: Do you realize what you have done?
Dennis Van Tine/MediaPunch/MediaPunch/IPx Putin made headlines worldwide by blaming the U.S. for Middle East chaos in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last year.
The news agency revealed on Friday that the Russian government has had a deliberate policy of sending radicalized Islamists out of Russia -- which means they inevitably end up in the central hub of militant extremism, Syria. In one case, officials allowed a militant placed under house arrest to make it to Moscow's international airport and start a journey that would end in his joining ISIS's ranks. In five of the instances Reuters tracked, "Russian authorities had reason to deny [radicals] travel documents and prevent them from leaving the country. But according to relatives and local officials, in each case the authorities made their passage possible."
Putin's government adopted this policy in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi because of its fear that radical Islamists would target the marquee event. The scheme ran at least until then, Reuters reported. But it had important consequences regardless of when it ended: A local police officer told the news agency that dozens more Russian radicals left the country after their fellow extremists reached Syria and encouraged them to make the same journey. Again, the militants were able to leave even though Russian authorities had flagged them as individuals of concern.
Thousands of terrorists of Russian origin are now thought to be operating in Syria.
Putin's spokesman denied the revelations. "Terrorists get annihilated in Russia," he told Reuters. "It has always been like that, it is like that and it will be in the future.”
But the findings aren't surprising given Russia's general approach in Syria and its policies toward radical Islamists at home. Putin and Russia-friendly Assad have long described the Syrian conflict as a fight between a government and an irredeemably extreme foreign-funded opposition, rather than the product of millions of Syrians' frustration with violent authoritarian rule.
Assad has done his best to make that false binary a reality. His forces have avoided attacking ISIS-controlled areas, even concluding land swaps with the militant group, as they have targeted more moderate groups in the opposition who present a viable alternative to Assad or ISIS for Syria's future. He has repeatedly released hardcore prisoners, including extremists once nurtured by his own security agencies. And his government has boosted ISIS coffers by buying oil from the radical group.
Reuters' new report shows that Putin adopted the same approach -- likely making a similar calculation that allowing extremists to gain power was acceptable if it would make the Assad regime look like the best option in Syria. For Russia, the policy had the added benefit of moving potential threats far away. Putin's government has struggled with how to handle radicalization among Russia's millions-strong Muslim population, and its primary response -- severe crackdowns and violations of human rights -- has simply encouraged more radicalization.
This means that in spite of Moscow's slick #RussiaVsISIL propaganda campaign, designed to present its military intervention in Syria as a fight against the best-known radical group there, there's growing evidence that Putin is helping ISIS thrive.
The new reporting doesn’t even account for how Putin has helped the group recruit fighters worldwide by supporting Assad's butchery. Regime excesses, enabled and supported by Russia, have for years made armed struggle against the Syrian dictator seem like a noble cause.
The new Reuters report is unlikely to change Russian policy. Most Russians buy Putin's nationalist, xenophobic rhetoric and doubt Western reporting on his government, and outside players have known for months that Russia's “fight against terror” in Syria is really about helping Assad.
But it does weaken an important part of Russia's attempt to remain influential abroad as its economy crumbles and its population ages: cheap, effective information warfare.Reuters US Democratic presidential candidate and US Senator Bernie Sanders.
In 2006 I wasn't exactly "feeling the Bern" when I voted for Bernie Sanders in the US Senate Election for one of Vermont's two seats. He was simply the most appealing candidate when compared to a ludicrously wealthy Republican businessman and the representatives from the "Marijuana Party" and the "Anti-Bush Party".
As a disenchanted Republican clinging to my evangelical Christian faith in a state that actually isn't as liberal as many suspect, I was won over by Sanders' reputation for diligently governing by enacting policies that improved the quality of life for his constituents—especially the poor and working poor.
Comparing the Sanders campaign of 2006 to his bid for the Democratic nomination in America's 2016 presidential election, the main difference is the absence of BBQ chicken dinners at the local park. Rather, there are rallies with upwards of 20,000 people at a time.
The policy goals, communication style, and wild wisps of white hair are more or less the same as before. It's possible that the political landscape is finally ready for a figure like Sanders, even for a segment of the evangelical voting bloc that has typically belonged to Republicans.
As Sanders prepares to speak at the conservative bastion of Liberty University, his policies line up surprisingly well with the values of many millennial evangelical voters and, for good measure, Catholic teachings.
That isn't to say that the majority of evangelicals will defect from the Republican Party when they "feel the Bern". The majority will stay put.
Rather, Sanders is positioned to prompt a sizeable minority of Christian voters, especially Millennials, to do what seemed unthinkable at the height of the Tea Party movement in 2010: vote for a socialist.
Mind you, Sanders is a Democratic socialist, far from a Soviet Era style dictator and, arguably, different from a "pure" socialist in the first place. However, the Tea Party stoked the fears of Christians on the right by calling President Obama, a centrist Democrat if there ever was one, an extreme socialist.
The idea of an extreme socialist president called to mind images of Christian schools being shut down, preachers being tossed into jail, and laws banning the sale and reading of the Bible. Within this worldview, a larger socialist government is just a single piece of legislation away from banning Christianity altogether in America.
When Federal Marshals jailed county clerk Kim Davis for refusing to follow the Supreme Court's ruling to issue same sex marriage licenses, she became the sign of what's coming to America when "big government" goes out of control persecuting Christians.
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Today, Sanders bears the label of big government socialist proudly. In fact, he'd probably say, "Yeah, but..." and then go on a tirade about fixing income inequality, bringing jobs back to America, raising the minimum wage, addressing climate change, and repairing our infrastructure. The terror of five years ago has become a non-story with Sanders who would rather rant about policy than argue with culture warriors.
As Sanders doggedly presses forward by focusing on what he will do rather than what his opponents can't, he stands to at least win a hearing among evangelical voters, especially the particularly large Millennial cohort in America that leans strongly Democrat even if evangelicals as a whole remain majority Republican.
Sanders won't win many points among the bulk of evangelical voters since he won't ban abortion, but his proposal to expand health care would put a significant dent in abortions by providing wider access to contraception (a proven policy even in America) and abortion isn't a make or break issue among younger evangelicals. His vocal opposition to the Iraq War appeals to the evangelical pacifists and opponents of militarism. While Sanders has long supported same sex marriage, many younger evangelicals simply aren't galvanized by this issue. Rather, they're concerned about finding affordable healthcare, finding better jobs, and caring for God's creation. Most importantly, they want the government to help.
For evangelicals concerned about social justice issues, it's hard to ignore income inequality, the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to America's impoverished neighborhoods, and the need to increase the minimum wage. For voters prioritizing these issues, Sanders and his version of Democratic socialism may lose its frightening red veneer.
At this point in the election Sanders is still a long shot in a volatile primary season. Good heavens, Donald Trump is still the Republican front runner, and we can only pray that won't last. A lot can change in a month or two—please?
However, if Sanders does manage to keep his campaign alive, he may provide an important turning point in evangelical demographics as the values of younger voters unfazed by a socialist further carve up an already fragmented movement. Perhaps he'll even convince Republican strategists that you can't win an election by rallying the evangelical camp with homophobia, xenophobia, and militarism.
Ed Cyzewski (MDiv) is the author of Coffeehouse Theology, A Christian Survival Guide, and The Good News of Revelation. He writes at www.edcyzewski.com.The entire Sailor Moon x Peach John collaboration set 2 is revealed on Premium Bandai, it includes 17 new pieces! There is a Princess Serenity dress, Black Lady dress, school uniform dresses for Usagi, Ami, Rei, Makoto, Minako and costume lingerie sets with skirts for all 10 senshi. Since these are made by Peach John, the dresses are short and soft, meant for lounging and inside use.
Princess Serenity dress: empire dress with gold embroidery on the chest, chiffon puff sleeves, built-in bra pads, one size: B75cm ~ 84cm, measures 113cm long, retail price: 14,018 yen
Black Lady dress: sleeves are sheer chiffon, there’s a slit up the leg, comes with a choker, built-in bra pads, one size: B75cm ~ 84cm, measures 110cm long, retail price: 9,698 yen
School uniform dresses: depending on the character the design is scarf, ribbon or lace-up, all above the knee length, fabric is a little stretchy, one size: B75cm ~ 84cm, measures 82cm long, retail price: 5,378 yen each
Senshi bra/skirt lingerie sets: 4 pieces (bra, panties, skirt, choker), made in shiny and stretchy material, sizes range from B65 to F75, retail price: 7,538 yen each
All of these items are scheduled for release in March 2015. If you live in Japan you can preorder directly from Premium Bandai. If you live outside Japan you’ll need a deputy service: step by step guide.It was announced on Thursday that the Miami Marlins will be erecting a bronze statue of late pitcher Jose Fernandez. While on the surface this looks like a good way to pay tribute to the fallen star, but this is not a good look for the Marlins or baseball in general. Let me preface this by saying that the tragedy that took place last fall is not lost on me at all and I was devastated to hear the news. That being said, we cannot turn a blind eye to the circumstances around Fernandez’s untimely death.
We now know that Fernandez and his two friends died when their boat struck a grouping of rocks while going at a high speed. However, we found out that Fernandez was believed to have been driving at the time of the crash while drunk and with cocaine in his system.
What kind of message are we sending if we are immortalizing players whose reckless actions cost them their lives as well as the lives of those around them?
Yes we all make mistakes, but we are not all looked up to the way professional athletes are in our society. By immortalizing players like Jose Fernandez we are telling our kids that it doesn’t matter if you’re reckless and take the lives of others as long as you are a successful player.
Not to add insult to insult to injury, but Fernandez only played four seasons in the majors and that is not enough to be remembered forever. Yes there are plenty of examples of players with short careers who we immortalize, but they also contributed off the field.
Jose Fernandez was a very good player with a future as bright as the sun, but we cannot let a short period of on the field dominance overshadow his tragic off the field mistake. So I, and many other baseball fans urge the Miami Marlins to reconsider their decision to immortalize Jose Fernandez because what he did off the field casts a very large shadow over his accomplishments on it.Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature "Taste Tests." Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com.
Every week, we here at The A.V. Club's Taste Test labs selflessly subject ourselves to foodstuffs so misguided that they must have been dreamt up by a cartoonish mad scientist who gave up on global domination in favor of a career of merely disgusting the masses. Who else would be behind a beverage as diabolical-tasting as Jeppson's Malört?
But, at the risk of prematurely tainting your opinion of this urine-colored liqueur, here's what the beverage coyly has to say for itself on the label: "Jeppson's Malört has the aroma and full-bodied flavor of an unusual botanical. Its bitter taste is savored by two-fisted drinkers." Now, calling it "bitter" is generous: At 70-proof with indistinct ingredients, this is rotgut of the most potent and foulest order. There's a good reason its ingredients are left a mystery: Supposedly, it's flavored with wormwood—the very herb used for the highly potent and hallucination-inducing absinthe, which until recently was illegal in this country.
Still, it's been on The A.V. Club's radar for a while—our headquarters are in Chicago, and so was the Carl Jeppson company's, until they moved to Florida, where they remain the sole distributor of it in the United States. But it wasn't until we caught John Hodgman's recent appearance at Second City behind the excellent More Information Than You Require that we were inspired to go under the knife with this libation: Hodgman thrilled his audience there by reading aloud from the bottle and speaking about the drink's curative abilities for pretty much everything. He proceeded to pass two bottles around the audience while he swirled a snifter of it onstage the rest of the night; any fears of spreading germs are moot, as Malört smells strongly of antiseptic and formaldehyde.
When asked via e-mail to expand on Malört, Hodgman had this to say: "All I can tell you about Malört is that I first bought it for a Chicago-themed Little Gray Book Lecture. I don't recall who recommended it to me, but I had to have it shipped to New York. Imagine jägermeister heavily diluted in pondwater, but less piney, and that about describes it. What makes me sad is that it is not available in nip bottles. That is the only thing that would make it more depressing, weird, and marvelous. I brought a bottle for my first Second City appearance in 2006. By popular demand, we had two bottles at my second appearance last month. Next time, I'm expecting a Malört fountain."
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The taste: Maybe Hodgman's eternal quest for complete world knowledge goes hand-in-hand with his unquenchable desire for Malört, but A.V. Clubbers unanimously could not stomach it. Within a single sip, reactions swiftly went from "I can't see how it can be that bad" to sputtering and near-vomiting. Here's intern Ellie Cunningham, A.V. Clubber Kyle Ryan, and Internet Eating Sensation Dave Chang taking their maiden taste:
Indeed, it seems harmless at first, but it proceeds to invade your innards immediately upon consumption with an unbearable, cringe-inducing bitterness that sticks with you for a worrying amount of time. (It also began to eat its way through our paper cups, which was even scarier.) Words do little to communicate how vile Malört truly is, and as proof we aren't just a bunch of namby-pambies, here's roughly 200 reaction shots to ingesting this hateful demon-drink on the "Malört face" Flickr pool.
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Office reactions:
· [Wincing.] "It's foul. I think people in prison make better alcohol than this."
· "It tastes like extreme dirt. Not just dirt, but dirt that's been super-charged."
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· "It tastes like poison. Real poison."
· "Don't get me wrong: This shit is awful, but I expected instant revulsion from my whole being. But really, the alcohol taste is so overwhelming that you don't get anything at first. Then it just lingers and strengthens on your tongue."
· "It's been a few minutes now, and I still kind of have the shakes. That's a bad sign."
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· "It's exactly like eating a tire fire."
· "It has an initial nail-polish-remover flavor, and then… nothing. Then it tastes like a cigarette got put out on your tongue."
· "It kind of settles into the back of your mouth and then crawls down your throat like an acidic slug."
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· "If someone offers you a shot of this, start running. This person is not your friend. A.V. Club writers excepted."
· "I can feel my tongue getting numb. It's like my mouth is creating a defense mechanism against a second sip."
· "Reminds me of that time I chewed a Tylenol Gelcap. It puts a little stain on your soul that won't wash off."
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· "Ah! It tastes like death!" [Runs around the room looking for something to replace the taste.]
Where to find it: Binnys.com for $15.99 plus shipping, but only if you've exhausted slower methods of killing your liver.MZPN and FOIPN (Forum Opportunitijaet Indaqs Partit Nazzjonalista) said today they were four-square with Opposition leader Simon Busuttil in his push to bring about gay marriage.
"We note that this position is consistent with calls from the PN leader 12 months ago, and is a position which we back out of a true sense of responsibility and belief," the groups were quoted as saying in a PN statement.
Civil Liberties Minister Helena Dalli said yesterday that gay marriage could soon be introduced in Malta as a Marriage Equality Bill is in the process of being drafted. The Civil Partnership law already gives partners the same rights as married couples.
The MZPN and FOIPN said their support was one built on a genuine belief that same-sex marriage is a civil right for all, and is not a belief borne out of political convenience.
"Panama-Papers-embroiled Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has voiced his ‘support’ for the sensitive issue of same sex marriage just twice in the past year, the first time when the Panama Papers issue broke out in the local scene, and once more yesterday when the Pana Committee investigating his close friends and allies confirmed that suspicions of money-laundering existed in his team," the observed.2k has been notoriously quiet about what exactly their attributes do and what their numbers really mean. NBA2kLab.com was started with the goal of shedding a little more light on these subjects so that our readers could have every advantage available to dominate online play. After months of research here are the top 5 little known advantages you can give yourself in NBA2k.
5. Plus 1s
Most 2k players would agree that 95 is the player rating cap for all non-superstar players and 96 is the cap for players at the superstar 1 rating. However this is not the case. Players who max every +1 attribute that can be earned by going to practices have the ability to get to 96 overall before superstar 1 and 97 overall as a superstar 1. There are 9 different attributes you will need to max to get to this next level.
Free Throw – Play the Free Throw Gold game in team practices. Players can only earn one free throw attribute per team practice. Different positions cap at different levels.
Reaction Time – Do the Gatorade Reaction Time Drill in the weight room. You can fail the drill and still get +1 each time, but only once per practice. The minimum amount of effort to still received gold “Doin’ Work” is get at least 6 on the first half of the drill, and 0 on the second half. This is the quickest way to complete the drill.
Offensive Consistency – We will go into further details in a moment, but you can only do this drill every other team practice, and it only gives +1 every other attempt. This one is a grind, but worth it.
Draw Foul, Shot IQ, Intangibles, Hands – You earn these by doing the tasks in practice. You can start the drill and cancel it to earn the +1. It takes three tasks to earn one of the attributes. We are looking into Shot IQ and Intangibles to see what they do exactly, but we have some information on Hands and Draw Foul. Draw Foul is not a sim stat, you will be more calls the higher it gets. We tested a player with 40 draw foul and they drew a foul on 17% of drives. We duplicated that player and gave them 99 draw foul and they drew a foul on 35.5% of their drives. While this is not crucial for Park, ProAm players should take advantage of draw foul to earn some free points at the line. This is a huge increase making it worth it to max. The Hands stat will help you to catch passes cleanly and not fumble them and will reduce the frequency of rebounds bouncing off your hands which can be incredibly frustrating.
Stamina and Hustle – You earn these two by doing the workouts in the weight room. You will get one of them for every fifth workout you complete. Increase stamina will let you sprint for a longer period of time and it will replenish your stamina bar more quickly. Hustle will help you with recovering loose balls and rebounding.
If you grind all of these stats to 99 you will see subtle improvements in your MyPlayer and you will hit that next overall rating.
4. Strength
One of the questions we get asked the most is “Is this attribute worth upgrading”? And most of the time that attribute is Strength. We are big fans of increasing strength and have been doing it for the past few 2ks. So, what does strength help with besides “making you stronger”?
The largest quantifiable increase was in made dunks/layups. For testing strength, we used a 6’6 player with slasher attribute caps and Hall of Fame posterizer dunking on a team of 7’3 glass cleaners with bronze rim protector. Any attempt that resulted in a missed shot due to a foul was thrown out. Below are the results from this test
STRENGTH RATING MADE DUNKS MADE LAYUPS MISSED ATTEMPTS 70 26% 25% 49% 65 20% 26% 54% 60 19% 22% 57% 55 15% 26% 59% 50 5% 29% 66%
As you can see, having higher strength greatly helps with the success of dunks and the chance of a shot going in. While it may appear that the number of made layups went down that is only due to the increased frequency of getting layup animations as opposed to dunk animations.
Strength also has benefits in areas that are more difficult to quantify.
Boxing out – Strength will help keep your man from slipping past you for the rebound. On the flip side, if you are |
, but sheep, cattle, deer and chicken manures are all good too. Don\’t be tempted to use dog or cat manure as these can carry diseases that could be passed on to your vegetables and then to you. Ideally, the manure should be at least six weeks old before you spread it, but if fresh is what you have then use it and delay your plantings for a few weeks. Spread a thick layer, about 15cm or 6 inches deep, over your cardboard. Water it well.
Your new soil also needs some mineral content. I like to use river sand as the next layer over the manure. You could also use regular topsoil from your garden but be aware that it probably contains weed seeds too. It doesn\’t need to be as thick as the manure but get as much as you can on there. Water this well too.
Your new bed now needs a barrier to stop all that water evaporating into the atmosphere rather than going to your plants. Mulching is the answer. Just about any organic matter will do for this. Think about what you have available. I have used straw, seaweed, untreated grass clippings, leaves saved from the previous autumn, chipped bark, even hair from the local barber shop floor. Women\’s hairdressers are not such a good source of mulch, as many more women use strong chemical dyes. You want to spread this as thickly as possible too.
When you plant out your vegetables it\’s often a good idea to buy a small pack of sterile organic seed raising mix. Make a depression in the mulch about the size of a coffee mug, place your seedling into it and bed in with the mix. This gives the small and vulnerable plant a chance to get established before it has to contend with the inevitable weeds.
At the end of each growing season you will need to replenish the nutrients in your soil. Simply repeat the layering of manure, sand and mulch and you will continually improve the quality of your soil.Finance Minister Bill Morneau is getting low performance ratings and many Canadians want him to step aside as the Trudeau government faces a crisis of credibility over whether its economic policies are helping low- and middle-income Canadians, according to a new opinion poll.
A substantial majority of Canadians also say conflict-of-interest laws should be rewritten to require all federal cabinet ministers to divest assets and put them in a blind trust.
About four out of 10 Canadians believe Liberal economic policies are most beneficial to upper-income Canadians rather than the middle class and poor for which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likes to cast himself as the chief defender.
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Read also: Ethics Commissioner launches examination of alleged Morneau conflict over pension bill
When asked by Nanos Research whom Liberal economic policies are helping, 41 per cent of those polled said upper-income Canadians, 17 per cent said lower-income Canadians and 14 per cent identified middle-income earners.
The poll of 1,000 Canadians was conducted for The Globe and Mail from Nov. 4 to Nov. 7 after the Liberals reversed course on controversial small-business tax reforms and Mr. Morneau landed in the centre of an ethical scandal over the handling of his family's wealth and federal pension legislation.
Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson announced on Friday that she is launching a formal examination into Mr. Morneau's role in the finance department's drafting of the Bill C-27 pension bill and his decision as Minister to sponsor it in Parliament.
"Research suggests the government's economic narrative has been overshadowed by controversies related to the proposed changes to the tax rules on small corporations, and the personal finances of the minister of finance," pollster Nik Nanos told The Globe.
"Four in 10 Canadians think it's time for a new minister of finance, and only a minority believe the government is working to help middle- and lower-class Canadians."
The Liberal government has faced weeks of relentless grilling in Parliament and tough criticism in editorial pages after The Globe revealed in October that Mr. Morneau used a loophole in the Conflict of Interest Act to avoid putting his substantial holdings in a blind trust.
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The Finance Minister's ethical troubles are hurting his credibility with 40 per cent of Canadians saying it is time for a new finance minister, while 29 per cent say he should stay and 31 per cent are unsure.
The Nanos survey is considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, plus or minus, 19 times out of 20.
Mr. Morneau had left the impression for two years that his wealth was in a blind trust at the same time he sponsored Bill C-27 pension reform legislation that conceivably could benefit Morneau Shepell, a large human resource and pension management firm where he had been executive chair and still held one million shares valued at more than $20-million.
Mr. Morneau subsequently sold his shares and is in the process of setting up a blind trust. He also promised to donate $5-million to charity on profits earned on the Morneau Shepell shares since becoming Finance Minister.
When he was running Morneau Shepell, Mr. Morneau was a high-profile advocate for this type of legislation that would enable federally regulated businesses to create "target benefit" pension plans that lower the monetary liability for employers by shifting risk to employees. The proposed law would require actuarial valuations every year for this type of plan, which could also mean more work for firms such as Morneau Shepell.
The ethics screen called for Mr. Morneau's chief of staff to tell the Finance Minister when he had to recuse himself from discussions that involved his former company. Mr. Morneau said he did not recuse himself from discussions about Bill C-27.
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The Nanos poll found 70 per cent of Canadians believe Mr. Morneau should have sold his assets and put them in a blind trust in 2015, immediately before he entered cabinet. Only 10 per cent somewhat disagree while 9 per cent disagree and 6 per cent were unsure.
Significantly, 86 per cent of Canadians said it was important or somewhat important that cabinet ministers place personal assets in a blind trust when they join cabinet.
The number of Canadians who "want cabinet ministers to make sure their assets are sold or in a blind trust is high," Mr. Nanos said. "Likewise, a significant majority of Canadians believe Morneau should have sold or put his assets in a blind trust back in 2015. It shouldn't be a surprise that Canadians are more likely to think that it is time for a new minister of finance, rather than thinking Morneau has done a good job and should stay."
Conflict-of-interest law in Canada requires cabinet ministers to divest assets such as publicly traded shares by selling them in an arm's-length transaction or putting them in a blind trust beyond reach until they leave office.
The exception, according to the Ethics Commissioner's office, is if these shares or similar assets are held indirectly through a holding company or similar mechanism.
Ms. Dawson has been asking since 2013 for the loophole to be closed.
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Adding to the perception that the Liberals are out of touch with ordinary Canadians were recent revelations in the Paradise Papers that the Liberal party chief fundraiser, billionaire Stephen Bronfman, had ties to an offshore trust in the Cayman Islands, an allegation he has denied.
Mr. Bronfman said he had no direct or indirect involvement with the trust other than an arm's-length loan made more than 25 years ago that was repaid five months later.
The Prime Minister has come under fire for his holidays at the private Bahamian island owned by the Aga Khan, a billionaire philanthropist and spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Muslims.5 JDK Tools Every Java Developer Should Know
Last modified on November 17th, 2014 by Joe.
Java JDK has many tools bundled into it. Needles to say java.exe and javac.exe are used by all developers and can be easily counted as popular Java tools. Along with these there are many tools Java JDK presents us. Most of those tools are never used by a normal Java developer. If they are put into effective use, they can save lot of productive hours.
Following is a screen shot of tools present in the Java SE 8 JDK. They are there for a purpose and as a Java developer we should know about them. I have listed the Java tools available in JDK in the previous tutorial. To help you start with, I am presenting you 5 tools that I feel are most important from them.
javap jvisualvm jcmd jhat Oracle Java Mission Control
It’s a conscious decision to omit java, javac, jar, javadoc from the 5 JDK tools to know. Similarly jvisualvm, jcmd combines many tools into one.
1. javap
javap is a Java class file disassembler. Let us compile the following Hello World Java program and disassemble it.
public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String... args) { System.out.println("Hello World!"); } }
C:\Users\Cycle\Desktop>javap HelloWorld
I just ran the javap tool without passing any additional parameters and got the following output. By default it prints the package, protected, public fields and methods of the Java class.
Compiled from "HelloWorld.java" public class HelloWorld { public HelloWorld(); public static void main(java.lang.String...); }
C:\Users\Cycle\Desktop>javap -c HelloWorld
If we pass –c as argument to javap, then we get the byte code as output. This is nice information, the instructions that are printed help us to learn JVM better.
Compiled from "HelloWorld.java" public class HelloWorld { public HelloWorld(); Code: 0: aload_0 1: invokespecial #1 // Method java/lang/Object." ":()V 4: return public static void main(java.lang.String...); Code: 0: getstatic #2 // Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream; 3: ldc #3 // String Hello World! 5: invokevirtual #4 // Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/String;)V 8: return }
2. jvisualvm
jvisualvm is a Java virtual machine monitoring and profiling tool. This provides a graphical interface and provides the runtime information of Java applications in visual manner. This actually combines many tools like jmap, jinfo, jstat, jstack, JConsole into one. jvisualvm was made available with standard Java distribution from JDK 6 Update 7.
Under the hood, it uses these tools to gather information and present in a visual manner. There are plug-ins available that enhances its features. It is a handy tool when we troubleshoot a Java application that is having performance issues. MBeans functionality is useful in many a situations and it can be enabled by installing a plug-in.
In a pervious tutorial about Java garbage collection monitoring and analysis, I used jvisualvm. You can have a look at it to know how to use jvisualvm.
3. jcmd
jcmd is used to send diagnostic command request to the Java JVM. When we run jcmd without arguments it lists the JVM processes that are running at the moment. This is equal to the jps tool. I started jconsole and then used it to get the following output by passing it as argument to jcmd. It can also be done via the process id (pid).
C:\Users\Cycle>jconsole C:\Users\Cycle>jcmd JConsole help 3344: The following commands are available: JFR.stop JFR.start JFR.dump JFR.check VM.native_memory VM.check_commercial_features VM.unlock_commercial_features ManagementAgent.stop ManagementAgent.start_local ManagementAgent.start Thread.print GC.class_stats GC.class_histogram GC.heap_dump GC.run_finalization GC.run VM.uptime VM.flags VM.system_properties VM.command_line VM.version help
C:\Users\Cycle>jcmd JConsole VM.uptime 3344: 289.977 s
I grabbed the above argument from the help output just listed above. VM.uptime shows the uptime of the Java application.
Following arguments give the thread stack dump with the concurrent locks and it can be useful while debugging.
jcmd <pid> Thread.print -l
4. jhat
jhat is Java heap analysis tool. It is used to parse and browse a heap dump file. Sometimes jhat is preferable over the visual tools. jhat parses the heap dump and launches a webserver. Then we can browse the dump in a browser. jhat supports object query language (oql) and also some pre-designed queries. Help for OQL can be obtained by
http://localhost:7000/oql/
http://localhost:7000/oqlhelp/
jmap tool to generate heap dump. We should use the -dump option. Following are the available options for the jhat tool.
C:\Users\Cycle>jhat -help Usage: jhat [-stack ] [-refs ] [-port ] [-baseline ] [-debug ] [-version] [-h|-help] -J Pass directly to the runtime system. For example, -J-mx512m to use a maximum heap size of 512MB -stack false: Turn off tracking object allocation call stack. -refs false: Turn off tracking of references to objects -port : Set the port for the HTTP server. Defaults to 7000 -exclude : Specify a file that lists data members that should be excluded from the reachableFrom query. -baseline : Specify a baseline object dump. Objects in both heap dumps with the same ID and same class will be marked as not being "new". -debug : Set debug level. 0: No debug output 1: Debug hprof file parsing 2: Debug hprof file parsing, no server -version Report version number -h|-help Print this help and exit The file to read For a dump file that contains multiple heap dumps, you may specify which dump in the file by appending "# " to the file name, i.e. "foo.hprof#3". All boolean options default to "true"
I created a heap dump file for the jconsole application that is running with process id 3344 using the following command.
jmap -dump:format=b,file=heap.bin 3344
Now the heap file is ready and to analyze it, run the following command and it will start a server
jmap -dump:format=b,file=heap.bin 3344
Following will be the output in the console
C:\Users\Cycle\Desktop>jhat heap.bin Reading from heap.bin... Dump file created Sun Nov 16 19:26:35 IST 2014 Snapshot read, resolving... Resolving 641209 objects... Chasing references, expect 128 dots.................. Eliminating duplicate references..................... Snapshot resolved. Started HTTP server on port 7000 Server is ready.
Now, go to the following URL in a browser
http://localhost:7000/
Now we can navigate and get details from the heap dump. For example, the heap memory histogram can be analyzed at http://localhost:7000/histo/
5. Oracle Java Mission Control
As part of the JVM convergence strategy which is to unify the HotSpot, JRockit VMs, the JRockit Mission Control is now available with the standard Java SE. It was made available in Java JDK 7 Update 40. An important thing to note is the license agreement. It is free for development and evaluation use. For production use, a license is required from Oracle. This can be considered as a super-set tool for all analysis and debug purposes.
Java mission control works along with the Java Flight Recorder. This is available with the HotSpot JVM and it records key statistics and events. It is a profiling tool and available with the Oracle JDK. When there is an issue, this data can be used for analysis. Since the JMC utilizes the Java Flight Recorder data, it has a minimal footprint. JFR is the one that forces the production license use. Using JFR on a production server requires a commercial license. Let see if Oracle will makes it free in future.Police: North suburban woman killed son, took body on train to Chicago
A north suburban woman killed her 6-year-old son last summer, according to police, then got on a train with the dead boy and another child to visit relatives in Chicago, who noticed the child was not breathing.
Jamie L. Jones, 29, was charged Monday with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of concealment of a homicidal death, according to Round Lake Beach police.
On July 1, Jones “caused injuries” to her son, Carl Rice, at their Round Lake Beach home, resulting in the boy’s death, police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. Jones then took Carl and her other child on a train to visit relatives in Chicago.
While in Chicago, family members noticed Rice was not breathing and called 911, but paramedics were unsuccessful in their attempts to revive the child, according to Round Lake Beach and Chicago police.
Carl was pronounced dead at the scene, the medical examiner’s office said. An autopsy did not initially rule on cause or manner of death, with results pending further studies.
But on Friday, the medical examiner’s office said the boy died of multiple injuries caused by child abuse, and ruled his death a homicide.
Detectives arrested Jones on Saturday on a Lake County warrant for failure to appear for a battery charge, Round Lake Beach police said. She was taken into custody for the warrant and held until she was charged Monday with Carl’s murder.
Rice was ordered held on a $3 million bond in court Tuesday, according to the Lake County state’s attorney’s office. She is next scheduled to appear in court at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 30.
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was investigating the boy’s death, a spokeswoman said at the time. DCFS had not had prior contact with the child or his family.Mr Ibrahim said his business suffered for four years when the Legacy Way tunnel was under construction and had hoped for better years ahead. "My team took up the Botanical lease in good faith," he said. "New plans for a grand venue to optimise the environment were drawn up at our own expense, only for the BCC to push back with such unreasonable demands and ultimatums that we are forced (to) exit." But deputy mayor Adrian Schrinner said they included requirements to improve the facility over a five-year period that were agreed to last December when Mr Ibrahim signed a heads of agreement, which preceded a formal lease. "All the stuff (in the agreement) is pretty standard in the industry and they certainly didn't believe it was unreasonable last year when they signed the document," Cr Schrinner said.
"Both parties agreed to the offer, both parties signed off and it came to civic cabinet to endorse the agreement in December. "Everything was proceeding. Council started investing in improvements agreed to as part of that deal, including a storage facility the operator mentioned they needed." Cr Schrinner said the saga had left him confused and wondering what had changed in recent months. "They've essentially withdrawn from the deal and reneged on the document that they signed," he said. "It's a bit baffling. We had a deal, both parties agreed to it, and now they've withdrawn from that deal.
"Everything was on track and I can't understand why they've pulled out of this deal." But Mr Ibrahim said the actual lease, as presented to him, was "a lot more intimate" than the agreement he signed. "Some of the things the council put on that became intangible for us," he said. Cr Schrinner said he acknowledged the construction of the Legacy Way tunnel had an impact on the business, but now the work was completed there was a "real opportunity" for the restaurant to thrive. The council would go out to tender to find a new long-term operator, Cr Schrinner said, but would try to make do in the meantime.
"Probably, there will be a short-term arrangement where we temporarily appoint an operator to run for about six months, so someone will go in there, serve coffees and keep the café running along," he said. "But, ideally, we want someone in there on a longer-term basis, so we're talking a five- or 10-year lease, where that operator will go in, invest in the furniture and fit-out to create a really high-quality facility." To that, Mr Ibrahim said simply, "good luck". "I don't know how they can do that," he said. "The bar and the kitchen and all the equipment belongs to me, so it's my responsibility to make good to remove all of that out of the building.
"It's a large investment for someone to do that." Mr Ibrahim said he would not recommend another operator try their luck with the venue. "The last operator walked out, we just walked out – what does that tell you about dealing with this council?" he said. "I was going to invest a substantial amount of money with a much higher rent. "Good luck finding anyone nationally who will pay the rent they expected us to pay."
Mr Ibrahim said he could not legally discuss the rent figure. "What I can say is that there is no way any operator would do it," he said. "…The only offer they've made us is pay more rent and spend more money. They didn't even say you must build to design – they said you must spend a set amount of money."Tyronn Lue was frustrated with his team’s lackadaisical performance. After weeks of playing unselfish basketball and convincingly winning their best-of-seven series, his squad was getting away from the smart shots and swarming defense that fueled their impressive run. Lue knew that everyone was doubting his squad; they clearly weren’t as talented or experienced as their star-studded opponent. After all, two of Lue’s starters weren’t even on an NBA roster.
Oh, to be clear, I’m not talking about the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors battling in the NBA Finals. I’m, of course, referring to Lue’s dominant 2010 pick-up squad that is the stuff of legend at Las Vegas’ Impact Basketball – where many NBA stars have trained over the years.
Back when Lue was still playing, he was the captain of a five-man squad that also featured Alan Anderson, Jared Dudley, Tayshaun Prince and Patrick O’Bryant. This team managed to win every seven-game series during Impact’s open run for three straight weeks – meaning they were king of the court for a significant portion of the offseason.
“Here’s why I always knew that Ty Lue would be a great coach: He’d secretly be in the gym before everyone, scouting players and assembling his pick-up team,” Chauncey Billups said with a laugh. “It wasn’t ‘coincidence’ who ended up on his team!”
Lue’s group faced plenty of challengers. Dudley recalls Billups, Jermaine O’Neal, Baron Davis, Al Harrington, Kyle Lowry and Stephen Jackson assembling teams to face their squad. However, they all came up short.
“They were a problem,” Billups admitted. “I do remember that team and they did win for a few straight weeks. They beat a lot of great players; I’ll give them that. They all knew their role and they had the right group of guys.”
Some things to keep in mind: Lue was approaching his mid-30s and his playing career was about to end. Anderson had yet to receive his NBA break and was under contract overseas. O’Bryant was an NBA journeyman who signed abroad for good several months after this pick-up team’s run. Prince and Dudley were solid players, but Impact was typically full of stars like Billups, Davis, O’Neal, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Gilbert Arenas, Rashard Lewis, Andrei Kirilenko and Corey Maggette among others. Impact also provides pre-draft training, and their 2010 class featured 15 players who were selected including John Wall, Avery Bradley and Lance Stephenson. In other words, there was a lot of star power in that gym.
So how did Lue, Anderson, Dudley, Prince and O’Bryant manage to beat talented squad after talented squad (some of which were assembled with the sole purpose of beating them in mind)?
One Impact staffer explained why the underdog squad was so good: “Alan Anderson was pissed off that he wasn’t in the NBA yet, so he would score lights out and always played with a chip on his shoulder. He wanted to show he belonged. Ty Lue ran the pick-and-roll to perfection. Jared Dudley always made the smart play and was shooting really well. Tayshaun Prince was probably their best all-around player. Overall, they were a really smart team; their basketball IQ was excellent. Even though it was a pick-up game, they played excellent help-side defense. They would double-team and frustrate the other team so much. For a while, they couldn’t lose.”
“Everyone was wondering, ‘Why can’t we beat them?!'” Dudley said with a laugh. “Everybody wanted a shot at us. This kind of thing hadn’t really happened before.”
“That’s true,” Billups said.
“And Ty Lue talked a lot of shit,” Dudley adds, “which only made people want to beat us more.”
“That part is absolutely true too,” Billups said with a laugh.
At the end of the day, Dudley said that the team’s success just came down to their high basketball IQ, the fact that their players complemented each other really well, the chemistry they quickly developed over those three weeks and a little bit of luck.
“We had all been playing together at Impact for years, so we had great chemistry and we all knew our role within the team,” he said. “T-Lue and I used to always be on the same team. He’d form his team and we’d usually end up on the same squad. And we used to call Alan Anderson ‘Kobe’ because he was a pick-up killer. He was playing overseas at that point, but he was a monster and would score the majority of our points. He was trying to prove himself. Patrick O’Bryant was playing overseas at this point too. Everyone was asking, ‘How are these guys winning without a true star?!’ Tayshaun was our most well-known player, but we really played a Detroit Pistons-style where we all played together and knew our role.
“Our team had a high basketball IQ and we played the right way defensively. Most times in pick-up, you let someone defend one-on-one, but we would help. If a guy started scoring, we’d double. The teams didn’t have plays so they struggled to pass out of doubles and adjust to our help defense.”
Dudley said that things got crazy when players started flying in from out of state to face their squad.
“I remember the Warriors flew in as a team to play us – Stephen Jackson brought out Matt Barnes and Kelenna Azubuike,” Dudley said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wait. What? The Warriors are flying in to play our pick-up squad? What’s happening?’ People were flying in to play us or asking us to travel to different gyms! It’s not like we entered the offseason thinking, ‘We’re going to go into summer basketball and destroy everyone!’ No, we were just working out, trying to get better and this just kind of happened.”
Like all good things, this unlikely run came to an end.
After three weeks of dominance, they were finally dethroned. Dudley didn’t remember the exact squad that beat them, but he remembers feeling like “the deck was stacked” with Impact veterans who had experience playing with each other.
“Yeah, it was me, Dahntay Jones, Al Harrington, Melvin Ely and, I think, Kyle Lowry that beat them,” Billups said.
“And when was this? This was 2010, right? See, there you go; I was barely there because I was playing with USA Basketball. I think I lost one game to them, but I beat them when I put my team together!”
When reminded that Harrington also played sparingly due to an injury, Billups joked: “Mhmm, see! Right place, right time!”
All kidding aside, Billups acknowledged that whenever Lue, Anderson, Dudley, Prince and O’Bryant would reassemble, they were always very difficult to defeat.
He also made it clear that he has a ton of respect for those five guys because they always worked extremely hard and did whatever their respective NBA teams asked of them – even though he saw firsthand what each of them could do with an increased role.
“All of those guys showed things at Impact that they didn’t get a chance to do in the regular season,” Billups said. “For example, T-Lue is probably the all-time leading scorer in Impact Basketball history. But then during the season, he was back to playing tough defense and doing all the right things as a back-up point guard. All of those guys were unselfish and did what was best for the team.”
After a brief pause, Billups chuckles.
“Man, those were good times,” Billups said. “That was so much fun.”
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Please check your email for a confirmation.The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, more commonly referred to as the Jones Act, has become a point of contention in the wake of Hurricane Maria. The act ” requires that all people and goods travelling from one U.S. port to another be carried on U.S. owned, flagged and crewed ships” [1]. This protectionist measure is, by the President’s own admission, still in place because “we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people… who work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted” [2]. The act normally results in higher prices for everyday goods on the island of Puerto Rico, and in the wake of this disaster, it could severely hamper the ability to get emergency supplies to the island. President Trump temporarily suspended the act for Puerto Rico for 10 days [3]. However, critics say the rebuild effort could last years, and the waiver should be extended. For this reason, John McCain has sponsored a bill to permanently exempt Puerto Rico from the Jones Act [4]. Craig Caplan of C-Span is now reporting that Majority Leader McConnell has invoked Rule XIV to fast-track a vote on McCain’s bill [5].
AdvertisementsJohn Lanzendorf: hairdresser to the stars and unparalleled collector of dino art. (Photo: Courtesy The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)
“At one time, I could name 700 dinosaurs,” says John Lanzendorf.
Lanzendorf, 69, is a hairstylist who has coiffed Chicago’s socialites for 51 years. He’s styled Rita Hayworth, Raquel Welch, Angela Lansbury and other celebrities. He is also an obsessive collector who amassed a staggeringly vast portfolio of dinosaur art. Once, his 1,250 square foot Chicago apartment was the Louvre of Terrible Lizards: Busts of long-necked Shunosaurus and Dicraeosaurus looked down upon massive sculptures of Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus. Bronzes of Dimetrodon and Triceratops commanded tabletops and floors. His collection roamed into every room.
“It got so big, I couldn’t turn around,” says Lanzendorf.
To a layperson, dinosaur art—or “paleoart“—may conjure up images of goofy roadside attractions or tail-dragging cartoons. But far from spinning out silly caricatures, the best-regarded paleoartists study current research and work with scientists to create the most accurate images of prehistoric animals possible. Without paleoartists, dinosaurs remain an assemblage of bones in the popular imagination. But despite a global fascination with dinosaurs, paleoart collecting was, and remains, rare. When Lanzendorf started stockpiling paleoart, word spread. Paleoartists started talking about the hairdresser in Chicago who was buying dinosaur art. They sought him out and offered him their works. Prolific and passionate, Lanzendorf soon assembled what is one of the largest—if not the largest —collection of dinosaur art in the world.
An example of paleoart by Donna Braginetz—Edmontosaurus and Maiasaura. (Photo: Courtesy The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)
As a teenager in Spooner, Wisconsin, Lanzendorf knew he wasn’t meant to stay in a small town. When he couldn’t afford the senior class trip to New York City as a high school student, he boldly convinced the bus driver to take him as far as Chicago.
“They let me off on the expressway and I climbed up the embankment and got to my grandmother’s place,” says Lanzendorf. He had $35 and years of experience doing hair for his relatives and classmates. Three days after his arrival, he got a job as a stock boy and attended beauty school at night. He graduated at the top of his class and was soon employed as a hairdresser. Eventually he sought out and landed a spot at a top downtown salon. “And I became one of the most respected, well-known hairdressers in Chicago.”
The dinosaur obsession—as dinosaur obsessions often do—started in childhood.
“When I was a kid I got a dinosaur in a cereal box and I got hooked on that,” he says. “I used to eat a box of cereal every two days just so I could collect more dinosaurs.”
Tyrannosaurus rex vs Triceratops by Michael Trcic (Photo: Courtesy The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)
Lanzendorf might have become a paleontologist, but there was no money for college. Instead, starting in the mid 1980s, he started snapping up paleoart in volume. At his peak, he was collecting around one new artwork every week. He especially loved theropods—meat-eating dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex. (“I just love the shape of them and all that.”) He bought bronzes and paintings. Even salt and peppershakers. He acquired sketches from the 1800s.
His collection became a who’s-who of the paleoart world: Sculptures from Michael Trcic, lead animator of the T. rex in Jurassic Park, illustrations by James Gurney, author of the Dinotopia books, and works from innovative artists like Luis Rey, whose wildly colorful, feathered dinosaurs reflect the most up-to-date research.
Ornithomimid Theropod Dinosaurs by Donna Braginetz (Photo: Courtesy The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)
Even without a formal education, Lanzendorf became something of a dinosaur expert, reading everything that he could get his hands on. He attended conferences. The renowned Canadian paleontologist Philip J. Currie invited him to a dig in Alberta. (Currie would later pen the introduction to a book about the collection, Dinosaur Imagery.) Eventually, museums began noticing his work:The first time the Lanzendorf Collection was displayed to the public was in 2000, as part of the Field Museum’s heralded unveiling of Sue, the largest and most complete T. rex skeleton ever discovered.
Meanwhile, dinosaurs were taking over Lanzendorf’s apartment.
Daspletosaurus Torosus by Michael Trcic (Photo: Courtesy The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)
It was around this time The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis came calling. “When I first met John, he’s got a one bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago and it was wall-to-wall art,” says Dallas Evans, Lead Curator of Natural Science and Paleontology at museum. “You’d look at a wall and there’d be framed artwork, an inch to spare, and another artwork right beneath it, taking up the entire wall. In fact all the walls of the house, even in the bathroom.”
The museum wanted Lanzendorf’s collection for their Dinosphere. In 2001, they invited him on a trip to inner Mongolia. Evans and Lanzendorf toured around the fossil-rich country, visiting digs.
“I found a theropod tooth and a wooly rhinoceros metatarsus in the Gobi Desert,” Lanzendorf recalls. That same year, for an undisclosed amount, the museum bought his collection outright. The dinosaurs had outgrown his apartment and Lanzendorf was ready to move on: “Life is about change, I’ve learned that.” He kept his childhood toys and a Skrepnick painting of a Dimetrodon.
Evans has overseen the collection since its arrival.
“When I was first hearing about dinosaur art, I was a little skeptical, I expected it to be like black velvet Elvis paintings,” says Evans. But soon, Evans’ doubts evaporated, as he says that paleontologists and paleoartists have a symbiotic relationship. Art is often the best way to excite the public about a new discovery.
“Artists really rely on the scientist for guidance and technical experience but at the same time paleontologists are really in need of skillful illustrators that research new discoveries,” says Evans. “And it’s really often difficult for people to see fossils and relate to them as once living organisms, so art is great at communicating this across age, education and language barriers.”
The Lanzendorf Collection contains over 500 pieces and the museum doesn’t display it all at once, favoring themed exhibitions that are rotated out. Currently on display are unusual dinosaurs with flamboyant ornaments, such as Dracorex Hogwartsia (named for Harry Potter villain Draco Malfoy), an upright carnivore that looks like it’s wearing a football helmet studded in horns.
Evans can’t pinpoint an exact favorite in the collection, but he says he’s fond of the Trcic pieces. He does some fantastic very detailed work, there’s kind of a grace and fluidity to the dinosaurs and the sculptures,” says Evans.
Lystrosaurus by Gary Staab (Photo: Courtesy The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)
The museum continues to grow the collection, adding artworks that reflect the changing field of paleontology. Adding more artwork featuring feathered dinosaurs is a priority, according to Evans. There are other dinosaur art collections out there (the Smithsonian maintains a historical paleoart collection) but Evans is not aware of any that exist on such a grand scale.
Lanzendorf does miss his dinosaurs, but his legacy in the paleoart world is cemented. Once a year the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology awards the John J. Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize to artists in three different categories. And Lanzendorf has moved onto a new passion: Asian art. Sparked by the Mongolia trip, he now shares the same one bedroom apartment with an array of art gathered from India, Thailand, Mongolia, China and other countries. A 400-pound gilded bronze Buddha from the early 1700s resides in his living room where dinosaurs once ruled.
Lanzendorf also shares the apartment with his dog, Rafael Nadal, named for the highly ranked Spanish tennis player. Rafael is a Grand Basset Griffon Vendeen, a French breed that resembles a shaggy basset hound mashed up with a terrier. Popular in France, |
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) <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: or rather, what clients they contribute to is not a basis for discrimination <Tasoshi> it is, if one looks at if from a discrimination perspective <Luke-Jr> considering the lead mod is a Classic dev, and none of the mods are Core devs, despite Core being the only really significant implementation, I think there's a clear lack of bias in favour of Core <Tasoshi> if there is to be no bias, then contributors to other clients should have a moderating say * Beef (~beef@unaffiliated/beef) has joined <Tasoshi> I disagree, the mailing list, if not in actuality, is perceived to be highly biased <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: such perception has no basis in reality <Luke-Jr> no basis at all <Tasoshi> plus, no one precludes a core dev being included in the moderation pannel <Tasoshi> that's your opinion :) <Luke-Jr> just because you don't like the facts doesn't mean they become opinions. <Tasoshi> what I am trying to establish is a working relationship based on perceived fairness if bitcoin-dev mailing list is to be truly cross client <Tasoshi> in any reasonable view, for the mailing list to be truly cross client, it needs to have on the moderating panel contributors to different clients, that means core, classic, unlimited and xt <Tasoshi> if not jonathan from classic, then tom hardin I think his name is, "tomz" * priidu has quit (Ping timeout: 268 seconds) <btcdrak> The bitcoin-dev mailing list is for Bitcoin protocol discussion. <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: moderation isn't a competition <Tasoshi> doesn't really matter, as long as they're not extremely busy and practically unable to moderate <Tasoshi> I agree <Tasoshi> but moderation can be very biased <Luke-Jr> generally not <Tasoshi> that's your opinion <dgenr8> tomz is tom zander <Luke-Jr> frankly, if we ever got to the point where bias mattered, the moderators are going too far <Tasoshi> thank you <Tasoshi> some say they are Luke-jr <Tasoshi> now maybe they wrong, it doesn't really matter <Luke-Jr> it does matter <Tasoshi> as I said I am trying to establish a working relationship <Luke-Jr> people making up utter rubbish FUD should simply be ignored <Tasoshi> and by any reasonable analysis, if the mailing list is to be cross client, then it needs on the moderating list contributors from different clients <Luke-Jr> which it has <Tasoshi> it has no one from bitcoin unlimited <Tasoshi> or xt <Tasoshi> or btcd <Luke-Jr> so? <Luke-Jr> it has people from different clients <Tasoshi> Luke, I am not here to argue <Tasoshi> as I said, I am here to propose a working relationship <Tasoshi> if you do not with to be co-operative that is fine <Luke-Jr> … <Luke-Jr> the only ones not being co-operative, are the ones spreading FUD and/or not participating <Tasoshi> but, if the mailing list is to be cross client in any reasonable analysis it needs to have on the moderating list contributors to different clients so that the moderator's actions are not biased <Tasoshi> we need, in my view, to distill the political aspects from just code <Luke-Jr> Andrew Stone recently began to reach out, and I encouraged more cooperation. <Tasoshi> sure, on political aspects there is disagreement, but on many aspects we need to co-operate <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: we already have that <Tasoshi> and we need to establish a basis on how that co-operation is to be carried out <Tasoshi> for any such co-operation there must be not only bias, but not even the possibility of bias, there must be checks and balances <Tasoshi> which is set by contributors to different clients being on the moderating pannel <Chris_Stewart_5> when verifying sigs for a p2sh/multisig input sigs are always assumed to be in order right? <Tasoshi> Luke-Jr, developers from other clients can not co-operate on a mailing list that may act as a podium <Tasoshi> if you wish to co-operate you have to set up checks and balances <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: take your politics somewhere else. the ML is not where they belong. <Tasoshi> the ball is on you really <Tasoshi> but it is * Xanather has quit (Quit: Leaving) <Tasoshi> the moderators of the mailing list can be highly biased towards a client <Tasoshi> that is why you need moderators who are not super busy from different clients to balance any potential bias <Luke-Jr> everyone *is* super busy, which is why the majority of the moderators don't work on *any* client <Tasoshi> are you rejecting my proposal? <Tasoshi> not that you have any say of course, being just one guy <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: I am rejecting your continued wasting of my time here. goodbye. <Tasoshi> then don't claim the mailing list is cross client <Luke-Jr> it is, so I will continue to claim so <Tasoshi> or that the bip process is cross client <moli> Tasoshi: go away <Luke-Jr> it also is <Tasoshi> that's your opinion <Luke-Jr> no, it is the fact <moli> Tasoshi: you've been wasting core devs' time too much, go away <Tasoshi> you have no monopoly on facts * jaclupi has quit (Ping timeout: 276 seconds) <Luke-Jr> I don't. You could have facts too if you didn't so vehemently reject them. <Tasoshi> unless you can give me some certain mathematical equation to prove it then it is simply your opinion <moli> as if you can understand maths? <Tasoshi> good to know bitcoin core devs have no desire whatever to co-operate however <Tasoshi> that was necessary information <Luke-Jr> Tasoshi: you reveal your utter dishonesty when you go forward spreading such absolute lies like that <jonasschnelli> guys,.. this type of conversation does not belong here. Its a tech/dev channel. <Tasoshi> so is the mailing list <Tasoshi> how cross clients co-operate is pretty tech <Tasoshi> but I'd be interested to hear other opinions than Luke's490 BC and vengeance has come for the Athenians. Hungry to repay a previous affront, a large Persian force has landed at Marathon. Its goal, to capture Athens – the birthplace of democracy. One force however, stands between the invaders and this goal, ready to defend that city to the last.
Outnumbered, relatively untrained and going into battle against the forces of the greatest empire of the time; the chances of victory look stacked against these Athenian farmers. Yet the outcome of this battle is to determine the future of Greece: A future of freedom or subjugation.
Background: The Greek World 500 BC
If someone asks you what were the greatest cities of the Ancient Greeks, anyone would forgive you for instantly thinking of famed places such as Sparta, Athens or Corinth. Indeed, these city-states would go on to represent the zenith of Greek power for much of antiquity. In 500 BC, however, this was not the case.
Back then, the most powerful of these cities – stretching from Ampurias in Eastern Spain to the Crimea – were, funnily enough, not situated in Greece at all. Instead you must look further east, to the coastline of Western Turkey.
The ‘beating heart’
On these shores, multiple Hellenic-cities had prospered for centuries, establishing trade and connections with both the East and West. Rich rewards and splendour duly followed. Many famous ‘Greeks’ of the period would originate from this area; people such as Thales, Sappho and Homer. It was these cities that, at that time, represented the ‘beating heart’ of the Greek World.
It would be on this shoreline that the critical event that lead to the Battle of Marathon occurred.
Instability in Ionia
In 500 BC, radical change was seizing this prominent area. No longer were these powerful cities free and independent, able to easily increase their wealth. Instead, they had fallen under the rule of the greatest superpower of the Age: Persia.
Naturally, the previously supreme Greek cities in Anatolia were reluctant to accept the authority of this new overlord. They had been free and autonomous for so long that subjugation was alien to these people. The possibility of revolt was always there – it was only a matter of time.
Tensions snap: The Ionian Revolt 499 – 493 BC
In 499 BC, relations finally boiled over. Although instigated by one man’s desire to maintain power, quickly, a desire for liberty seized many of the Hellenic cities; no longer would they be dictated to by another. The revolt had begun.
The task this revolt faced was a momentous ask. These cities had not united against some other upstart city-state, but the greatest power of the time. They desperately needed help if their struggle was to succeed. They looked to Greece.
The call for help
Although many of the prestigious mainland cities such as Sparta and Corinth refused the call, one city agreed. A city that had only recently began to extend its power, yet who’s ambition was far-reaching: Athens. This was the opportunity its citizens had been waiting for; an opportunity to finally put their city firmly on the world stage.
Quickly, Athens – along with the neighbouring large city of Eretria – brought together a fleet and set sail for Ionia. Their presence however, was short-lived. After suffering one damaging defeat these two cities deserted the revolt, leaving the Ionians to their fate. Hardly the most dependable of allies!
Defeat then became only a matter of time for the uprising. Sure enough these Ionians soon after suffered another crushing defeat at Lade, its result spelling disaster for their cause. Miletus and Chios – the two greatest Greek city-states of the time – fell to the Persians; their men slaughtered and women and children sent into slavery. The revolt was at an end.
Vengeance
Athens and Eretria had played very little part in the Revolt, of that there is little doubt. Yet their initial eagerness to join it put them at odds with the most powerful man in the world: the Great King of Persia, Darius I. He would not forget.
Following his complete victory over the Ionian Greeks, Darius began plotting his revenge on those two cities. They had dared to aid his Empire’s enemies; enemies who had succeeded in burning one of Persia’s most prestigious cities in Anatolia to the ground. It was only recompense that Athens and Eretria be given the same treatment. From there, he intended to conquer the entire Greek mainland, removing their cherished liberty for good. The world’s great superpower was now coming for Greece with one thing on its mind: vengeance.
The Persian Expedition: 490 BC
Although an initial invasion across land failed, Darius remained undeterred. Readying a fleet of 600 ships filled with men, horses and supplies, a new force soon set off from Samos. Never before had such a large amphibious invasion been attempted. Quickly they made their way across the Aegean, ‘island-hopping’ across the numerous isles that dot the centre of that sea.
Being caught completely unaware, island after island rapidly fell to this Persian Armada. Soon – and without much resistance – it had reached the shores of Greece itself. There the Athenians could only watch as, after a brief fight, Eretria fell to the invaders; the city destroyed and its population deported back to Persia. Athens’ only ally in the Ionian Revolt was now out of the war. A similar fate awaited the Athenians. They knew they were next.
Marathon
The Persian expedition wasted no time in moving to their main goal of destroying Athens. Quickly they landed their forces at a plain near the town of Marathon – barely 26 miles from the glorious city.
Disembarking there, however, this expedition quickly realised that they were not the only force present on that lowland. Blocking their path stood 10, 000 men. Athens would not go down without a fight. Battle was imminent.
Forming a battle-plan
Having been joined by 1,000 men from the nearby town of Plataea, the Athenian generals were at loggerheads as to what they should do next. Sparta had said they would send reinforcements yet they would not arrive for at least a week. Should they wait for the Spartans and defend their position? Or should they attack?
Thanks to the persistence of the Athenian general, Miltiades, the latter was decided. It was a risky strategy; their foe far outnumbered them in not only size but also troop diversity (having archers, cavalry, axemen and spearmen). Timing such an aggressive decision would therefore be crucial.
The hoplite
Miltiades knew his army had both strengths and weaknesses. Almost all his force consisted of Athenian and Plataean citizens equipped for a style of fighting that would epitomise Greek warfare for centuries: The hoplite.
These men were unique to world history – heavily-armoured infantrymen that fought in tight phalanx formations with spear and shield. Although only part-time soldiers, these men were more than a match for their counterpart’s lightly-cladded infantry. Yet the Persians had strengths of their own.
Speed and firepower
Of all its army, the Persian cavalry was that expedition’s most deadly asset. Highly mobile and devastatingly effective, these horsemen had already proven their worth fighting hoplites in Ionia. There, their swiftness had wreaked havoc on those less-flexible heavy footmen. The threat they posed, Miltiades likely realised, was the greatest his men faced.
Archery too, was another strong point for the Persians. Their sheer number would be expected to deal heavy damage to their opponent before the battle even commenced. In turn, the cavalry would quickly finish off any enemies that managed to survive the deadly barrage.
It is no hidden fact that the Persian infantry was relatively poor; but usually they were never expected to play a decisive role. The speed of their cavalry and the great firepower of their archers: that was where Persia’s great strengths lay.
To attack this Persian force was therefore a daunting prospect for any Greek army – especially one lacking both archers and cavalry of its own! Miltiades knew this. He had to wait for the right time that allowed these crucial strengths of his foe to be made as worthless as possible. It was a big ask. Do the opposite, however, and attack would almost certainly lead to defeat; their army massacred by missiles and unable to counter the harassing tactics of the skilled cavalry. And so Miltiades waited.
The right time
A few days after the decision to attack was taken, Miltiades awakened to see the golden opportunity he so desperately needed. The Persian cavalry – his biggest problem with launching an attack on a wide open plain – had disappeared.
Where the cavalry had gone, no-one exactly knows. What is likely however, is that – due to some blunder or other – this force was split-off from the Persian army that morning. This was the chance Miltiades had been waiting for.
Having arranged his forces, Miltiades prepared to attack. Yet, even without cavalry support, the opposing forces still far outstretched his own troops (the Persians outnumbered the Athenian army by that much!). To counter this, that Athenian general then decided on one of the riskiest strategies in antiquity.
To match the length of the Persian line, Miltiades stretched the centre of his force very thin (only a few ranks deep). His wings, however, he bolstered with more hoplites. It was there that he made his army strongest. Yet the centre, albeit under strength, had to hold if the plan was to succeed.
Marching down to give battle to the Persians, Miltiades then realised his next problem: The Persian archers. He could not allow his army to be peppered by these units – his weakened centre would collapse before the battle had even begun. He therefore came up with a simple-but radical decision. Just before getting into bow-shot range of the foe (about 150-200 metres), Miltiades gave the command for his forces to charge.
The charge
So why was this such a radical order? Did not most armies charge into battle? Well, with hoplites, their greatest strength was cohesion, each soldier fighting ‘in tune’ as one unit. To charge such a distance under heavy arrow fire would inevitably put that cohesion at severe risk – each man wanting to close with the enemy as quickly as possible. They were, after all, only barely trained citizen-soldiers, hardly comparable to the later professional armies of Alexander and Rome.
Although running 200 metres into battle does not seem that impressive, we must remember the context. Not only were these soldiers wearing heavy, bronze, body armour, but also a helmet that seriously limited their vision. Now combine that with the fact they were running towards a type of enemy unlike any they had previously encountered: men that wore long trousers and head-scarfs, who fought in complete silence.
For the Greeks, this was bizarre. Charging towards the Persians at Marathon would thus not only have been physically tiring, but also mentally frightening.
Straight away, however, the charge paid dividends. Within no time at all and having barely suffered any casualties from Persian missiles, the two infantry lines clashed. The battle had begun.
The Battle of Marathon 490 BC
The fight, at first, could not have been closer as very quickly, the strengths and weaknesses of Miltiades’ plan became apparent. On the flanks, his strengthened forces were pushing their foe back. The battle in the centre, however, was a completely different story. There, the sheer numbers of the Persians gradually began to overwhelm the weakened Athenian line. Victory would be decided on where the line buckled first.
Herodotus recalls that critical moment,
On each wing the Athenians and Plataeans prevailed… and (having achieved this) brought their wings together to fight those who had broken through in the centre.
{Hdt. 6. 113}
With such an act, the Persian centre – that, up to that point had been prevailing against Miltiades’ diminished line – now found itself surrounded on three sides. Slaughter naturally followed for the Persians.
Only then would that force’s elite cavalry return. Yet they would be too late to change the outcome of the battle. The Athenians were victorious. What remained of the Persian force – after failing to reach Athens by sea before Miltiades and his army returned – sailed home disheartened. They would return 10 years later with a new invasion, determined to right this humiliation. For now, however, Greece was safe.
Their finest hour
In this one battle, Athens achieved its goal of putting itself on the world stage. It had faced off against the current superpower and won!
Not only had they won, but they had won well. Of the 10,000 Athenians, only 192 had fallen – mostly, one would expect, in the weakened Athenian centre. There, they buried the dead where they had fallen, the mound still being visible to this day. As for the fallen Plataeans and slaves that fought alongside the Athenians, the victors buried them also in a separate tomb on the plain.
As for the 6,400 Persian dead, there would be no such formalities; their lifeless bodies left as a visual spectacle for any wishing to know what these Easterners looked like. Although most of the expedition had survived the battle, to lose so many men in return for just 192 Athenians would have been a bitter pill to swallow. These Athenian farmers had succeeded in crushing the greatest army of the time.
‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ Although Churchill’s speech after the Battle of Britain was not in any way supposed to relate to Marathon, you can imagine the Athenians saying similar words to their children about the heroism of their city that day.
This battle, like that one in 1940, would be presented by the victors as one of the greatest in that nation’s history; a battle for freedom against overwhelming odds.
Animosity
From then onwards, many Greek cities would view the Persian Empire as the worst of enemies. No longer would they them as a culture to learn from – as they had prior to events in Ionia – but a nation that directly opposed a keystone of their culture: liberty.
Mockery of their ‘barbaric’ culture thus began to appear in Athens and many other Greek cities. Their perfumed features, preference of bows and arrows and tyrannical king all became things that the Greeks would openly ridicule and distance themselves from for centuries. The start of a human desire to differentiate Eastern and Western cultures – that would continue for much of history – had begun.
What if?
Marathon would mark the start of a new dawn for Athens. Combined with their crushing defeat of a new Persian force 10 years later at Salamis, its power and prestige would only continue to grow for the next 70 years.
It would be these years that turned Athens into one of the greatest cities on the Greek mainland, toppling other esteemed metropolises such as Corinth and Argos. The ‘Golden Age’ of Athens had begun.
To imagine a world where the Athenians had lost the day at that defining battle is therefore fascinating to consider. That, however, could easily have been the case if the Persian cavalry had returned slightly earlier.
The Persian horsemen, remember, were that nation’s best weapon against the slow-moving and fatigued Athenian hoplites. Surrounding Miltiades and his already engaged force, they could easily have picked these outnumbered Greeks off one by one. An Athenian bloodbath would have quickly followed – Miltiades’ risky strategy backfiring spectacularly.
In such a scenario, rather than gaining a brilliant victory, the Athenians would have suffered a crushing defeat. Persia would have emerged victorious.
An open road to Athens
With the defeat of Miltiades and his men, destruction would have quickly followed for Athens. Nothing would now stand in the way of the Persians taking away that city’s freedom for good. Darius’ revenge would be complete.
It would not just be the Persians, however, that would celebrate this successful expedition. Many Greeks, hostile to Athens and its big ambitions, would also have welcomed the victory. For one Greek more than most, would this result have been ideal.
Hippias
Among the Persian ranks was an elderly man named Hippias. An Athenian by birth, it was his despotic rule that the Athenians had expelled almost 20 years prior to Marathon.
Desiring a fresh and ambitious new start, they established a new form of rule in his place; a form of rule that would go on to represent an early version of something we now cherish: democracy. Yet Hippias would not give up his claim on the city that easily.
Having allied himself with the Persians, their victory at Marathon would have restored him to power in Athens. Far from being independent, however, he would be a puppet of the Persian Empire – a ‘sub-king’ ready to obey when his master commanded. The famed democracy of Athens would have quickly come to an end.
Only the start
After taking control of Athens, it is unlikely that Darius would have stopped his Empire’s western expansion there. Instead, he would have viewed Athens as a base from where he could further extend his control into Greece. Sparta had already proven its hostility to Persia, agreeing to send help to Marathon. They would be next.
Inspiring playwrights such as Euripides and Aristophanes, famed philosophers like Socrates and Plato and builders of brilliant art and architecture namely Phidias and Polykleitos; all people that helped the Ancient Greeks reach their zenith in the aftermath of victory in the Persian Wars.
Yet without Marathon, this ‘Golden Age’ of Hellenic culture would never have come into being. Instead, rather than becoming one of the two great ‘Western’ cultures of antiquity, the Greek way of life would fade – becoming overshadowed by an Eastern influence.
The future prominence of many Greeks therefore relied on victory at Marathon. For this piece, however, I would like to focus on one man in particular; a man who himself actually served at that all-important battle.
Aeschylus
Regarded as the Father of Tragedy, the surviving works of Aeschylus have become invaluable to us. The Persians, Seven Against Thebes and his most famous work, The Oresteia; only a few of his plays that we consistently reproduce and study to this day.
Many would argue that these plays were his greatest achievement. Aeschylus himself, however, thought otherwise. His epitaph shows,
Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.
On an obituary, you would usually label what the deceased considered their finest moment in life. Regarding Aeschylus, was it his popular tragedies or the huge fame that inevitably followed? No, for him it was the part he played – alongside Miltiades and his Athenians – that famed day at Marathon.
In a world where Marathon marked a crushing Persian victory, then that man could easily have lost his life during the fight. Rather than going on to represent the first great tragic poet we have surviving, his name and works would be lost to history. An utter tragedy, pardon the pun.
End
Athens achieved one of the greatest military achievements in antiquity at Marathon; this ambitious city-state had, almost single-handedly, defied the supreme power of the time. Although fighting against Persia would continue, it was this victory that triggered the Greek mainland into becoming such a central civilisation for the rest of the Classical Age.
To therefore imagine a world where the cavalry had returned earlier and spelled disaster for the Athenians is almost scary to think of. Would we have any form of democracy? Would we view Eastern and Western cultures as being so different? And, of course, how differently would we remember the Ancient Greeks today? All fascinating questions to consider in a world where Marathon marked the end for Greek freedom.
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Disclaimer: Marathon is one of the most difficult battles in antiquity to accurately reconstruct because of Herodotus’ lack of military detail. The order of battle I have put in this piece, therefore, is purely my own best interpretation of events after reading the evidence and various proposed theories.
For example: Herodotus claims the Athenians ran 1,500 metres into battle. This however, many have widely discredited nowadays in favour of 150-200 metres and is why I claim this here.
Further reading
Huge thanks to Johnny Shumate and Malay Archer for letting us use their stunning artwork.
Herodotus’ account of Marathon: 6.95-116 here
Plutarch: Life of Aristides here
Time Commanders: Battle of Marathon
Jstor
Doenges, N.A. 1998. ‘The Campaign and the Battle of Marathon’, Historia 47 (1): 1-17
Evans, J.A.S. 1993. ‘Herodotus and the Battle of Marathon’, Historia 42 (3): 279-307
Hammond, N.G.L. 2008. ‘The Expedition of Datis and Artaphernes’ in Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd Edition, Cambridge, 4: 506-17.
Murray, O. 2008. ‘The Ionian Revolt’ in Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd Edition, Cambridge, 4: 506-17.
Shrimpton, G. 1980. ‘The Persian Cavalry at Marathon’, Phoenix 34 (1): 20-37.
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Like this: Like Loading...Caffeine intake is so common that its pharmacological effects on the mind are undervalued. Since it is so readily available, individuals can adjust their own dose, time of administration and dose intervals of caffeine, according to the perceived benefits and side effects of each dose. This review focuses on human studies of caffeine in subjects with and without psychiatric disorders. Besides the possibility of mild drug dependence, caffeine may bring benefits that contribute to its widespread use. These benefits seem to be related to adaptation of mental energy to the context by increasing alertness, attention, and cognitive function (more evident in longer or more difficult tasks or situations of low arousal) and by elevating mood. Accordingly, moderate caffeine intake (< 6 cups/day) has been associated with less depressive symptoms, fewer cognitive failures, and lower risk of suicide. However, its putative therapeutic effects on depression and ADHD have been insufficiently studied. Conversely, in rare cases high doses of caffeine can induce psychotic and manic symptoms, and more commonly, anxiety. Patients with panic disorder and performance social anxiety disorder seem to be particularly sensitive to the anxiogenic effects of caffeine, whereas preliminary data suggests that it may be effective for some patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The threshold for the anxiogenic effect of caffeine is influenced by a polymorphism of the A2A receptor. In summary, caffeine can be regarded as a pharmacological tool to increase energy and effortful behavior in daily activities. More populational (cross-sectional and prospective) and experimental studies are necessary to establish the role of caffeine intake in psychiatric disorders, especially its putative efficacy on depressive mood and cognitive/attentional disorders.Facebook
For the hordes of investors large and small who bought into hype around Facebook's IPO -- heck, even for those who snapped up shares two days ago -- this will offer little comfort. But in the last two days of trading, the assault on Facebook's stock has shaved a few billion dollars off the Facebook's famously rich founder's net worth.
More specifically, since the close of trading on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg has lost almost $3 billion, at least on paper. (His total stake is still worth about $11.8 billion, a far cry from the $19 billion he held at the IPO price).
As we all know, Facebook's stock has been struggling since its botched IPO on May 18. Ever since going public at $38 dollars a share -- and briefly reaching $45 on opening day -- it's been a bumpy ride down. The last two days have been particularly brutal. First, Zynga, which is tied at the virtual hip to Facebook, reported dreadful earnings, spooking Facebook investors. And then yesterday, Facebook reported its quarterly earnings, which left the Street unconvinced that company is moving fast enough to turn those 955 million users into big dollars.
Zuckerberg has sold some of his stock, which the company said was necessary for him to pay his taxes. Regardless of the reason, just after the IPO, he took some profits at a price that others would envy. He sold 30.2 million shares at $37.58 a share, netting him more than $1.1 billion.
As for the future, who knows. This is the stock market, after all, and past performance is no guide for future performance. Yet there are some key dates that Wall Street is worried about. Those are when the so-called lockup periods expire and more insiders can sell their shares, which doesn't seem so far-fetched for those who got them at, say, $1 a share.
One of those dates comes on August 15, when, 90 days after the IPO, 268 million shares held by stockholders other than Zuckerberg become available for sale. But the date that causes the most concern is November 13, when 1.24 billion shares will become available for sale.
It's well understood -- and Zuck and his team said as much on yesterday's conference call -- that Zuckerberg isn't going to cater to the short-term interests of Wall Street. So he might not care that much about the following painful stock chart:Maurkice Pouncey, his voice crackling with emotion, apologized to Steelers fans for the team`s handling of the national anthem in Chicago and said every player...
Maurkice Pouncey, his voice crackling with emotion, apologized to Steelers fans for the team`s handling of the national anthem in Chicago and said every player...
Maurkice Pouncey, his voice crackling with emotion, apologized to Steelers fans for the team`s handling of the national anthem in Chicago and said every player...
Maurkice Pouncey, his voice crackling with emotion, apologized to Steelers fans for the team’s handling of the national anthem in Chicago and said every player will be standing on the sideline when the “Star-Spangled Banner” is performed Sunday in Baltimore.
“We have to make it right,” Pouncey said Wednesday afternoon. “I honestly think we will go out there and make it right.”
Pouncey, an eight-year veteran and five-time Pro Bowl selection, was the first Steelers player to say the entire roster will be standing for the anthem. On Monday, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said the team would be on the field after players remained inside a tunnel last Sunday when the anthem was played at Soldier Field.
“As far as I know, it’s 100 percent participation,” Pouncey said, later adding. “If not, you’ll all have something to talk about, but as far as I know, everyone on the Pittsburgh Steelers will go out there.”
After President Trump last Friday criticized NFL players who kneel during the anthem and said they should be fired, the Steelers decided to stand inside the tunnel before their game against the Chicago Bears.
It was designed to be a show of unity, but the plan backfired.
Left tackle Alejandro Villanueva, a former Army Ranger, stood outside the tunnel so he could have a view of the American flag and was the only player visible to the crowd and TV cameras while the anthem was performed.
“It was just a big misunderstanding,” Pouncey said. “I promise you this week that we’ll all be standing out there for the national anthem. Trust me. We respect our flag, and we respect our military and everything that is a part of it.”
The Steelers’ actions were met by strong backlash from fans, some of whom burned jerseys or sold their tickets and apparel. Pouncey delivered a passionate apology to fans.
“I’m very sorry to anyone who feels the way that they do,” Pouncey said. “Trust me, this team loves this flag, we love what we represent, Al and this entire organization, Mr. Rooney.
“We feel just as badly as everybody else does because this is a lot on our shoulders. We really do. I think this week we are going to show that.
“We know that we are sorry for all of our fans who are upset about the things that went down. I honestly think we’ll come together, and all of this will be out the window.”
Linebacker Arthur Moats, the team’s Walter Payton Man of the Year representative last year for his community service, took a pragmatic approach to the criticism. His wife is collecting unwanted Steelers gear to send to veterans and military personnel who still support the team.
“So if we go out there and we want to win the Super Bowl — and you didn’t want to root for us? Well, that (stinks) for you,” Moats said. “But if you were with us, and then we won, then I’m sure you’re going to feel good about it.”
Villanueva was in the Steelers locker room Wednesday, but a team spokesman said he only would talk about football-related topics. Earlier in the day, a fan from Arizona sent a bouquet of flowers to Villanueva at the team’s headquarters.
Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said the Steelers can learn from adversity when they play the Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium, where they have lost in each of the past four seasons.
“You will either be divided or brought together,” Roethlisberger said. “This is a group that is a very close-knit group, and I feel strongly that we will be stronger than ever.”
Tight end Jesse James said the Steelers can’t afford to have distractions disrupt preparations for the game in Baltimore. Both teams are 2-1, tied for first place in the AFC North and coming off unexpected losses last weekend.
“If you let it, you have to toughen up mentally,” he said. “You can’t let things going on in the outside world affect how you play the game.”
Joe Rutter is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at jrutter@tribweb.com or via Twitter @tribjoerutter.
Joe Rutter is a Tribune-Review steelers reporter. You can contact Joe via Twitter.There will be a men’s title fight at UFC 213. Just not the one originally planned.
Yoel Romero and Robert Whittaker will meet for the interim middleweight title in Las Vegas on July 8.
Additionally, the originally planned bantamweight title fight between champion Cody Garbrandt and T.J. Dillashaw is officially off due to a back injury suffered by Garbrandt. MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani confirmed a Tuesday report on both items by ESPN.
The Romero-Whittaker interim title fight is due to a knee injury suffered by champion Michael Bisping. It will be the evening’s co-main event, with the women’s bantamweight title fight between champion Amanda Nunes and challenger Valentina Shevchenko as the evening’s headliner.
Romero (12-1) has won eight consecutive fights, with three of his past four wins coming via knockout. His most recent win was a brutal flying knee knockout of former champion Chris Weidman at UFC 205.
Whittaker carries an 18-4 record with 14 finishes into the bout. The Sydney, Australia resident has won seven in a row, with his last victory a divisional paradigm-shifting finish of Ronaldo Souza at UFC on FOX 24.
According to ESPN, the UFC is hoping to put Dillashaw into an August bout with UFC flyweight champ Demetrious Johnson. |
same incorrect test answers.
A flood of foreign undergraduates on America’s campuses is improving the financial health of universities. It also sometimes clashes with a fundamental value of U.S. scholarship: academic integrity.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from more than a dozen large U.S. public universities found that in the 2014-15 school year, the schools recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students. They recorded one such report per 100 domestic students.
Students from China were singled out by many faculty members interviewed. “Cheating among Chinese students, especially those with poor language skills, is a huge problem,” said Beth Mitchneck, a University of Arizona professor of geography and development.
In the academic year just ending, 586,208 international undergraduate students attended U.S. colleges and universities, according to the Department of Homeland Security. More than 165,000 were from China. South Korea and Saudi Arabia were the source of nearly 50,000 each and India of about 23,500.
Faculty and domestic students interviewed said it appears that substantial numbers of international students either don’t comprehend or don’t accept U.S. standards of academic integrity.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.Never mind the Flintstones; the Sinclairs are the modern Jurassic Age family you’d most want to meet. Thirty years after ABC introduced viewers to the ‘60s caveman clan Fred, Wilma, and Pebbles, the network launched the ambitious family sitcom Dinosaurs in 1991, and invited family audiences into the home of dinosaur husband and wife, Earl and Fran, and their three kids: Robbie, Charlene, and Baby. Unlike their animated forebearers, the Sinclairs were live-action, life-sized puppets, built by the ace crew at Jim Henson Productions. These days, the same characters would probably be rendered with CGI. But in the early ‘90s, the family was brought to life purely through the magic of puppetry, with teams of actors donning beautifully designed latex costumes and cracking wise in classic sitcom fashion. That’s why it made our list of the 30 Best Bad Shows of the Last 30 Years.
One of these actors was Leif Tilden, who wore the latex body of the eldest Sinclair child, teenage dino Robbie. (The character was voiced by Jason Willinger, and puppeteer Steve Whitmire — who assumed the role of Kermit after Jim Henson passed away in 1990 — manipulated Robbie’s facial expressions.) It was Tilden’s second tour of duty in a Henson-built suit, previously playing Donatello in the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feature film and its sequel, The Secret of the Ooze. Now a filmmaker, Tilden spoke with Yahoo TV about bringing Robbie to life, dancing with Michael Jackson, and the show’s famously dark series finale where the Sinclair family literally faced their own extinction.
View photos
Before Dinosaurs, you wore a Henson-designed suit for the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. How did that experience prepare you for the series?
It prepared me for the process more than anything. The process of preparing the way the character moved, conveying emotion through the body, working in sync with the other puppeteers, pacing yourself in the heat, keeping hydrated. The audition process for Dinosaurs was very engaging. It’s a little like Andy Serkis playing Gollum, only instead of wearing white balls for the motion capture artists, you’re wearing a costume that’s a combination of latex and fabrics, and people can’t see your face and facial expressions. It’s not amusement park performing; there’s comic timing and hitting emotional beats. I went in as if I was playing Robbie, saying his lines and physicalizing him. I know I’m talking esoterically about a show like Dinosaurs! But I defend Dinosaurs. It’s a family show that has an innocent spirit to it. It’s really funny, and somewhat dark at times. I just think it was kind of a startling concept for some people.
Maybe they were thrown by the idea of watching a traditional family sitcom starring full-sized puppets.
It’s a hard one. It was experimental in a lot of ways. We weren’t The Dark Crystal [Jim Henson’s 1982 fantasy adventure], where the characters are sort of magical and exist in a different world. I don’t know why it wasn’t successful, really. I’ve met a lot of people since who love that show. I think it takes someone with an eccentric personality to dig it. Did you ever see that Saturday Night Live skit [“First Got Horny 2 U”], where Aidy Bryant had a crush on Robbie and then he takes off his head and it’s a balding middle-aged man in there? That was funny, but it shows a certain cynicism. And if you’re a cynical person, you’re not going to like Dinosaurs.
How long did it take to put on Robbie’s suit?
It took about an hour in total; the average shooting day was 12 hours. It wasn’t cumbersome to move around in. It was designed to be actor-friendly so the performer could instill life into the suit. And I want to emphasize that it wasn’t just me playing the character. I was one of a group of people who played Robbie. The people who made the costume made a big contribution to how that character is portrayed, as well as the puppeteers doing the mouth and eyeballs. It’s just like a motion capture character; Gollum isn’t all Andy Serkis’s work — he builds the foundation and they tweak his performance in the computer. It’s the same thing with Robbie. I don’t stake a claim that this is my work — it’s our work.A 26-year-old Laois man jailed for life as a teenager for hammering a boy to death will be released in less than two years, after his trial judge reviewed his sentence.
A 26-year-old Laois man jailed for life as a teenager for hammering a boy to death will be released in less than two years, after his trial judge reviewed his sentence.
Man (26) jailed for life as a teenager for hammering boy to death to be released in less than two years
Darren Goodwin, formerly of Graigue, Mountmellick, was 16 when he was sentenced to life in prison for the 2003 murder of 14-year-old Darragh Conroy.
Due to his age, the life sentence was not mandatory. However, Mr Justice Barry White used his discretion in imposing it, after hearing all the details, including that Goodwin had ‘wanted to kill someone’.
A jury had found Goodwin guilty of the crime following a trial at the Central Criminal court in July 2004. He had pleaded not guilty to the murder at Briar Lane Moutmellick on 11 November 2003.
Darragh Conroy’s mother had told the court that she had been searching for her only child for hours that night, ringing the phone she had bought him just weeks earlier so that they could stay in touch.
His body was found on waste ground in Smithsfield, Mountmellick shortly before midnight. He had suffered six separate blows to his head, five of which were inflicted in rapid succession with considerable force while he was lying on the ground.
State Pathologist Marie Cassidy said the schoolboy’s skull "had been broken up and was like a jigsaw with some of the pieces fallen out of the wounds".
The prosecution case rested on the evidence of several friends and acquaintances of the accused who testified that he had been talking about killing someone the week beforehand and had admitted to the murder on the night in question.
One classmate testified that Goodwin had said: "Jesus, I’d love to kill someone, someone that no one would care about, like Darragh Conory".
Another witness testified that the accused admitted to the murder the evening of the killing, saying that he had hit the deceased in the head with a hammer.
Goodwin’s grandmother testified that her grandson had asked her for a hammer that evening but that she couldn’t find one to give him.
The trial heard that Goodwin had met his father for the first time shortly before he moved in with him, about six months before the attack. The teenager had attempted suicide in September 2003.
When passing sentence ten years ago, Mr Justice White said that Goodwin’s psychological reports showed that he was a danger to society and certainly a danger to his father.
He had said the correct sentence for the ‘pre-meditated, brutal, callous murder’ was life imprisonment, but said that he would review it in a decade.
That unusual review took place yesterday (Thursday), despite the DPP asking for an adjournment to acquire more reports.
Goodwin’s father, David Horan, testified that he and his wife had moved to another town so that members of the Conroy family would not have to face seeing their son if he was released to live with them.
He said that they had rented a house with a separate apartment for their son as he was no-longer 15, the age he was when he went into custody. Mr Horan said his boss had agreed to offer his son an apprenticeship in his workplace.
He said that he had previously approached the prison authorities with the concern that his son wasn’t receiving the psychological services he needed, but that he had got nowhere.
Clinical Psychologist Dr Kevin Lamb testified that it was difficult to assess Goodwin as he had committed the crime at the age of 15, before his mind had fully developed.
He said he determined that his risk for future violence would be low, but with a significant caveat. A big part of this was his need for forensic psychotherapy twice a week, he said.
He told Mr Justice White that he would need about two years of treatment. He said that he was not confident that such services would be provided in his current situation, but said that it might be of benefit were the judge to direct it.
This is what Mr Justice White did, fixing a release date of July 1st 2016, but directing that Goodwin receive the services of a forensic psychotherapist twice a week while in prison.
He said he was not satisfied that the issue of remorse had been fully addressed.
Dressed in a black jacket and blue jeans, Goodwin stepped into the witness box to enter a bond to be of good behaviour and fulfil other conditions on his release.
He spoke to his parents before and after proceedings.
Darragh Conroy’s parents were also present in court but were not asked to testify.
Online EditorsOldest known hominid sheds light on human evolution
Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy
The first major analysis of one of the earliest known hominids sheds light on human evolution.
"People often think we evolved from apes, but no, apes in many ways evolved from us," said Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy, associate professor of biological anthropology at Kent State University. "It has been a popular idea to think humans are modified chimpanzees. From studying Ardipithecus ramidus, or 'Ardi,' we learn that we cannot understand or model human evolution from chimps and gorillas."
The research is being published in a special edition of the journal Science.
An international team of 47 scientists for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.
The research consists of 11 detailed papers that describe the Ardipithecus fossils that include a partial skeleton of a female, nicknamed "Ardi."
The last common ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees is thought to have lived 6 or more million years ago. Though Ardipithecus is not itself this last common ancestor, it likely shared many of this ancestor's characteristics.
For comparison, Ardipithecus is more than a million years older than the "Lucy" female partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis. Until the discovery of the new Ardipithecus remains, the fossil record contained scant evidence of other hominids older than Lucy.
Through an analysis of the skull, teeth, pelvis, hands, feet and other bones, the researchers have determined that Ardipithecus had a mix of "primitive" traits, shared with its predecessors, the primates of the Miocene epoch, and "derived" traits, which it shares exclusively with later hominids.
Because of its antiquity, Ardipithecus takes us closer to the still-elusive last common ancestor.
However, many of its traits do not appear in modern-day African apes. One surprising conclusion, therefore, is that it is likely that the African apes have evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor, which suggests that living chimpanzees and gorillas are poor models for the last common ancestor and for understanding our own evolution since that time.
Primary authors in the project include Dr. Lovejoy, who studied the skeletal remains below the neck and helped determine that Ardi could walk upright, but not as well as humans, and could climb trees, but not as proficiently as chimpanzees and other great apes.
Those results among others place Ardi as an important transitional hominid in the evolutionary journey that led to humans.
"It's another step toward understanding human evolution and completing our understanding," Dr. Lovejoy said. "Ultimately it says something about our place in the world."
More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
David Templeton can be reached at dtempleton@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578.
First published on October 1, 2009 at 10:39 amThe Office of Naval Research recently equipped Marines in Hawaii with special technology to help them sift through loads of data to find only the information they need for the battlefield.
ONR officials partnered with U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific Experimentation Center and the 3rd Marine Regiment for the third annual Agile Bloodhound demonstration Nov. 13-14 at Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Marines used handheld devices and special software to automatically sift through loads of data to help ease information overload.
Naval expeditionary operations involve more sensors, radios and computers than ever before. However, the management and dissemination of information has not kept pace with technological advancements, and Marines on the front lines can be overwhelmed with the amount of raw data coming at them, demonstration officials maintain.
“Marines in the heat of battle have more pressing things to worry about than trying to make sense of a lot of different pieces of intelligence,” said John Moniz, ONR program manager. “They need the right information at the right time, and Agile Bloodhound is helping us figure out what combination of hardware and software works best to deliver only the most relevant information as quickly as possible.”
The demonstration showed how information such as imagery from an unmanned aircraft sensors and communications and networking can be tailored to speed decision-making by expeditionary forces.
Some of the many technologies used during Agile Bloodhound include:
-- A serverless chat system that allows person-to-person and group communications even for those not connected to the infrastructure network and servers.
-- A knowledge discovery program that uses smartphones and tablets to streamline ISR data collection and exploitation, as well as create a unified picture of the battlefield through geographically identified imagery and automated force tracking.
-- ActiveWiki software that allows collaboration for social-networking graphs and real-time updates of pictures and maps to produce unique views and overlays of the battlespace.
“We’re trying to create a user-oriented world view for Marines,” said Col. William Zamagni, deputy director of ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department. “Whether they’re in command centers with PCs, in vehicles with laptops or on foot with smartphones, Marines need access to the most pertinent information possible.”I have been reading the Leeds Teaching Hospitals report on Jimmy Savile. Obviously, it couldn’t really be any more grim, and you’ll have heard the latest shocking revelations via the mainstream media and Jamie Kenny.
But what about really sick and perverted behaviour? Here’s some for you.
A hugely important theme in the report is the remarkably vicious competition between the consultant doctors for status, resources, and career advancement. At a higher level of abstraction, this appeared as competition between LGI and other medical institutions for prestige, high technology, and investment. The huge scale of NHS infrastructure in Leeds meant that this was a seriously big deal politically and economically. This was dramatised as a rivalry with St James’s across town, a rivalry that was rooted in class distinction, as LGI historically emerged from the university medical school and St James’ from the workhouse.
The 1960s-70s board of governors, who were personally closest to Savile, were especially exercised by the perceived need to keep up with the expansion of St James’s as the light of NHS investment shone down on the previously benighted casual wards. This was why they wanted the publicity Jimmy Savile drummed up so badly.
This had direct practical consequences for Savile’s MO. One of the reasons why there were so many people crammed into the Nightingale wards, and so many children mixed into the general population, under minimal supervision by a thin scattering of student nurses overnight, was because they were desperate to retain their accreditation as a teaching hospital and needed to save elsewhere, something of enormous financial and career significance.
As time went on, his engagement with the top management shifted, in their telling at least. Rather than being personally associated with the bigwigs, he was increasingly in touch with the ambitious middle layer who used his services as a kind of broker to contact private donors, thus getting around the NHS’s procurement rules. I suspect there is more than one sordid story about money in here*.
However, this narrative is somewhat tendentious, when you look at the astonishing attempt by cardiology professor Alistair Hall, PR director Karl Milner, and others to get their hands on Savile’s estate. To recap, Hall, who was Savile’s doctor as well as his friend, gave a eulogy for him at the preposterous pseudo-state funeral in which he claimed that Savile had left much of his estate to endow a heart institute at LGI. Savile’s will contained nothing of the sort. It turns out from the report that Hall, Milner, and company had a get-together between his death and the funeral to decide how best to get their (institutional, rather than personal) hands on his money, like some gang of scheming relatives in a 19th-century French novel.
Actually, many of the recent top management demonstrate huge amnesia about him, which is astonishing when you realise one of them (former CEO Stuart Ingham) remembered Savile directly threatening him, saying that he could have him “dealt with” by people he “knew”, although he also remembered nothing else.
Which reminds me. Far below this exalted social level, Savile’s only official role was as a volunteer porter, and he made a great deal of effort to be everybody’s best mate at that level. It’s not hard to see a parallel with his career in the Northern club trade. Famously, gangsters love to control the door staff because anything that goes in or out of the club goes through the door. Savile had his own door staff to ensure that he controlled the door. Similarly, influencing the porters and security guards gave him what he wanted: access. To put it another way, he muscled in on the door at LGI with the assistance of the new chief porter, his close friend and apparent accomplice Charlie Hullighan, in the same way as he might have imposed a new Lithuanian bodybuilder on an uncooperative dance hall.
In fact, it would probably make sense to break this post up into sections by social class, but there’s only so much Savile I’m up for wading through.
And making this an underworld story is interesting, but I think it’s worth pointing the finger firmly at the cynical and ambitious medical bureaucrats driving in from Harrogate or Ilkley. They thought they were using him; he was using them; now they remember only that he’d always been hanging about and it was somebody else’s problem. They are the Schreibtischtäter of the story, and there’s something frankly Prussian about the report’s description of LGI in the postwar era.
The parallel, not-quite-equal nursing hierarchy was as bad for different reasons. They were just as ambitious but even more authoritarian, and where their medical colleagues cared about their science, they cared mostly about whether any of the students had snuck a boyfriend into halls or been seen in a pub. Nobody seems to have cared about the patients, who were somehow beside the point. The world of Orwell’s How the Poor Die was still with us.
Speaking of How the Poor Die and workhouses, the one place in Leeds where you were relatively safe from Jimmy was…Jimmy’s. Out of thirty-odd allegations on Leeds Teaching Hospitals premises, only one is recorded at St. James’s. Clearly, he had fully entered into LGI’s tribal identity. A real LGI man didn’t set foot in Jimmy’s, and neither did he.
*One that didn’t happen was the appeal for an MRI scanner in the early 90s, where Savile made it a condition of the donation – which wasn’t actually his money or even money he collected – that the machine be procured from a specific Japanese manufacturer, not named in the report. The medics refused to accept that particular model and the deal fell through.WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday sent a letter to President Barack Obama's nominee to head U.S. trade negotiations, expressing concerns about the administration's lack of transparency in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal being negotiated largely in secret.
Labor unions, public health advocates and environmental groups have long decried so-called free trade policies for undermining important regulations in the pursuit of corporate profits. The letter signals that Warren's tough stance on bank regulation extends to other major consumer and public interest matters.
What the public does know about the TPP has been learned through leaked documents. According to those documents, the Obama administration is seeking to grant corporations the ability to directly challenge regulations in countries involved in the talks -- a political power that was typically reserved for sovereign nations until the 1990s. Obama opposed such policies as a presidential candidate in 2008. The leaked intellectual property chapter of the deal includes provisions that would increase the costs of life-saving medicines in poor countries.
Warren's letter does not take issue with specific terms of the negotiations, but rather the secrecy surrounding the process. Members of Congress have been allowed to see TPP negotiation texts. Some have said they were insulted by the complex administrative procedures the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, or USTR, imposed to actually access the texts -- barriers not imposed on unelected corporate advisers.
Members of official "Trade Advisory Committees" stacked with corporate officials have been given access to the texts. But on June 6, Labor Advisory Committee Chairman R. Thomas Buffenbarger wrote a letter to acting U.S. Trade Representative Miriam Sapiro objecting to the "severe restrictions" that her agency had placed on information available to advocates for working people.
In her letter, Warren asked current White House official Michael Froman, who Obama has nominated to be the next head of USTR, whether he would make a copy of the negotiation text available to the public. She also asked for a full accounting of all information that has been made available to each official advisory committee.
The Obama administration has been negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership for several years, and Obama said at his 2013 State of the Union address that he hopes to have the deal approved by the end of the year.Every so often a man publishes some screed about how he’s no longer a feminist because feminists have been mean to him. Every very often, some white person opines that they’d be totally on board with this whole anti-racism thing except that people of color are just so damn rude to them all the time. Or a religious person says that atheism is wrong because atheists are condescending. Or a person who consumes animal products dismisses the idea of veganism because they, personally, found some vegan or other to be annoying.
I have seen this happen enough times and with enough different beliefs and social groups that I’ve noticed it as a pattern. I’ve written before about the specter of That One Meanie-Face Feminist Who Got All Bitchy When I Offered To Pick Up The Check, without which no discussion of feminism with a non-feminist man could possibly be complete. This supposedly very rude woman from my interlocutor’s distant romantic past is now trotted out what I imagine is very often to provide an explanation for the man’s distaste for feminism. Or, perhaps with a caveat, “modern” feminism.
But it doesn’t happen just with feminism. It happens with every political issue.
First of all, the most important thing to remember is that when feminists(/women/people of color/vegans/etc.) are accused of being “mean,” this is only actually the case a fraction of the time. (Even if the exact fraction is debatable.) A lot of the things that get people with minority identities or viewpoints are labeled “mean” go completely unremarked-upon when done by someone with a dominant identity or viewpoint. I have a lot of theories for why that is: the expectation that minority or subordinate groups be quiet and not rock the boat; the unfamiliarity that people in dominant groups have with those views and opinions; and the stereotyping of certain groups, such as women and people of color and especially women of color, as being “emotional” or “hysterical” or “angry.” This leads to the simplest cognitive bias of all: confirmation bias. You expect a woman of color to be angry, and lo and behold, you perceive her that way.
“Mean” is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s easy to rationalize why a certain tone or behavior from a female feminist is “mean” while the same tone or behavior from a man is not. And that’s not even to imply that anyone is lying or intentionally skewing anything. It’s subconscious; that’s why it’s called a bias. I have no doubt that everyone who has ever accused me of being “mean” about my feminism genuinely felt that I was being mean to them. But that doesn’t mean that perception wasn’t influenced by their bias.
I’ve seen this play out numerous times with my own writing. A year ago I wrote a post about street harassment that went viral and got tons of comments about how I’m being so mean to men and clearly I hate them and blame them for everything. (For a fun exercise, count how many times I use the phrase “not all men” or variants thereof in the post.) And look. You can disagree with my entire thesis–that “compliments” made to random women on the street are a sort of power play, and that the reason many men feel so compelled to make them is because they’ve been socialized to believe that their opinions on women’s looks are extremely important and worthy of expression–and still see for yourself that there’s no way a person thinking clearly can conceive of that post as being “mean,” or of me as “hating men.”
But sometimes feminists (and vegans and atheists and whatever) are mean. Of course they are. Everyone is mean sometimes, but “default” categories like “white” and “male” are made invisible because they’re considered the norm from which everyone else deviates, so nobody besides women and minorities and their allies usually makes much of fuss about the meanness of men or white people specifically.
For instance, if you do not identify as a feminist or you consider yourself actively opposed to feminism, you probably don’t think of yourself or others like you as especially mean. It looks a little different from over here, though. I’ve been angrily fumed at and condescended to by you. I’ve been called every possible insult and every slur that could possibly apply to someone like me–bitch, cunt, whore, slut, dyke–by you. I’ve been threatened with various acts of violence. I’ve been alternatively called gruesome and unfuckable and told exactly how I should be raped.
And yet, except for when I get especially upset (which isn’t very often anymore) I avoid claiming that everyone who disagrees with feminism is “mean” (or much worse), because I actually have evidence that that’s not true. Most of the people I’ve met in my life have been opposed to feminism, and most of them have been perfectly decent people.
Hopefully we’ve established that people of all genders and races and religions and political beliefs can be “mean,” although some get accused of it much more readily and harshly than others, and not necessarily because they are any more likely to be “mean.”
Now let’s get to the main point, which is the utter ridiculousness of dismissing someone’s argument or opinion merely because you find them to be mean.
It doesn’t actually matter if a feminist is mean to you–at least, not in terms of making up your mind about feminism. Feminism is based on a wide variety of observations and theories that are empirically testable. Either women (especially women of color) make less money than men for the same work or they do not. Either women are less likely to become CEOs and film directors and elected politicians or they are not. Either women are held to impossible and unfair standards of beauty that are impossible for most of them, especially for women of color and women who are not thin or able-bodied, to achieve, or they are not. Either women are interrupted much more often in conversation by men or they are not, and either resumes and applications belonging to men are more likely to be read and approved of than those of women or not. Either women (especially women of color and women with disabilities) are subject to extremely high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault or they are not. Either people of all genders are frequently blamed for being sexually assaulted or they are not. Either trans people, especially trans women, are socially persecuted for allegedly violating the gender binary or they are not. Either men are expected to be “strong” and “manly” at the expense of their emotional needs, or they are not. Either women (but not men) face a double bind between being considered competent but unlikable or incompetent but likable, or they do not. Either reproductive care for people with uteri (but not for people with penises) is constantly being attacked, or it is not.
Hundreds or thousands of pages of research are available about all of these questions. Even if you peruse the research and find it wanting, the reason you are not a feminist should be because you don’t find the evidence compelling, not because some woman yelled at you for offering to pay for her meal. I’ll still disagree with you about the evidence, but at least then you have a real argument, and not one entirely based on feelings.
Likewise, the criminal justice system is demonstrably discriminatory against people of color at every level regardless of whether or not you personally enjoyed your recent interactions with people of color. The production of animals for human consumption has negative effects on the environment even if many vegans are snobby. There is no, and has never been, any evidence for the existence of a higher power, even though some atheists are pretty crappy to religious people. (By the way, one way to help would be to stop calling them mentally ill, but you already know that)
It’s common to claim that a feminist who is arguing with you and also calling you names is making an ad hominem fallacy, although the argument there is usually less “You’re wrong because you’re an asshole” and more “You’re wrong and, by the way, you’re also an asshole, so there’s that.” Bu in fact, it seems like an ad hominem fallacy to dismiss someone’s arguments because they’re mean. People aren’t wrong because they’re mean; they’re wrong because they’re wrong.
If I wanted to, I could explain to you that 2 + 2 = 4 in the most nasty, condescending, stuck-up, snarky, hateful, vicious way possible. (I’m trying to imagine this now, and it’s funny.) You might never want to interact with me ever again, but that doesn’t mean 2 + 2 suddenly doesn’t equal 4 anymore.
What would be fair to say is that you’re now upset and not interested in trying to learn about basic arithmetic from me anymore, so while you still haven’t been convinced that 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn’t mean it necessarily doesn’t. You can also say that the emotional response that you’re experiencing is interfering with your ability to think clearly about this subject.
Feminism is not as clear-cut or obviously correct as 2 + 2 = 4, but the same principle applies. It’s natural to start to feel very bad when you perceive (accurately or otherwise, doesn’t even matter) that you’re being personally attacked, and that can make you not want to engage with this person, listen to their arguments, and reevaluate your own opinions in response. But that doesn’t make them wrong; it just makes them ineffective–for this particular purpose in this particular situation. Remember that meanness is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, and what may seem mean to you may be just a normal spirited debate to someone else.
At this point, the rational thing to do is to tell yourself that your unwillingness to agree with or even consider the person’s opinion has less to do with the merits of the opinion and more to do with your emotional response. Disengage, let the emotions subside, and, if you’re interested, find another way to learn about the view in question.
And now I’ve written over 1,500 words, and, to be honest, I think most of the people who say things like this already know all of this. Of course someone being mean to you doesn’t suddenly invalidate all of their opinions. So when you say that you disagree with feminism/veganism/atheism/anti-racism/queer rights/whatever because someone you have apparently designated an official ambassador of one of those views was unkind to you, you probably really mean one of these two things:
1. I disagree with feminism/veganism/atheism/anti-racism/queer rights because I hold a diverging opinion.
2. I feel hurt by a discussion I had with a feminist/vegan/atheist/anti-racist/queer rights advocate, and that makes me not want to think about this issue anymore or reevaluate my opinion on it.
Say what you mean.
~~~
Liked this post? Please consider donating so I can speak at conferences.NEW YORK — Basketball's newest league started with a game-winning basket and an injured former NBA player.
Rashard Lewis made a three-point play with his team facing game point Sunday in the opening game of the Big3, the 3-on-3 basketball league co-founded by Ice Cube.
Jason Williams, the flashy point guard nicknamed "White Chocolate," went down with a right leg injury late in the game. His 3 Headed Monsters blew the late once he went out and were a point away from losing, but Lewis made his basket and free throw to edge the Ghost Ballers, 62-60.
BIG3 Basketball League debuts at Barclays Center
The games are played to 60 points but teams have to win by two, so the Ghost Ballers couldn't quite get there when they went ahead 60-59.
Lewis scored 27 points and former No. 1 pick Kwame Brown had 17 points and 13 rebounds for the 3 Headed Monsters. Ricky Davis led the Ghost Ballers with 23 points.
Jason Williams (55) drives against Ghost Ballers Ivan Johnson (44) during the first half of Game 1 in the BIG3 league Sunday.
Cube vowed the games would be competitive — players are vying for a revenue share based on final league standings — and there was a possession early when players on both teams dived on the floor for a loose ball. There was pushing and shoving in the post and a few hard fouls, and the trash talk appeared to heat up as the game went on.
The quality of play wasn't the strongest, but Barclays Center in Brooklyn had a good crowd for the first of four games on the day. Allen Iverson, the former NBA MVP who is the marquee attraction in the league, was scheduled to play in the third game.
Ghost Ballers player/captain Mike Bibby (10) knocks the ball from 3 Header Monsters Eddie Basden.
The eight-team league will play on 10 weekends, culminating with the Aug. 26 championship in Las Vegas. Games are shown on Monday nights on Fox Sports 1.
Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing!The typically hushed corridors of the Russell Senate Building echoed with noise Monday as protesters, upset by the Senate Republicans’ health care bill, descended on lawmakers’ offices to let their displeasure be known ― part of several such demonstrations around the U.S. Capitol.
An initial crowd estimated at around 100 protesters split into smaller groups once inside the building, with each subgroup seeking out the offices of specific senators, some of whom are positioned to cast critical swing votes on the legislation.
Capitol Police said in a statement they responded to 13 locations in Senate and House office buildings and as of late Monday afternoon had made 80 arrests. The officers “warned the demonstrators to cease and desist with their unlawful demonstration activities,” according to the statement, and those who did not were charged under a law prohibiting “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding.”
A group of around 20 protesters visited the office of Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in the Russell building, where they proceeded to enter and chant against what their signs termed “Trumpcare.” Ten later sat on the floor outside Flake’s office, where they chanted “Kill the bill” and “Flake, where are you?”MUNICH, Germany (Kurdistan24) – According to a German official, the country’s troops will start leaving a Turkish air base where they are stationed in July.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen revealed the Bundeswehr soldiers would pull out of the Incirlik air base in Turkey after strained relations between the NATO allies.
The German troops will be relocated to a new base in Jordan, von der Leyen told German media on Sunday.
“Until the end of June, our flight plans as part of the anti-Islamic State (IS) coalition are set,” Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted the Defense Minister.
“After that, we’ll be transferring our tanker aircraft as quickly as possible to Jordan,” she added.
Germany has over 250 military personnel present at the Incirlik air base.
The troops fly Tornado surveillance operations over Syria and refueling flights for partner nations in the coalition against IS.
Regarding Germany’s role in the Middle East, von der Leyen stated the country’s transfer of troops would temporarily put the Bundeswehr’s mission in the region on hold.
She reaffirmed the soldiers would be ready for deployment from the Jordan base by mid-July.
“Starting from October, the reconnaissance Torn |
,” mountain biker Damian Hiley told the San Diego Union Tribune. “I was blown away when they told us we had stepped into the eastern boundary of the base.”
Hiley and five friends had begun their ride on the West Sycamore Canyon trail in Scripps Ranch. The ride ended abruptly, though, after they rounded a bend and were stopped by a Marine.
The bikes — many of which are priced at $5,000 or more — were placed with others that had been confiscated.
Lt. Matthew Gregory told the Union-Tribune that trespassing has become a serious issue and that efforts have been stepped up to warn bikers and hikers about off-limits zones.
Because of frequent weapons training, trespassers face “potentially life-threatening danger,” Gregory said.
Gregory told the San Diego Reader: “I feel like we’ve done our due diligence. We’ve let people know, we put signs out there, and we’ve had patrols warning people to stay off our base. It’s a security issue for us, and a safety issue for them.”
The Marines claim that warning signs are placed prominently and strategically, but Hiley said his group did not see any signs.
“What's really upsetting for us is that there are really no signs,” the Chula Vista resident said. “As first-time riders on that trail, we had no idea we were on [base].”
<iframe width=”620″ height=”340″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/Csb80nmUT88″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe> However, the San Diego Mountain Biking Association this week has posted a statement to Facebook informing bikers that "there are NO LEGAL TRAILS in Sycamore canyon,” which some bikers are accessing via Mission Trails Regional Park.
“Sycamore Canyon is not part of Mission Trails,” the SDMBA added. (SDMBA President Kevin Loomis speaks about the weekend incident in the video posted above.)
The SDMBA has for years tried to persuade the Marines to open Sycamore Canyon for riding and other recreation, to no avail.
Now they're working with local government representatives in the hope of opening an alternative trail system through the area's wilderness, beyond base property.
Meanwhile, those who have been ticketed and had their bikes confiscated have been told they will get their bikes back after they settle their tickets. That process could take up to 45 days.
Hiley said he and his group were forced to hike two miles back to their vehicles, wearing cycling shoes. He described to GrindTV that the trek was like a “the walk of shame.”
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5 unusual campsites for adventurous campersT he shot was of two women in party dresses taking a selfie next to the Greek riot police. In the summer of 2015 it was an unremarkable sight – middle-class supporters of the euro rallying to save Greece from the threat of Grexit. But when I described the scene, in a voiceover aimed at an American audience, a query came back from the US: this does not sound right; they look too posh to be middle class.
Middle class, in the US, means what working class means in Britain. Except that, while nobody – even in Corbyn’s Labour party – goes around saying they represent “working-class values”, all politicians in America claim to represent the values of this middle class.
But the middle class is shrinking. A report from the Pew Research Center last week found that, for the first time since the 1970s, families defined as “middle income” are actually in a minority in the US – squeezed from both ends by an enlarged poverty-stricken group below them, and an enriched group above them.
Analysis / Guardian readers: US middle class is 'living from one crisis to the next' Despite endless chatter of an American middle class, a precise definition of the term remains elusive. So we asked our readers to tell us in their own words where they think they fall on the US class spectrum and why Read more
The graphs showing the shrinkage read like a textbook example of the future that French economist Thomas Piketty predicts for the world. In 1971, there were 80 million households in the US defined as middle income – compared with a combined 52 million in the groups above and below. Now, there are 120 million middle-class families, but 121 million rich and poor – “A demographic shift that could signal a tipping point,” says Pew.
There has also been a big shift in who gets the wealth generated by America: “Fully 49% of US aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29% in 1970. The share accruing to middle-income households was 43% in 2014, down substantially from 62% in 1970.”
Middle America is, of course, supposed to be the bedrock of US democracy. The young family with kids, its income gradually rising as the years go by, is the foundation of political stability and consensus – and, although its quintessential era was the Keynesian years from 1945 to 1973, the dream, myth or other storytelling metaphor has survived. Until now.
The bare fact is that the majority of Americans, according to Pew, are either rich or poor. And this is beginning to have political impact. It would be facile to link the emergence of Donald Trump’s know-nothing, racist rhetoric to a mere demographic tipping point. But the insecurities he is playing on are real.
In part, the new demographics of the US are a success story: black people and older people have both, according to Pew, moved up the income scale. The clearest move downwards is among those who did not receive or complete a college education. That means the quintessential success story of the US is no longer the young, white, suburban family of the Bewitched and Doris Day legends. And the manual worker, the farmer and the self-taught salesman – all essential archetypes – no longer fit so easily into the success narrative.
Neoliberal economics favour the already rich and those rich in assets. This means, in an economy bulked out on the steroids of quantitative easing, older people. Meanwhile, for the young – whether of the precariat or those lucky enough to get into the stable workforce of corporate America – the debt accumulated while gaining the essential passport to middle-income status – a degree – serves as a lifetime drag on asset wealth
This demographic tipping point creates, in short, more problems for America’s mainstream political narrative than it creates for the shrunken middle classes. Consensus is fragmenting. Social media thrusts footage of repeated police shootings of black or other minority Americans into our timelines. It thrusts the senseless mass shooter into the limelight. Now, it makes anti-Muslim hatred go viral.
Trump’s aim is not just to amplify these insecurities, but to create a politics of spectacle and senselessness around them. Businesspeople in the US are quietly despairing not just about the overtness of the racism, but also about the underlying irrationality of the discourse.
If fewer people get to work in technocratic jobs, where logic, prudence and care have to be followed every hour of every day, then, sooner or later, the acid of unreason begins to corrode democracy. That’s the fear: that values of science, logic and humanity get left behind as the fragmenting conservative right outshout each other.
Are you feeling the Bern – for Donald Trump? If Bernie Sanders fails to win the Democratic nomination, are you planning on voting for Donald Trump instead? We want to hear from you Read more
It’s worth exploring the root cause of such fragility, though, because it is not obvious why the proportional decline of the middle class should trigger, causally, an implosion of reason as spectacular as the one being played out in the Republican primary battle. When you dig into the demography of the US middle class, a plausible answer emerges: it is more ethnically diverse than ever, there are fewer marriages than ever, it is better educated than ever.
Any conservatism – or any form of liberalism – that assumes as its default a middle class that is white, religious and uneducated is going to be misaligned with reality. But this new, diverse, more modern US middle class needs representation like never before. The average income of the upper tier, says Pew, is seven times that of the middle tier. In 1983, it was merely double.
As the primary season begins, beyond all the self-parody and craziness, the most serious questions for these 120 million households will be: who actually understands us, and who can offer us a plausible way beyond stagnating real incomes and multigenerational insecurity.Halloween is, in part, about reckoning with the coming season of darkness, about confronting our fears of what lurks in that dark — spiders and spirits, witches and ghouls. Each year, it seems more and more people get into the season's spirit by going all out decorating their homes. Below is a guide to my favorites (listed by community, in alphabetical order), based on several nights of haunting Greater Boston after the sun went down.
Are there great places that I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments, by email or on the Facebook.
Boston: 206 Savin Hill Ave.
A giant, inflated Grim Reaper stands on the lawn and a purple ghost flutters in the tree.
206 Savin Hill Ave., Boston. (Greg Cook)
Boston: 62 Tuttle St.
A pumpkin-headed ghoul and spiders haunt this home. Style points for the tasteful use of cornstalks.
62 Tuttle St., Boston. (Greg Cook)
Boston: Union Park and Waltham Street.
Union Park and neighboring Waltham Street, just off Tremont Street, are the Halloweeniest part of Boston’s South End. Numerous properties are decorated with skeletons, witches and pumpkins. The neighborhood grew so covered with fake cobwebs this week that a concerned citizen filed a complaint with the city on Oct. 25. Now that’s doing Halloween right.
74 Waltham St., Boston. (Greg Cook)
36 Union Park, Boston. (Greg Cook)
Malden: Bainbridge Street.
Bainbridge Street has become a Halloween destination since Maryann Spinney (26 Bainbridge St.) and her daughter and son-in-law Evelyn and Mark Anzalone (50-52 Bainbridge St.) began going all out decorating their homes more than a decade ago. Other neighbors followed suit, including Michelle Corbett, who often turns her yard at 49 Bainbridge St. into a free, outdoor, walk-through haunted house.
26-28 Bainbridge St., Malden. (Greg Cook)
30-32 Bainbridge St., Malden. (Greg Cook)
26-28 Bainbridge St., Malden. (Greg Cook)
50-52 Bainbridge St., Malden. (Greg Cook)
Malden: Wyoming Avenue.
A couple homes, about a block apart, are worth checking out here. Witches and a mummy haunt the front door at 37 Wyoming Ave. A graveyard filled with skeletons and ghouls fills the lawn at 104 Wyoming Ave.
Wyoming Avenue, Malden. (Greg Cook)
104 Wyoming Ave., Malden. (Greg Cook)
Medford: Main Street at Bowen Avenue.
Inflated ghosts, the Grim Reaper, spiders and a dragon haunt this corner property.
Main Street at Bowen Avenue, Medford. (Greg Cook)
Melrose: 462 Lebanon St.
Ghouls (one with long auburn hair maybe, coincidentally bears a bit of a resemblance to the hairdo of one of the residents here) haunt the porch of this blue and purple house.
462 Lebanon St., Melrose. (Greg Cook)
Melrose: 223 Washington St.
Each autumn, Scott Moss turns his front drive into “Clara’s Tunnel of Terror,” named for his late mother, who he says inspired his passion for Halloween haunts. He covers the driveway and turns it into a maze running past animated tableaus of zombies, a ghoulish mom pushing a baby carriage (don’t look inside), and a murderous butcher and still writhing corpse. He opens it to the public on both Halloween and Halloween eve (when he invites visitors as a charity fund-raiser). Moss dreams some day of opening his own haunted house.
Washington Street just south of Gould Street, Melrose. (Greg Cook)
Washington Street just south of Gould Street, Melrose. (Greg Cook)
Washington Street just south of Gould Street, Melrose. (Greg Cook)
Washington Street just south of Gould Street, Melrose. (Greg Cook)
Washington Street just south of Gould Street, Melrose. (Greg Cook)
Somerville: Springfield Street at Concord Street.
Another magnet for trick-or-treaters is Springfield Street at Concord Street, where numerous neighbors decorate their homes. Jerry Carvalho fills the front yard at 53 Springfield with a zombie nursery. (The babies aren’t on view yet, he says, because they tend to wander off if he puts them out too early.) His brother, who resides next door, has covered his property with a giant spider web. Across the street, a neighbor often decorates with a Phantom of the Opera theme, but perhaps not this year as the property is for sale.
53 Springfield St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
63 Concord St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
Somerville: 23 Chester St.
This home and its neighbor to its left are a couple of the best-decorated homes in the region. Giant spiders have overrun the place, stringing webs in the trees, on the porch, and climbing up to the roof. It will make your skin crawl.
23 Chester St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
Somerville: 44 to 46 Medford St.
Skulls, ghosts and glowing spider webs.
44-46 Medford St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
Somerville: 465 Medford St.
The lawn on this corner property has become a graveyard. “I told you I was sick,” reads one headstone. “Boston Red Sox R.I.P.,” reads another.
465 Medford St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
Somerville: 48 Walnut St.
This astonishing house at the corner of Walnut and Summit Avenue glows a creepy blue. Skeletons sit on the porch, dragons perch on the roof, and the yard is filled with inflatable ghouls, a graveyard and a zombie.
48 Walnut St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
48 Walnut St., Somerville. (Greg Cook)
Somerville: 31 Warren St.
There’s something terribly unnerving about this graveyard and ghouls.
31 Warren St., Someville. (Greg Cook)
Greg Cook is co-founder of WBUR's ARTery. Follow him on Twitter @AestheticResear or on the Facebook.Last time Jamie and Jenny saw each other, he surrendered himself to the Red Coats and was imprisoned for numerous years.
The episode, titled "First Wife," hints to fans that's there trouble ahead in Claire and Jamie's marriage.
Jenny has been left to care for and maintain the Frasers' family home and estate called Lallybroch.
Jamie (Sam Heughan) tries to reason with his sister, Jenny (Laura Donnelly), who is known for her stubbornness.
Claire (Caitriona Balfe) has a lot of explaining to do on Outlander's third season. After 20 years away from her beloved Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), she returned through the stones to 18th-century Scotland. Since being back, she's performed surgery, nearly gotten raped, and watched Jamie's print shop burn to the ground.
Claire has also been telling a few white lies to explain her disappearance for the past two decades. She told Fergus and Ian Murray that she sailed to the American colonies because she thought Jamie had died in Culloden.
In Outlander's new episode this Sunday, "First Wife," Jamie and Claire return home to Lallybroch, his family's estate where Claire comes face-to-face with her sister-in-law, Jenny (Laura Donnelly), who is unsure about Claire's return these many years later.
Click through the gallery to check out some sneak peek images from the new episode.
Outlander, Sundays, 8/7c, StarzThe truth of the matter is, you have no idea what will happen to your code once your application is released. Your code may be used again down the line, it may be altered – and it will most certainly be used in ways you never imagined. Can you start to see why security does actually play an important role in organizations which develop applications?
Luckily, if you’re in a position where you interact with code, you have a direct way to help better secure our applications and devices. And with that power comes responsibility – the responsibility of playing your part in helping secure the world’s software.
To help get those working with code a boost in your security education, we’ve curated a collection of application security resources to assist any developer, wherever you are on your journey into the arduous (yet rewarding) world of application security. Because when it comes to Application Security, your education is never complete.
And if you’re part of the security team, consider sharing this collection with your colleagues on the development teams – you just might help spark a conversation about secure coding!
General Resources:
OWASP Top 10
The first place to start with application security is with OWASP. If you’re not familiar, OWASP stands for the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit, international organization dedicated to spreading security awareness and offering resources to help all parts of an organization get involved in the application security program. (Read more about what OWASP is all about here.)
The OWASP Top Ten is a “powerful awareness document for web application security,” and represents the most common and critical security flaws. It’s recommended that all organizations adopt the OWASP Top Ten, as it offers a simple way to get the ball rolling on application security within your organization.
OWASP Top 10 Cheat Sheet
After absorbing the Top Ten vulnerabilities you should be working to avoid in your code, the next stop is the OWASP Top Ten Cheat Sheet, which details the best practices and techniques you should instill while coding.
Writing Secure Code
Microsoft has amassed a collection of resources over the years to help its own developers, and the community at large, write secure code. The company was an early adopter of integrating security into their SDLC, or the SDL, as they call it, and have gathered valuable information, best practices, and techniques that can be found in this resource.
The Ten Best Practices for Secure Software Development
Developed by ISC, this printable PDF offers ten best practices that organizations should be on the lookout for as they develop applications. While the sheet is aimed for security managers, it’s an important read for developers, too. Learning the ‘why’ behind application security will help you understand why the secure practices you’re putting in place while coding are essential for the overall health of your organization.
Web Application Security Guide
A comprehensive overview for of web application security, this guide delves into the most common security issues in web applications and offers both the techniques to preventing such mistakes – and the rationale of how, if the vulnerability stays in the code, an attacker could use it against the application.
The guide is printable, and acts a great tabletop resource for when you have a specific question about a certain issue or practice. In addition to the online guide, a checklist is provided to help guide developers through the security process as they code. Also printable, the web application security checklist is a great way to ensure your code is on the right track.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
No matter how much expertise in the area of application security you have, there is no better resource or place to turn than OWASP. For newbies, it’s imperative you familiarize yourself with OWASP’s numerous resources, and the cheat sheets offer digestible tips about the security issues you should aim to understand and help prevent. With a section dedicated as cheat sheets for the builder, or developer, bookmark these OWASP cheat sheets for a quick stop as you code and review what you’ve built.
Bonus: A PDF version that makes finding what you need even easier.
WebAppSec/ Secure Coding Guidelines
Aimed at those developing web applications for Mozilla, the guide is another universal resource for achieving security in applications. The guide sets forth best practices based on Mozilla’s own experience in securing web apps, so it’s a valuable resource to check out when trying to implement security features and reviewing your code.
CERT Secure Coding Standards
This resource is maintained by CERT, the federally-funded research and development group that’s housed and associated with Carnegie Mellon University, so you can be sure you’re getting up-to-date and effective information. The collection of standards includes one set of general best practices, and then drills down into the best practices for languages including C, C++, Java, Perl, and Android.
Stack Exchange: Information Security
There are going to be times, many times even, where you’re stuck with a security question that you can’t seem to find an answer. Fear not, because you’re not the only one. Stack Exchange offers a community just for security questions. Sign up today and remember you are not alone!
Articles:
A Gentle Introduction to Application Security
This article from Paragon offers a great high-level overview of what AppSec is, why it is important, and offers a “Taxonomic model” for security vulnerabilities, grouping security issues into classes with similar ‘features.’ It’s a different way to look at AppSec, but it teaches developers to look at the fundamental problem behind the vulnerabilities, as opposed to just checking if the issue exists and fixing it without giving it a second thought.
XSS: The Definitive Guide to Cross-Site Scripting
Breaking down the different types of cross-site scripting and the best ways to deflect each of them while writing code, this article (by yours truly) also includes a downloadable, printable guide of the do’s and don’t of XSS. Perfect to keep close by as you learn more about looking out for possible XSS issues.
28 Sites to Legally Practice Your Hacking Skills
Part One
Part Two
When learning application security, it’s crucial you get a taste of the “dark side” in order to be more effective as a builder and defender. Once you’ve learned the basics of AppSec, it’s time to try your hand at attacking the type of applications you code. Without understanding how attackers really work and the common methods of entrance they use – and seeing how it’s done for yourself – it’s hard to see the code in any other way than what your intention was for it. But that’s not how attackers think…
29 Cyber Security Blogs You Should Be Reading
Application security is a moving piece of the security puzzle, and staying up-to-date with appsec news and research is going to be important as you get more involved in security at your organization. To make sure you know what’s going on, so that you don’t miss the next Heartbleed or Shellshock, follow the security blogs we listed in this article.
Videos & Presentations:
Intro to Web Application Security
Offered as part of one of MIT’s Computer Science classes, this presentation is a great high-level overview of the importance of web application security, with examples of the most prevalent security issues and how to keep them out of your own code.
Application Security – Understanding, Exploiting and Defending Against Top Web Vulnerabilities
This talk, given by Michael Coates (@_mwc), who is now the Trust and InfoSec Officer at Twitter, dives into security issues all developers will see in their lifetime and shows you how attackers will use those vulnerabilities to hack your site or application. It’s a highly informative talk and gives a great lesson for using WebGoat, OWASP’s own vulnerable web application.
Application Security: Everything We Know is Wrong
In this talk given by OWASP board member Eoin Keary (@EoinKeary) attempts to answer the question “Why are we still happy with ‘testing security out’ rather than the more superior ‘building security in’”? It’s an interesting topic, especially if you’re not familiar with different security techniques like pen testing.
If you’re not quite sure how security is done in your organization, Eoin offers a look at the old, traditional way of manual testing late in the SDLC as well as the modern way of application security, which, you guessed it – involves developers helping integrate security earlier in the SDLC by learning secure coding practices. Slides to Eoin’s presentation can be found here.
The OWASP AppSec Tutorial Series
Unfortunately, the channel hasn’t been updated in a few years, but the content and topics covered – SQL, XSS, and the importance of using HTTPS – still continue to be relevant today. The first episode is a primer for the series and for what Application Security is all about. If you’re into learning through videos, this channel is a great place to start learning the fundamentals of application security.
Mobile App Security and Privacy
Developing mobile apps? You’ll want to watch this hour-long presentation on recent research and secure techniques against the most common attacks to mobile apps. Given by Carnegie Mellon University professor Norman Sadeh, this talk is chock full of interesting tidbits on the world of mobile applications and the importance of keeping them secure.
Mobile Application Security: Who, How, and Why
Another great resource for developers coding mobile apps, this OWASP presentation paints ‘the big picture’ in terms of what attackers are going after and why, and offers pointers to defend the code you worked hard to create.
Advanced SQL Injection
This talk was given at DefCon 17 by Joseph McCray (@j0emccray), who was a network pentester at the time but is now CTO at Secure Ninja. It’s an extensive look at SQL injection in various environments and how to deal with different types of the nasty yet entirely avoidable security bug. Joseph’s an entertaining speaker, making this talk fun and informative at the same time – the best way to learn about application security.
Hell Has Frozen Over: DevOps & Security
If you’re on a DevOps team, this video is for you. James Turnball (@kartar), CTO at Kickstarter, offers a primer to how to get along better with the security team. DevOps environments can seem impossible to control, but given the right tools and a strong collaboration between DevOps and Security teams, securing your applications can be done right. James gives an entertaining look at how to do it in your own organization.Want to try a recipe before purchasing your copy of Candle 79’s hotly anticipated new cookbook? Cook up this Seitan Piccata— it’s the restaurant’s most famous dish.
“We’ve been serving it for so long, and people come in and say ‘That was the best veal I’ve ever had,’ says Joy Pierson, co-owner of Candle 79.
Seitan Piccata
6 seitan cutlets (about 11⁄2 pounds; recipe below)
Whole wheat flour, for dredging
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1⁄4 cup minced shallots
1⁄4 cup finely sliced leek, white and pale green parts
1 teaspoon sea salt
1⁄2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour
3⁄4 cup white wine
1⁄4 cup capers, drained
2 cups vegetable stock or water
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon minced fresh flat-leaf parsley, plus 1⁄4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley for garnish (optional)
1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme leaves
1⁄8 teaspoon ground turmeric
1⁄4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
Caper berries, for garnish
1 lemon, thinly sliced, for garnish (optional)
Serves 6
Dredge the cutlets in the whole wheat flour, shaking off any excess. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Add the cutlets and cook until crisp and golden brown, 1 to 2 minutes per side. Place the cutlets on individual plates or a platter.
Heat the remaining 4 tablespoons of olive oil in another sauté pan over medium heat. Add the shallots, leek, salt, and pepper and sauté until soft and translucent, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the all-purpose flour and cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly, to make a roux. Add the wine to deglaze the pan and stir well to incorporate the flour. Add the capers, stock, bay leaf, minced parsley, thyme, turmeric, and lemon juice and cook over medium heat until the sauce becomes slightly glossy, about 10 minutes.
Spoon the sauce onto serving plates and place the cutlets atop the sauce. Garnish with the caper berries and the optional chopped parsley and lemon slices. Serve at once.
Seitan Cutlets
7 cups unbleached bread flour
3 cups whole wheat bread flour
41⁄2 cups water
11⁄2 teaspoons sea salt
8 cups vegetable stock or water
1⁄4 cup tamari
1 piece of kombu
1 piece of wakame
Makes 6 to 8 cutlets, about 11⁄2 pounds
Put the flours in a bowl. Mix the water and salt together and add to the flour. Stir until the mixture forms a ball of dough. When you have a nice ball, cover with water and let stand for 1 hour.
Pour off the water and rinse the dough under cold running water until the water is almost clear. Divide the dough into 2 balls.
Put the stock in a large soup pot and bring to a boil. Add the tamari, kombu, and wakame and decrease the heat. Add the balls of dough and simmer, uncovered, for 2 hours, until they are firm and slice easily.
Drain the stock from the pot, reserving the stock if not using the seitan right away. Transfer the seitan to a bowl, add enough cold water to cover, and let sit for about 10 minutes. Drain and slice the seitan into 1⁄2-inch-thick cutlets.
If not using the seitan at this point, store it (sliced or unsliced) in 4 cups of the reserved stock, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 1 month. Alternatively, the cutlets can be frozen (without the stock) for up to 3 months.
Reprinted with permission from Candle 79 Cookbook: Modern Vegan Classics from New York’s Premier Sustainable Restaurant. Copyright © 2011 by Joy Pierson, Angel Ramos, and Jorge Pineda. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, Berkeley, CA. Photo credit: Rita MaasThere is a war going on between two national narratives in Scandinavia and other European countries. In Sweden, the central question is how to define “Swedishness,” what it means to be Swedish, and if it’s possible to define the term at all. The subject has popped up in debates from time to time, at least in the past fifteen years.
As the big nationalistic party, the Sweden Democrats, has gained more and more support, so has the topic of Swedishness climbed higher on the political and cultural agenda. The recent migrant crisis has pushed nationalistic ideas and parties to the forefront all over Europe. The political polarization seems to increase as more and more migrants enter what was in a not-too-distant past quite homogeneous societies.
Exclusive vs. inclusive
The two narratives are both nationalistic in the sense that they attempt to define what the particular nation is, what it stands for and how it differs from other nations. They are mutually exclusive, with one being excluding and the other being including. One focuses on the historical and cultural roots of the nation, the other advocates immigration and multiculturalism.
While normally we attribute the first to the political right and the other to the left, the distinction is not always that simple to make. The nationalistic Sweden Democrats is now the biggest party among working class voters, taking the place held for so long by the Social Democrats. Blue-collar workers have shown themselves to be surprisingly conservative.
Proponents of inclusive nationalism say Sweden should be a country of openness and tolerance. Another word they like to use is solidarity, meaning that the affluent Swedes must aid the people who suffer around the world. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the socialist idea of caring for the weak and downtrodden in society is being applied also to people living beyond the Swedish borders.
In the US, some say that America is a nation of immigrants. Therefore it’s un-American to be against immigration in any way. It’s nonsense, of course, since the mostly European migrants that made America what it is today arrived a long time ago. In Sweden it would be even more nonsensical for someone to claim such a thing, so no one does.
But they present other reasons for why immigration is such an important aspect of Swedishness. It’s morally wrong to keep people out who have done nothing wrong. And not helping someone you know is suffering is even worse. It’s thoroughly un-Swedish to be selfish at all.
Everything can be Swedish
But what’s also significant in this inclusive narrative is the idea that Swedishness is constantly changing and infinitely malleable, like a pot of clay that will never solidify. That means whatever people do or think within the Swedish borders is what constitutes Swedishness. Since Swedishness is in transition, the very proposition that there exists a particular Swedish ethnicity that can be preserved over time is met with accusations of racism and xenophobia. It’s seen as a dog whistle for white supremacists. After all, if a black person moves to Sweden, being black is also included in the definition of Swedishness.
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The other national narrative, the one which some would call exclusive, see the clay pot of Swedishness as solid but fragile. It must be kept protected lest it will break and disappear, its fragments being discovered years from now by archaeologists and examined as remains of a long-lost culture.
That is why you’ll hear some of these nationalists proclaiming “Sweden for the Swedes!” In the end, it’s a matter of survival. And who can blame someone who’s proud of his heritage for wanting to pass it on to future generations?
A Swedish ethnicity actually exists, say proponents of exclusive nationalism. It consists of components like a common language, religion, traditions, values etc. It’s what Swedes are used to and something they don’t even notice until they encounter cultures that are far different.
And that leads into another point—multiculturalism doesn’t work. Different peoples will experience difficulties in cohabiting the same country. A better solution would be that every ethnicity had its own state in which people who share the same culture can live together. A society like that would be more stable than one with a mix of peoples who don’t trust or understand each other, and whose goals are opposing.
Flawed but growing
Both types of nationalism have their flaws. The exclusive kind, inevitably isolationist to some extent, seems out of touch with the current globalizing trend where communication, relationships and trade become globally integrated. Minorities also tend to be treated badly in these kinds of societies. The wars and genocides of the 20th century are reminders of what can happen when one ethnic group claims superiority and hegemony over others.
In the case of inclusive nationalism, on the other hand, there is a naive and unrealistic notion that people from different cultures will get along fine. Instances of terrorism and the failure of integrating immigrants into Western societies showcase the difficulties at hand. It is also common in multicultural societies that minorities receive privileges and are treated as protected groups, while the dominant group is denied equal rights. Hate speech laws practically forbid any utterance that might offend groups deemed “oppressed.”
Borders are trending once again
One thing is for certain: nationalism will not die out any time soon. These days, exclusive nationalism seems to be gaining ground all over the map. It is and will continue to be fueled by the migrant crisis for as long as it lasts. Borders are being erected once again between the European countries, and the discontent with the EU is growing. Soon the British might decide to leave the union, and if they do, others might follow.
Even if the flood of immigrants can be halted, many of them have already come, and their presence will be a strain on the national economy as well as the relationship between groups of citizens. The “Old Swedes” will see their country changed by the “New Swedes” and doubt if it’s for the better.
Balkanization will make natives turn to the exclusive type of nationalism for security, as they see the social cohesion of their formerly homogeneous country deteriorate. Inclusive nationalism will receive pushback as its flaws become all too apparent.
Read More: The Final Verdict On Swedish GirlsGaelscoil Éadain Mhóir in Derry is looking to grow in size
THE number of pupils being educated through Irish will increase significantly over the next four years, campaigners claim.
Research from Comhairle na Gaelscolaíochta (CnaG), the council for Irish-medium education, predicts an almost 100 per cent rise over a 15 year period.
In 2006/07, there were 3,660 children at Irish-medium schools. This increased to 5,873 last year - up 60.46 per cent.
CnaG predicts that by 2021, there will be 7,220 children receiving education through the medium of Irish - a rise of 97.23 per cent from 2006.
Its research also shows that numbers are rising in every county and the largest growth has been in Tyrone and Derry.
Pupil numbers in Tyrone, excluding schools in Strabane, rose from 238 to 812 between 2006 and 2016.
In Co Derry, enrolments increased from 190 to 626 in Derry. This was boosted by the opening in 2015 of Gaelcholaiste Dhoire. It became just the second fully-immersive Irish-medium post-primary school in the north when it opened in Dungiven Castle.
Numbers in primary schools almost doubled between 2006 and 2016 - 2,512 to 4,577 - while there were 1,680 in post-primary Irish schools last year compared to 605 a decade earlier.
CnaG said its projections for 2020/21 were based upon current and historic enrolments over the last three years.
The council said this was a fairly conservative method to use to estimate growth, which would not take into consideration either any rise in transfer rates from pre-school to primary or from primary to post-primary or any newly established schools in the years to come.
As a result, it expects the actual growth to be even greater.
The sector continues to bring forward fresh proposals for further expansion.
There are plans to allow a popular bunscoil in Derry to grow in size while others proposals include one for a post-primary school in north Belfast.
In addition, new pre-schools in Armagh, Swatragh and Toomebridge opened this year.
CnaG said it viewed the establishment of the nursery schools as "irrefutable proof that the appetite for the provision of |
Stephen Walkom, vice-president and director of officiating for the National Hockey League, says his league wants the best referees regardless of the country on their birth certificate. Canadians, Americans and one Russian make up the current NHL referee roster.
Opening up CFL referee positions to Americans isn’t a new idea. My colleague, TSN CFL Insider Dave Naylor, has advocated for such a change for some time.
The notion U.S.-born referees won’t be able to adapt to the three-down game is false. Coaches and players do it on a seasonal basis. So could referees.
You can change the rules and improve the use of technology, but at some point it comes down to the guys with the whistles and the flags.
Challenge them. Force them to get better or step aside.
The CFL is at an interesting crossroads. New stadiums, invigorated ownership and a seemingly never-ending thirst for football in North America could allow the CFL to grow and prosper.
But they have problems to fix and the perception among fans is that officiating is a major flaw in the CFL.
Johnson is doing what he can to change that view. But he’s only going to get so far working with such a small talent pool. Canadian-born referees will survive an opening of borders.
Or they won’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is doing what it takes to be better.
Rule change considerations:
- The addition of a second video official with the ability to rapidly correct obvious errors in the moment on plays not challengeable by replay.
Currently, CFL Command Central in Toronto is staffed by two people, one technician to cut up plays and provide as many views of a play as possible and a former referee to help instruct the on-field crew on challengeable plays.
The new set up would see a third member added to the crew under the title of Video Review Official. This former or current referee would work as an extra set of eyes and communicate with the on-field crew to discuss penalties and other facets of the game which do not fall under the umbrella of challengeable calls.
It’s key to note, the review referee would not stop play but only get involved when penalties on the field are called or stoppages are already in effect.
The goal is to clean up play while not slowing it down.
- The league is also looking at player safety initiatives including eliminating peel-back and push blocks.
A peel-back block is when an offensive player makes a block facing his own endzone and blindsiding a defensive player.
Push blocks are used on converts and field goals when a defensive player is pushed from behind by one of his teammates to maximize the amount of force applied on an opposing blocker. Push blocks were used on more than half of last year’s kicking convert and field goal plays in the CFL last season.
- Also being considered are additions to the coach’s challenge menu. The league is considering adding 10 or 12 different judgment plays to the challenge bucket, including offensive pass interference, illegal contact and all unnecessary roughness penalties.
Currently, coaches have two challenges and must get both correct in order to attain a third. The number of challenges will be held at two but if a coach gets one challenge right, another will be added but the maximum will remain at three per game.Image caption In his will, Gaddafi urged Libyans to fight on
Muammar Gaddafi's website, Seven Days News, says it has published the last will of the deceased former leader of Libya.
The document was reportedly handed to three of his relatives, one of whom was killed, the second arrested and the third managed to escape the fighting in Sirte.
Here is the English translation:
"This is my will. I, Muammar bin Mohammad bin Abdussalam bi Humayd bin Abu Manyar bin Humayd bin Nayil al Fuhsi Gaddafi, do swear that there is no other God but Allah and that Mohammad is God's Prophet, peace be upon him. I pledge that I will die as Muslim.
Should I be killed, I would like to be buried, according to Muslim rituals, in the clothes I was wearing at the time of my death and my body unwashed, in the cemetery of Sirte, next to my family and relatives.
I would like that my family, especially women and children, be treated well after my death. The Libyan people should protect its identity, achievements, history and the honourable image of its ancestors and heroes. The Libyan people should not relinquish the sacrifices of the free and best people.
I call on my supporters to continue the resistance, and fight any foreign aggressor against Libya, today, tomorrow and always.
Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out our cause in return for a personal secure and stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour.
Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember forever despite the attempts of the others to tell you otherwise."Pingrid is a password system that aims to increase your online security by changing your password every time; instead, you enter a pattern on a grid.
(Credit: Winfrasoft)
When it comes to authentication, the password system is not necessarily the strongest one. According to a company called Winfrasoft, however, the password system could be tweaked so that a different password would be used each time a user logs into any one service, saving users the hassle of remembering a different password for every service they use.
Presenting at CeBIT, Germany, Winfrasoft managing director Steven Hope said, "The problem of passwords is that they are very weak, they are always getting hacked, and also from a user point of view, they are too complicated, everybody has 20, 30, 60 passwords. They all have to be different, no one can remember them, so everybody writes them down or resets them every time they log in. They don't work in the real world today."
The solution Winfrasoft has devised isn't as cryptic to use as it sounds. Instead, Pingrid — as it is called — is based on a pattern. Instead of simply logging in the user is presented with a six-by-six grid split into four smaller three-by-three grids, each of which is filled with the numerals one to nine. The grid is randomly regenerated every minute, so it will rarely appear the same twice,
The sequence of numbers required to log in is instead determined by a pattern on the grid pre-set by the user. The user selects a sequence of squares; each time the user logs in, the numbers in those squares, in the correct sequence, makes up the password — a system that, Winfrasoft believes, could seriously stymie anyone trying to hack into an account.
"There is no way anybody could see which numbers you are looking at," Hope said. "You see typing numbers but you don't know what the pattern is because each number is here six times."
The Pingrid app is currently available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows PC and Windows Mobile, but there is one serious difficulty in using it: in order for it to work effectively, web services will need to start integrating the system into their log-in pages; and many have already opted for the SMS-based two-factor authentication. Pingrid, therefore, is unlikely to take off.
In that, it can join all the attempts at recreating CAPTCHA. And those attempts to redesign the keyboard.The new Pentax K-3 II’s advanced features, image quality, ruggedness, and performance will be no surprise to Pentax loyalists. Those photographers have known that Pentax’s DSLR cameras have been at the technological forefront for years. As these Pentax shooters are out making great photos, they do so confidently, knowing that their cameras have unique and useful built-in features that even the top-level professional cameras from the major competitors do not have at their disposal.
With its latest flagship, Pentax has raised the APS-C DSLR bar even higher.
By the Numbers
Magnesium-alloy and metal chassis
24.35 effective megapixels on an APS-C CMOS sensor
27-point SAFOX 11 autofocus module
8.3 frames per second shooting
100% 0.95x optical viewfinder
92 weather seals
H.264 full HD movie capture at 1920 x 1080 60i/30p
4K-resolution interval timer mode
Wi-Fi capable with FluCard
3.2" 1037k-dot LCD
Built-in shake reduction effective to 4.5 EVs (a full stop better than the K-3)
The sensor is free of an image-softening anti-aliasing filter, something you have to pay a lot more for on other cameras, and the camera's Prime III image processing engine allows the sensor to operate at ISO settings up to 51200. The SAFOX 11 autofocus module has an incredible working light-sensitivity range of -3EV to +18EV. 25 of the 27 sensors are cross-type and three central points work at f/2.8 aperture. The SAFOX 11 uses an advanced AF algorithm and the Pentax Real Time Scene Analysis System for impressive subject-tracking capabilities.
Those details and specs indicate that the Pentax K-3 II is a capable machine built to exceed the capabilities of the direct competition, as well as the much more expensive flagship offerings from other companies.
New For the II
What do you get new on the K-3 II besides a Roman numeral painted on the front of the camera? A lot.
Pixel shift: Exquisite micro-control of in-camera image stabilization systems has allowed Olympus, and now Pentax, to follow the lead of Hasselblad's medium-format H5D-200c camera’s sensor-shift capabilities. I discussed the Olympus system in my hands-on review of the OM-D EM-5 Mark II, where the stabilization system shifts the sensor exactly 1/2 the width of a pixel (that is crazy small) and it captures and combines eight separate images as the sensor shifts. The Pentax K-3 II's system is slightly different—it takes four images shifted one pixel width apart and combines them into an image that offers increased image quality while maintaining the same resolution. What is improved is detail, color, and reduced noise when higher ISO settings are used. Basically, with an RGB sensor, the shift allows the camera to expose a red, green, or blue pixel at every pixel position. The end result is higher image quality due to the multiple pixel sampling.
Anti-Aliasing Filter Simulation: As I mentioned above, the camera does not come with an anti-aliasing filter, and its absence maximizes image sharpness. However, there is sometimes a need for the capabilities of the AA filter, and the same precision that allows the sensor shift composite image also lets you simulate an AA filter if you need to remove potential moiré in an image. You never know when a subject will suddenly arrive in your frame with a small-print plaid shirt or another moiré generator will appear in your composition. This feature gives the Pentax the best of both AA filter options and provides a flexibility that is not available from the competition.
Shake Reduction: The pixel-shift mode is just one sweet feature of the capable in-camera image stabilization system. With a full-stop improvement over the K-3, the 4.5EV-capable K-3 II stabilization also adds the ability for the camera to account for panning motion. If your subject is moving across the frame, feel free to pan and let the Shake Reduction system counteract the movement in the non-panning axes.
GPS: Sorry, built-in flash fans, the K-3 II has removed the K-3's flash and replaced it with a GPS receiver to geo-tag images, give shooters an electronic compass, and track your steps off the beaten path, along with another unique feature I will discuss later. The K-3 II's built-in satellite position capability mirrors that of the separately sold O-GPS1 that is available for other Pentax cameras as an accessory.
Design
The K-3 II presents a clean, utilitarian appearance with a nod toward "serious." The design is unobjectionable, sharp, and handsome. I am a fan of the harder angles of the pentaprism housing, versus the rounded and sculpted prism housings on some of the competitors. Those familiar with the K-3 will see that the K-3 II has an enlarged housing to make room for the GPS circuitry.
The port side offers a locking mode dial with mode labels more familiar to Canon shooters than the PASM camera crowd. The standard Program Auto (P), Shutter Priority (Tv), Aperture Priority (Av), and Manual (M) modes are joined by Sensitivity Priority (Sv) that allows you to command a specific ISO setting, and the Shutter and Aperture Priority (TAv) mode that automatically chooses an ISO based on your aperture and shutter orders. The Full-Auto (green square) mode accompanies three custom options, as well as Bulb and Flash X-sync Speed.
The starboard side contains the backlit LCD screen. I am a total sucker for Timex Indiglo-like electroluminescent backlighting, and the K-3 II's bright green display is high on my list of awesome LCD screens. [Hey, other camera companies, stop taking the cheap option when it comes to backlighting your LCD panels! Electroluminescent is way cooler!]
Handling
Most high-end cameras feel solid to the touch when you pick them up. A Leica feels like a big chunk of brass. Canon and Nikon pro DSLRs both feel solid in hand. However, there is something subtle about the Pentax K-3 II that, when you pick it up, you honestly believe that no part of the camera is hollow. Somehow, some way, the Pentax K-3 II feels more solid than other cameras that yesterday you thought were rock solid. When you shake it, there is no rattling or noise of any sort. It is as solid as solid gets.
Belying this, the Pentax K-3 has a well-deserved reputation for rugged performance that the K-3 II will undoubtedly share, as the K-3 II is also designed to resist water while dealing with dust, sand, fog, snow, and frigid temperatures that send many cameras running back to repair centers.
I continue to be a fan of Pentax ergonomics, but I find the K-3 II’s shorter stature (when compared to its direct competitors) means my little finger feels almost as if it is left out of the handgrip equation. It’s a minor gripe, but others around B&H Photo voiced similar thoughts after handling the camera.
Menus and Controls
It did not take me very long to get accustomed to the menus and controls of the camera. With cameras from other manufacturers, I sometimes would navigate somewhere on the LCD screen menu and scratch my head while thinking, "That is quirky," or, "That makes no sense." This did not happen with the K-3 II. Every camera manufacturer has its own interface, and getting used to it takes time, but the Pentax was as straightforward and easy to use as any camera I have tried.
All of the buttons and controls have a positive feel that goes along nicely with the ruggedness of the K-3 II. Nothing felt too heavy or too light. The camera just feels like a high quality piece of machinery.
What really stood out was the information screen on the LCD. First of all, it is very colorful—more so than any others I have used—bold colors, big text. Really nice to look at and use. The wonderful thing that the LCD offers is that it aids in navigating the shooting options with visual cues to help guide you to where you want to go or make adjustments to your settings. For example, if you are shooting and want to change your ISO setting, you can depress the ISO button on the top right side of the camera. On the LCD, the box showing your current ISO setting will become highlighted to indicate that you have selected ISO as an alterable setting. Not only is it highlighted, but a small icon in the ISO box will show you a symbol that lets you know that the front or rear command dial will be the one responsible for changing your ISO when and if you turn it. It is a subtle thing, but it makes you feel like the Pentax K-3 II is a camera that is trying to help you navigate its brain so that you can concentrate on shooting and not find yourself looking for the owner’s manual in your bag or searching your smartphone for answers. Not many other cameras give me that feeling. Actually, none do.
Astrotracer
First seen in the O-GPS1 add-on unit compatible with several Pentax cameras, the Astrotracer feature, built into the K-3 II, is one more example of the prowess of the camera's internal stabilization system. The system takes position information from the camera's GPS unit, as well as the internal magnetic and acceleration sensors, and then shifts the sensor during long-duration exposures to eliminate the star-trail effect and show the stars and other celestial bodies as points of light.
I studied celestial navigation in college, so I know a few things about how the spinning earth moves beneath the stars, but this feature of the newest Pentax camera makes my head spin. I would have loved to put the Astrotracer function to the test, but I have the unfortunate pleasure of living in what may be the worst above-ground location for shooting stars and planets—New York City. If you live somewhere with dark skies and a desire to capture stars with your camera, this unique feature might just be the thing you need to make stunning images free of star trails, without investing in an expensive telescope and tracking mount digiscoping system.
Summary
These days, there is not a great deal that separates one DSLR from the others, until you pick up the Pentax K-3 II and see what is under the hood. When compared to its direct competition in the upper echelons of the APS-C DSLR world, the Pentax K-3 II delivers everything the competition has, and a lot of things they do not. If those Pentax-only features make sense to you, your decision is simplified. Pentax brings an advanced camera to the photographer with weatherproofing, ruggedness, and all the essential flexibility that comes with a DSLR. And, if you are about to step into the brave world of DSLR shooting and you do not have a closet full of lenses from other manufacturers, the newest offering from Pentax is, without a doubt, a camera and camera system that should be considered.
The K-3 II gives its photographers a solid and confident shooting experience, complete with uncompromising image quality, unique features, and a helpful electronic interface. And, it does this at a competitive price. What else could you ask from the K-3 II?Image caption The dead man's family has been informed
A 21-year-old man has been shot dead on the street in Bristol, prompting a major police investigation.
The shooting happened at about 0410 BST near the Coach House pub in Stapleton Road, Easton.
Police said a 23-year-old man had been arrested in connection with the incident.
A man, 23, and a woman, 19, are being treated at Bristol Royal Infirmary for injuries which are not thought to be life-threatening.
The dead man is not believed to be from the local area. His family have been informed.
The road at the scene of the shooting has been closed in both directions between Warwick Road and Oxford Place.
Police said it was likely to remain shut into Monday morning because of the nature of the crime scene.
Forensics experts are still examining the area and a "visible police presence" will remain for some time.
'Speaking to witnesses'
Det Supt Sue Scott, of Avon and Somerset Police, who is leading the investigation, said it was "an emerging picture" at the moment.
The other two people injured are also suspected to have been shot, she said.
Image caption The shots were heard by people living in the area
But Det Supt Scott said she did not yet know how they were connected to the man who died.
The St Pauls Carnival, which took place nearby on Saturday, was attended by tens of thousands of people.
Det Supt Scott said: "We are speaking to family, we are speaking to witnesses.
"Actually, because of the St Pauls Carnival last night, there were a lot of people out and about having a pleasant evening."
But she said she was not aware of any link to the carnival, adding: "As I understand it, that went very well and a lot of people had a great time there. This happened a long time afterwards.
"We can't rule out a connection, but at this time we don't know."
'Very angry'
Keti Sarguna, who lives just off Stapleton Road, said: "I heard a commotion and I heard shots going off. It didn't sound like gun shots at all, it sounded like fireworks."
Jagtar Kandola, who owns a shop inside the police cordon, said: "I'm not even allowed to go into my premises.
Image caption Police are not linking the shooting to two stabbings earlier this week
"It makes me feel very angry, not only that I'm losing business here but I'm just wondering what sort of effect it will have on my customers?"
Det Supt Scott said: "We've had to close off the immediate area, Stapleton Road and some other small roads, in order to secure the scene and any evidence to help us understand the events that happened first thing this morning."
She said there was nothing to suggest a link between the shooting and two stabbings in the area earlier this week.
Three people were arrested on suspicion of murder after a man in his 30s was stabbed to death in Walker Close in the early hours of Friday.
On Monday, a man suffered leg and chest injuries when he was stabbed in a butcher's shop on Stapleton Road. Two men have been arrested in connection with that incident.
Easton councillor John Kiely said he had called for an in-depth inquiry into violent crime in the Stapleton Road area following a stabbing last year.
He said: "A working group has since been set up to try and address the issue as well as how to engage with young people.
"Obviously there are worries about what resources are going to be available to the police in the future, especially given the ward has some of the highest crime figures for the Avon and Somerset Constabulary area."
"It is very concerning there appears to be an escalation in violent crime over the past few weeks," he said.Conference call December 4, 2017 at 5:30 pm ET
LEAMINGTON, ON, Dec. 4, 2017 /CNW/ - Aphria Inc. ("Aphria" or the "Company") (TSX: APH and USOTC: APHQF) today announced that it has entered into an agreement to become a medical cannabis supplier to Shoppers Drug Mart.
Subject to Health Canada's approval of Shoppers Drug Mart's application to be a licensed producer, under the terms of the agreement the Company will supply Shoppers Drug Mart with Aphria-branded medical cannabis products. It is expected the products will be sold online, as Canadian regulations currently restrict the sale of medical cannabis in retail pharmacies.
"We have an impeccable record cultivating and producing high-quality, medical-grade cannabis," said Vic Neufeld, CEO of Aphria. "These traits make us a strong partner for an organization looking to serve and support Canadian patients."
CONFERENCE CALL ON DECEMBER 4, 2017
Management will hold a conference call on December 4, 2017 at 5:30 pm ET to discuss the supplier agreement between Aphria and Shoppers Drug Mart. Interested participants may take part by dialing (888) 231-8191. A replay of this call will be available until January 4, 2018 by dialing (855) 859-2056 with the passcode 6395256.
We Have a Good Thing Growing.
About Aphria
Aphria Inc., one of Canada's lowest cost producers, produces, supplies and sells medical cannabis. Located in Leamington, Ontario, the greenhouse capital of Canada. Aphria is truly powered by sunlight, allowing for the most natural growing conditions available. Aphria is committed to providing pharma-grade medical cannabis, superior patient care while balancing patient economics and returns to shareholders.
CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: Certain information in this news release constitutes forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Any statements that are contained in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Forward looking statements are often identified by terms such as "may", "should", "anticipate", "expect", "potential", "believe", "intend" or the negative of these terms and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to internal expectations, estimated margins, expectations with respect to actual volumes under the agreement, expectations for future growing capacity and costs, the completion of any capital project or expansions, and expectations with respect to future production costs. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks, including, without limitation, risks associated with general economic conditions; adverse industry events; marketing costs; loss of markets; future legislative and regulatory developments involving medical marijuana; inability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources, and/or inability to access sufficient capital on favourable terms; the medical marijuana industry in Canada generally, income tax and regulatory matters; the ability of Aphria to implement its business strategies; competition; crop failure; currency and interest rate fluctuations and other risks.
Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated.
Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.
SOURCE Aphria Inc.
For further information: David Ryan, Edelman, david.ryan@edelman.com, 416-455-1927Bruce Willis, 60, and model wife Emma Heming, 37, stepped out at the Evening Honoring Valentino event in NYC on Monday.
The couple, who've been married six years, are parents to daughters Mabel, three, and Evelyn, one.
Earlier today, mommy blogger Emma discussed the importance of documenting special moments in their growing children's life with a journal.
Date night: Bruce Willis, 60, and model wife Emma Heming, 37, stepped out at the Evening Honoring Valentino event in NYC on Monday
The Expendables star looked dapper in his a classic tuxedo and bow-tie.
Emma went for a classic, modest look in a long, black gown with sheer butterfly-printed overlay.
The model kept her make-up fresh and minimal with just a hint of soft black along the eyelid. The front of her hair was pinned back into a small bouffant style.
Picture of perfection: The Expendables star looked dapper in his a classic tuxedo and bow-tie. Emma went for a classic, modest look in a long, black gown with sheer butterfly-printed overlay
Happy family: The couple, who've been married six years, are parents to daughters Mabel, three, and Evelyn, one
In an Instagram post on Monday, Emma shared a picture of daughter Mabel holding sister Evelyn (presumably), as she encouraged mothers to'start to journal' and capture their children's special moments.
The couple, who married in 2009, have two children between them. Meanwhile, Bruce has Rumer, 27, Scout, 24, and Tallulah, 21, with ex-wife Demi Moore.
In an Instagram post on Monday, Emma shared a picture of daughter Mabel holding sister Evelyn (presumably), as she encouraged mothers to'start to journal' and capture their children's special moments.
'You never think you will forget those precious perfect memories of your children’s childhood…Until you do, My advice: Start to journal. I’m giving you the full scoop over on my site today. (link in profile) #Mommylife #family,' she stressed.
On her website, EmmaHemmingWillis.com, the 5ft 10in beauty, who previously kept a baby book, revealed the moment she realized she needed to write things down, having admittedly slacked off.
'I recorded everything until one day, I just stopped. I would say to myself, there’s no way I’ll ever forget this moment. It’s ok if I don’t write it down because I’ll etch it in my memory forever! Well… I forgot the moment. Couldn’t even tell you what it was or when it happened,' she confessed.
She pledged to begin to document their firsts and listed several notebook and journal options to do so.
On-screen reunion: On December 18, 2015, Bruce will reunite with Expendables co-star Kellan Lutz, 30, in the action-thriller, Extraction
Papa Bruce, meanwhile, has been busy with his acting career.
The Good Day to Die Hard actor has eight films in the works, with three set for release next year.
On December 18, 2015, he'll reunite with Expendables co-star Kellan Lutz, 30, in the action-thriller, Extraction.PHOENIX — The creators of one of the nation’s largest music festivals are looking to bring the same spirit of music, arts and culture to the Valley with the Lost Lake Festival.
The Lost Lake Festival will take place from Oct. 20 to the 22 at Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix. It’s set to feature more than 40 music acts on multiple stages, local food and drink, various artists and interactive games.
A post shared by Lost Lake (@lostlakefest) on Mar 15, 2017 at 3:05pm PDT
It will be put on by Superfly, a production company that has created Tennessee’s famed Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and the Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco.
Superfly co-founder Rick Farman said the company is excited to bring a new cultural experience to the Valley and hopes it can create inclusiveness through different artistic mediums.
“[Lost Lake will be] about creating opportunities that are beyond the bands on the stage, that really make this a cultural experience,” Farman said. “We feel [this] will be embraced by the entire community.”
Farman said the festival will be an opportunity to highlight local bands and artists, as well as create more economic opportunities for the Valley.
“We want this to feel like it’s Phoenix’s festival and it’s the Valley’s festival and that means trying to get as many local artists involved as possible,” he said. “What we do this year is just the start of where we’re going to go with this thing.”
At the end of the day, Farman said, Lost Lake Festival will be entirely centered around the community.
“We can do our best to put out to the community what we think would be a beneficial experience for everybody,” he said. “If people embrace it, then we are committed to working hard to make sure it is professional, inclusive and as quality as anywhere else.”
The lineup and ticket prices for the festival have not been announced, but interested concertgoers can sign up for updates on the festival’s website.
Follow @KTAR923Why Left Behind changed my perspective on a Last of Us sequel
This post contains spoilers for both Left Behind and The Last of Us.
The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC changed my perspective on a possible sequel to last year’s game.
A first for developer Naughty Dog, Left Behind is story DLC for a game that depends on its storytelling more than any other thing. Left Behind has to fit into a tight narrative that moves at an incredibly specific pace, and it has to assume you have played most, if not all of the main game for it to make its point. That’s hard to do. How do you make something standalone, with its own emotional arch, and still have it set within a larger story? Somehow, Naughty Dog pulled it off.
And I had my doubts. I worried that story DLC would hurt the main game’s ending, the way it wraps everything up and ends on a subtly unsettling note. Even when I loaded Left Behind up for the first time and saw that it took place both as a flashback with Ellie and Riley and right after Joel is mortally wounded, I asked myself why I needed to know what happened during a part the main game skipped over. I’m a fan of shorthand in stories, and I saw no reason why I needed to know how Ellie saved Joel because I had already seen that her devotion to keep him alive was integral to her character in the main story. I was wrong.
I was wrong about the important Riley’s relationship with Ellie was. It gives reason to why Ellie goes so far to save Joel in the future, and it adds texture that makes the final scene in The Last of Us far more affecting. It also provides a counter-point to all the action-based survival Joel and Ellie go through and lets you enjoy what little is left of the game’s savage world.
Naughty Dog avoided all my worries and made something I’m still thinking about today.
I came into Left Behind pessimistic and left proven wrong and optimistic. Optimistic about a potential sequel, which the developer says has a 50 percent chance of existing. After Left Behind I believe Naughty Dog could make a sequel that avoids all the problems people who play games assume it would have, especially when its following up such a complete story. It could also move the series to the next-generation consoles, making the game even more beautiful and detailed.
There’s tons of ways it could go about it. It could continue with Joel and Ellie or it could follow other characters in the world. As we see with zombie fiction, there’s tons of different survival stories to tell. And given Sony’s leeway when it comes to Naughty Dog and the way it took story-based DLC and turned it from something that on paper sounded unnecessary and made it necessary, I think a sequel could work. Actually, I’d go so far as to say I want a sequel. Left Behind changed me. I believe in Naughty Dog.I’ve always been wary of calling the Charlotte Hornets a playoff team this season. Just too many injuries, too much adversity, too little chance for cohesion and a sense of an ordered playing rotation.
This is a playoff team. There, I said it.
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Sweeping a season series against a quality NBA team is no small deal. The Indiana Pacers needed Friday’s game that much more than the Hornets did. But when the game was decided in the final five minutes, the Hornets got all the key stops and made huge shots.
That’s playoff basketball. That was Friday’s 108-101 win at Time Warner Cable Arena.
Barring a significant injury to a key player – and the past six months make that seem a real danger – the 33-28 Hornets will make their third playoff appearance since the Bobcats’ inception in 2004. Their schedule is favorable and they’ve hit a wave of momentum.
More importantly, this team might be up to doing some damage in the postseason. Coach Steve Clifford said the best traits of this team – low-turnover, low-foul and the best defensive rebound percentage in the league – are things that win in the playoffs.
That doesn’t mean they are without flaws. Point guard Kemba Walker, who had another maestro evening Friday with 33 points and 10 assists, recalled how furious Clifford was with them for a series of defensive breakdowns over the first three quarters.
Took a while, but they got that right as well. In the fourth quarter the Hornets held the Pacers (32-30) to 19 points and 5-of-18 shooting. Indiana forward Paul George, one of the best players in the NBA this season, was held to six points and 1-of-3 shooting from the field in the final quarter.
So is this a playoff team? I asked center Al Jefferson, who replied it has been one, by his view, all the way back to training camp. Fair enough. But that was before losing small forward/defensive stopper Michael Kidd-Gilchrist to two torn labrums and Jefferson missing long stretches with a calf strain and then a torn meniscus in his right knee.
In an odd way, Jefferson’s knee injury might have turned out for the team. The Hornets might never have discovered Cody Zeller’s ability to play NBA center had Jefferson not been injured. And now, with Jefferson playing mostly against backup centers, his post-up game can shine.
So I then turned to Nic Batum, who has plenty of playoff experience from his seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers. I asked if this team has the look, the vibe of a playoff team.
He was emphatic in his reply.
“Yes, yes,” Batum said, “because the starting lineup has played in playoff games before. Kemba, Courtney (Lee), myself, Marvin (Williams)…
Then Batum caught himself, realizing Zeller has no tangible playoff experience. So he made the Hornets’ “starter” at center a hybrid of Zeller and Jefferson. That is fine because in practice that’s true and one of the real strengths of this team.
One of the things Friday illustrated is how many dimensions the Hornets’ offense now has. Sometimes it’s Walker in the pick-and-roll or putting up 3-pointers. Then it was Batum filling up a box score; he had 31 points, seven rebounds and four assists.
And then it was Jefferson, who on a finally healthy knee, can use all those spin moves and drop steps that make him a classic low-post scorer. For about five minutes of the second half Jefferson so befuddled Pacers big man Solomon Hill that Indiana coach Frank Vogel had to call timeout to get Hill out of the game.
In the postgame news conference Clifford started getting multiple questions about playoff scenarios and hypotheticals. He finally reminded Charlotte media, just as he undoubtedly has reminded the players, that such things shouldn’t be of consequence right now.
He said the only thing he wants on his players’ minds after a day off Saturday is what they can correct in practice Sunday: Worry about the missed defensive rotation or the pass that went out of bounds.
Do that effectively and the rest all takes care of itself.Image copyright AFP
Last month North Korea held its first ever beer festival. Tourists from the West sat on the banks of the Taedong river and gulped back Taedong beer, named after the same river. Our Korea correspondent Steve Evans wasn't invited so he decided to hold a beer festival of his own - in South Korea. But it took some organising.
Sometimes, you've just got to have a beer. The thirst is there. No matter what it takes, you've got to get a bottle. So I flew to Beijing and picked up three |
of machine, and so promises good to great battery life.
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In our testing, our expectations held out. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga scored a strong four hours and 22 minutes in our most aggressive Basemark test, which runs through several aggressive CPU and GPU tests. That compares favorably to the four hours and 48 minutes that the 13.3-inch HP EliteBook x360 G2 could last.
In terms of looping a local video, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga lasted for a solid 11 hours and 36 minutes, right in line with the HP EliteBook’s 11 hours and 56 minutes. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga’s notebook sibling, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, lasted for a ludicrous 14 hours and 30 minutes, demonstrating that Lenovo did some special optimizations with that machine.
Finally, on our midrange test that loops through a series of typical web pages, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga churned through eight hours and 41 minutes of surfing before giving up. That beat out the HP EliteBook’s eight hours and 31 minutes, but again the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was the champ here at 11 hours and 25 minutes.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga (2017) 20JF-000BUS Compared To
All in all, these results indicate that the second-generation ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a very solid performer that will likely last most users a full day’s work, and then some. At least, that’s when equipped with the Full HD display, which helps considerably in stretching out the battery, along with the entry-level Core i5-7200U CPU. If you jump up in resolution and grab the OLED display, while opting for a faster processor, then you’ll naturally experience less battery life.
All of this makes the machine both highly portable and able to last a good while away from a charger. There’s something to be said about a machine that has a nicely sized display that’s nevertheless light in the hand and that can go the distance.
Software
Lenovo didn’t pack in too much additional software into the second-generation ThinkPad X1 Yoga. There are the usual Windows 10 games and Microsoft first-person apps, and then a few Lenovo configuration utilities that are unobtrusive and helpful if you like to dig into a machine’s proprietary configuration settings.
Warranty
The usual one-year warranty comes standard with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. Several upgrades are available at an added cost.
Our Take
The second-generation ThinkPad X1 Yoga manages to maintain the ThinkPad’s general look and feel and its excellent build quality while squeezing in the versatility of a 360-degree convertible. However, although it’s classified as a business machine, it doesn’t really add in all that many business-oriented features other than the ThinkPad name.
The newest version does use more robust and modern components, including seventh-generation Intel processors and the useful USB Type-C port. The OLED display option is a real differentiator and worth considering for anyone who’s a ThinkPad fan and wants a seriously excellent display. Otherwise, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga offers questionable value for the extra expense that goes along with the ThinkPad name.
Is there a better alternative?
There aren’t that many 14-inch 2-in-1 machines to compare to the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, particularly in the business segment. If you include consumer class machines, then Lenovo’s own Yoga 910 is a solid option to compare with. It uses a metal chassis and sports jazzier looks, but it provides similar performance. It’s also considerably less expensive, currently on sale for $979 with the same Core i5-7200U CPU, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and Full HD display as our $1,682 review unit.
For a more business-to-business comparison, you can consider the HP EliteBook x360 G2. Although the HP has a 13.3-inch display, it’s also aimed at business users and carries a similar $1,679 price as equipped. Unless you need that little bit of extra screen real estate or an OLED screen, however, the HP EliteBook is a more compelling option. It provides equally robust build quality, better battery life, privacy screen and 4K UHD display options, and a superior keyboard. In addition, HP packed in more business-oriented security and productivity features, making it a better choice for professionals.
If you don’t need a 360-degree convertible 2-in-1 at all and simply love the ThinkPad line, then you could always consider the ThinkPad X1 Carbon notebook. It provides superior battery life, great performance, the same robust ThinkPad build, and it’s priced similarly at $1,669 for the same specifications as our review unit (and it’s on sale right now for $1,418, a relative bargain). You’ll also get the same size display, although you’ll give up the OLED option.
How long will it last?
The second-generation ThinkPad X1 Yoga is built solidly enough that we imagine it will last long into the upcoming zombie apocalypse. It uses the latest components including seventh-generation Intel processors and PCIe SSDs. And, it packs in a veritable plethora of ports, including the increasingly ubiquitous and important USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 3. Therefore, it’s a choice that will last you for quite some time.
Should you buy it?
No. Really, you’re paying a significant premium for the ThinkPad brand and the 14-inch display. Given how well notebooks are being made today by many manufacturers, with consumer-class machines offering the same robust and quality build and excellent performance, the ThinkPad brand just doesn’t stand out the way it once did. If you’re a ThinkPad fan at heart and really want a 360-degree 2-in-1, then by all means buy this one. Otherwise, there are other, better options for the same or significantly less money.Then-senator Barack Obama, November 12, 2007:
After seven years of an Administration that has stretched our military to the breaking point, ignored deplorable conditions at some VA hospitals, and neglected the planning and preparation necessary to care for our returning heroes, America’s veterans deserve a President who will fight for them not just when it’s easy or convenient, but every hour of every day for the next four years.
By 2012, Obama continued to compare the performance of the VA during his administration favorably to his predecessor, declaring,
For the first time ever, we’ve made military families and veterans a top priority not just at DOD, not just at the VA, but across the government.
Now we know the report of at least 40 U.S. veterans dying while waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system is only the tip of the iceberg.
Today:
When Shinseki took office, he vowed that every disability claim would be processed within 125 days with 98 percent accuracy. But the backlogs only got worse.
It took about four months for VA to process a claim for disability compensation claim when Shinseki was sworn in. By 2012, the average wait time was about nine months.
In February 2013, the Examiner published a five-part series, “Making America’s Heroes Wait,” showing more than 1.1 million veterans with disability claims and appeals were trapped in bureaucratic limbo at VA.
About 70 percent of the 900,000 claims for initial benefits were considered backlogged, meaning they were older than 125 days.
The Examiner series also showed how agency statistics were manipulated to hide mistakes that doomed veterans into appeals that could drag on for years.
There were some early signs then that VA’s failures in delivering medical care were having deadly consequences.
An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease was reported in Pittsburgh in November 2012. Subsequent investigations by the inspector general and area media eventually linked a half-dozen patient deaths from the disease to faulty maintenance and poor management.
Reports of other deaths followed.
Four patients under VA’s care in Atlanta died of a drug overdose or suicides.
In Columbia, S.C., at least six patient deaths from colorectal cancers were linked to delays in receiving colonoscopies at veterans’ medical facilities.
VA eventually acknowledged that delays in providing care was linked to the deaths of 23 patients who died of gastrointestinal cancers at veterans’ health facilities. Deaths from other conditions were not disclosed.Video footage from a town hall meeting in Cudahy, California shows an African-American Trump supporter passionately slamming sanctuary cities as a racist assault on the black community.
“Sanctuary cities are racist – black communities have been destroyed by illegal immigration,” says the woman, adding that the situation called for a “second civil rights movement.”
Tracing her ancestry back to slave ships, the woman said, “I’m not going anywhere….sanctuary cities are racist, all the jobs are going to illegals….that is wrong, you’re not going to be allowed to get away with it….the black community has been destroyed by racist illegal immigration and we’re not gonna have it.”
“When my people do a crime, they get three strikes, your people do a crime, they get amnesty, they get benefits and they’re not paying taxes,” she added.
“Thank God for Trump, thank God for Sessions and you should be ashamed of yourselves, how dare you?” roared the woman, questioning why illegals were allowed to claim benefits for people living back in Mexico, while her own family members struggled in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Trump has threatened to cut off federal funds to so-called “sanctuary cities” that prevent law enforcement from apprehending illegal aliens. Polls show that 56 per cent of Hispanics support Trump’s policy of deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records.
President Trump’s promise that he would help the inner cities and get back jobs that illegals have taken away from African-Americans is one of the reasons why Trump outperformed previous Republican candidates.
He beat Romney’s share of the black vote by 7 points also did better than Romney with Latinos by a margin of 8 points.
Polls found that 58.5 percent of Hispanic voters supported Donald Trump’s immigration policy compared to 32.9 percent for failed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.Antibiotics use is widespread in the production of livestock, helping to create "superbugs," and aggravating the public health problem of antibiotic resistance. To address these issues, Consumers Union, the policy and advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, in a new report released today, "Meat on Drugs: The Overuse of Antibiotics in Food Animals and What Supermarkets and Consumers Can Do to Stop It," calls on supermarkets to stock only meat and poultry raised without antibiotics, and urges consumers to buy these products. Consumers Union is asking Trader Joe's to lead the transition by selling only meat and poultry raised without antibiotics.
Antibiotics, once called miracle drugs, may not be miraculous any more. With widespread use of antibiotics, many bugs have become immune to their effects. Doctors and scientists have cautioned that we must be much more careful in our use of these valuable medicines lest they lose even more of their effectiveness against deadly bacteria.
However, the biggest user of antibiotics in the United States today is not the medical profession, but rather the meat and poultry business. Some 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in this country are used not on people but on animals, to make them grow faster or to prevent disease in crowded and unsanitary growing facilities.
Consumer Union believes that to preserve antibiotics for treatment of diseases like pneumonia in people, use on animals must be drastically reduced. We think the most direct way to tackle this problem is at the supermarket. Consumer Reports sent shoppers to 136 stores in 23 states, belonging to the 13 largest supermarket chains, to see what kind of meat and poultry products raised without antibiotics are offered and at what price.
What they found is encouraging. The shoppers found that one chain, Whole Foods, is already offering nothing but meat and poultry raised without antibiotics. Several others--Giant, Hannaford, Shaw's, Stop & Shop, Publix, and Trader Joe's--had broad selections of these products. At only four chains were shoppers unable to find any organic or other products raised without antibiotics: Sam's Club, Food 4 Less, Food Lion, and Save-A-Lot.
The report also debunks the notion that meat and poultry raised without antibiotics has to be expensive. The Consumer Reports shoppers, who went out in the spring of 2012, found chicken raised without antibiotics for as little as $1.29 per pound in three chains--Publix, Jewel-Osco, and Trader Joe's.
Consumer Reports found broad public support for change. In a nationwide poll, 86 percent of consumers indicated that they thought that meat raised without antibiotics should be available in their local supermarket.
We're therefore excited to launch our new Meat Without Drugs, Stop the Superbugs Campaign with a companion website, www.MeatWithoutDrugs.org, and a new video in partnership with www.FixFood.org, a social media project of Food, Inc. Director Robert Kenner, narrated by actor Bill Paxton. Take a look at the video and then help us take action to change our food system.
Consumers, and the supermarkets they shop at, together can help solve the problem of antibiotic resistance, a problem that has eluded government regulators for more than four decades. Together we can say no to meat on drugs and stop the superbugs.Authorities in the nation's capital are searching for a vandal after the Lincoln Memorial was spray painted with explicit graffiti early Tuesday.
The National Park Service said it was working to remove the graffiti after it was discovered at about 4:30 a.m., FOX 5 DC reported.
The graffiti, which was done in red spray paint on a column, appears to say “F*** law."
Silver spray paint was also found on a Smithsonian wayfinding sign on Constitution Avenue, according to the park service.
The monument preservation crew started cleaning up the tagged areas with a "gel-type architectural paint stripper safe for use on historic stone," and will continue to use the treatment until the graffiti is completely gone.
Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact the U.S. Park Police at 202-610-7515.Sirius building's architect wants more inclusive Sydney as landmark opens to public
Updated
One of Sydney's most prominent examples of brutalist architecture, the Sirius building at The Rocks, will be opened to the public for the first time in almost 40 years.
The building was built in 1979 for public housing tenants displaced during redevelopment in the area.
In 2014, the New South Wales Government announced it would sell the Cumberland Street block of 79 units, along with a swathe of heritage-listed terraces in nearby Millers Point.
Most residents were moved out throughout 2015, despite their protests.
In July 2016, the Government decided against heritage listing the site despite a unanimous recommendation by the Heritage Council.
The Government's decision not to heritage list the building will be challenged at a hearing at the NSW Land and Environment Court in April.
Now, the brutalist building will be opened to the public as part of Art Month Sydney.
Architect wants a city for all
Architect Tao Gofers will be offering tours of Sirius throughout March, while people will also have the chance to meet some of the last remaining residents.
"We're hoping to get more support from the community by opening up the apartments to the public and educating people about social housing," Mr Gofers said.
"Social housing is about inclusiveness and I don't mean for people who don't have jobs, but for those people who are essential to the running of the city.
"I am talking about nurses, firefighters, police officers, those people who aren't paid a lot, because if you make them move out west, then they end up spending all their money and time on commuting."
Mr Gofers said he wanted people to realise that the city should not just consist of people who earn millions of dollars and can afford luxury apartments.
"We have such a problem with housing affordability and the Government should be providing social housing in all areas, not just way out in the outer suburbs.
"It's not fair to segregate people."
Residents eager to discuss passion for building
Myra Demetriou, 90, is one of three people who still live in the Sirius complex and will be posing for portraits by amateur artists.
"I will be meeting people in the Phillip Room, which is a beautiful timber room full of these cave-like artworks - it's where people used to come together and talk about their day," she said.
"I have lived in the Millers Point area for 60 years and I hope people coming along for Art Month will take the time to ask me about why I am so passionate about staying in my apartment.
"People from all walks of life should be able to live in the city.
"It shouldn't be an environment of investors and the wealthy because then you start causing divisions, which is dangerous."
Tours of the building will run from March 11 to March 25 as part of Art Month Sydney.
Topics: housing, architecture, arts-and-entertainment, community-and-society, the-rocks-2000, sydney-2000, nsw
First postedLAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Three of the top U.S. cellphone carriers signaled this week that they would support Research In Motion’s RIM.TO BlackBerry 10 products, the first of which are due to be unveiled Jan 30, offering a hopeful sign for RIM’s comeback effort.
A BlackBerry device is shown in front of products displayed in a glass cabinet at the Research in Motion offices in Waterloo November 14, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Cassese
Executives at Verizon Communications (VZ.N), AT&T Inc (T.N) and T-Mobile USA all said they are looking forward to the devices, which will be crucial for RIM’s chances of regaining lost ground from rivals such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Samsung Electronics (005930.KS).
“We’re hopeful its going to be a good device,” Lowell McAdam, chief executive of Verizon Communications, majority owner of the biggest U.S. mobile service Verizon Wireless.
“We’ll carry it,” McAdam said in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
BlackBerry 10 is RIM’s next-generation mobile operating platform and it is preparing to launch new smartphones later this month. Word that major carriers will offer the devices is good news for RIM.
RIM, which once commanded the lead in the smartphone market, has rapidly lost ground to Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s line of Galaxy products, especially in North American and European markets, as customers abandon its aging BlackBerry devices.
It has been testing the new BlackBerry 10 devices with carriers so they can assess their compatibility with networks.
No. 4 U.S. mobile provider T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE), also plans to carry the new BlackBerry 10.
“We’re extremely optimistic that it’s going to be a successful product and our business customers are extremely interested in it,” Chief Executive John Legere said.
AT&T has promised to support the BlackBerry 10 platform, according to Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher, but he would not discuss specific devices.
However, AT&T handset executive Jeff Bradley made it clear that the No. 2 U.S. mobile operator would carry the phone.
“It’s logical to expect our current (BlackBerry) customers will have the best BlackBerry devices to choose from in the future,” Bradley said.‘The Black Panthers Speak’ is back in print! This book features writings by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Fred Hampton, Kathleen Cleaver and other Panther women. You can get it from publisher Haymarket Books here.
Info: “From its founding by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966 to contemporary attempts to censor its history and revise its significance, the Black Panther Pary has aroused fear, hope, misunderstanding, pride, vilification, and government-sponsored repression. This is the first and only collection of the most vital, representative writings of the Party. It fiercely refuted the wanton distortion of its militant, public-spirited history and its fundamental role in the Black liberation movement. Here are Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Fred Hampton; Kathleen Cleaver and other Panther women; teh Party’s court battles and acquittals; and its positions on Black separatism, the power structure, the police, violence, and education, as well as songs, poems, and political cartoons. This book explains exactly what the Black Panthers stood for and what issues they confronted, almost all of which remain unresolved today. Philip S. Foner (December 14, 1910 – December 13, 1994) was an American historian and professor who taught and lectured all over the world. He wrote and edited more than a hundred books, including the ten-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States and the five-volume Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass.”This is me.
An unedited photo (except for a quick boost in lighting) from a shoot I did recently for my job, where I serve as CMO for a brand of women's clothing. It was professionally photographed and I had both my hair and makeup done. (Can you blame me? If every ex-boyfriend in your life could Google you wouldn't you want to look as good as you could?)
As a woman, especially a woman in her mid-30s, I am barraged every day with messages that tell me that who I am is wrong. I'm too heavy and too short. I'm too pasty pale. My wrinkles need to be erased. My grey hair should be covered meticulously. My breasts should be perkier. And don't I want this super awesome new product that does something super awesome that I just HAVE to have for my super awesome life?
If I allowed the messages that were thrown at me on a daily basis to sink into my head -- I'd probably feel pretty cruddy about myself. If I let them sink in and then turned those same words into negative self-talk, I'd have a lot of ground to be frustrated with myself. So it's pretty easy to get how looking at this picture -- which puts my body at a slightly awkward angle and shows off my full shape without any place to hide -- could make me see everything that society wants me to think is wrong about myself.
Photo courtesy of AbbeyPost
Why are these things wrong? Well, who knows? A much bigger question than I am qualified to answer. Some might say that people (as a whole) need others to feel bad about themselves in order for them to feel better. Some might say there's a big, conspiracy in today's marketplace that links overall consumer confidence to the sales of pretty much EVERYTHING, including beauty products. Others could say that, in order for there to be an Ideal Image we aspire to become, there has to be an archetype we dread becoming. You could say a ton of things. Instead, I will simply say this: I think it is human nature (especially in women) to find fault within something before they find praise.
The problem is that all these messages, if we hear them often enough and give them enough power, can turn into negative self-talk. And negative self-talk wears on you. It colors our lives and, in turn affects everything we do or touch.
Every day, I make a conscious decision to let the messages I tell myself be positive.
Some days it's easier than others. And some of those messages come easier than others as well. But I chose to be positive. So much, and so often, that drowning out the negative has become decently second nature to me with the majority of stuff I take on.
And so I offer this transparent experiment up for other women. When you look at a picture of yourself (or when you stand in the mirror) and when that negative voice starts to sing its seductive song, talk over it. Turn off the negative and turn up the positive messages that celebrate you instead.
Does this mean you have to be totally satisfied with your body? Nah. Come on, get real. But, you only have one choice -- demonize yourself or support yourself. I chose the second.
Your body tells a story. Your story creates a person. And that person deserves to be happy, just as they are.
If you have a few minutes, or are so inclined, I urge you to try this simple experiment. Find a photo of yourself. Address, head on, the things you could be scared of. Look them in the eye, stare them down and stand over them like you are a combination of Beyonce and Martha Stewart, and every other powerful, ass-kicking woman you can think of. Stare at them... and then move on.
Deal with it. Everyone ages. Everyone changes. Everyone (even the most "perfect" of people) has stuff about themselves they don't love. Tell the negative to take a hike. Off a tall mountain. And jump.
Next, find something you like. Even if it's as small as your toes or the shape of your nailbeds. Circle it. Literally. Take a pen to that paper and mark up every damn thing about you that you can dig. Today? That may not be too much. Next month? Hopefully more.
My point is simple. Not easy, but simple. "They" can tell you whatever they want. But so can you. You can tell yourself whatever YOU want. Longer, louder and in a way more connected to your powerful brain than anything else can be.
In the war of self-acceptance -- you can win. And it starts with a single choice.
Ready to see the good and take the Positive Photo Challenge for yourself? Share your own picture, pointing out the parts of you that YOU love and upload it to Instagram and Twitter! Make sure to tag so others can be inspired.
On Instagram @PositivePhotoChallenge and at #PositivePhotoChallenge
Twitter #PositivePhotoChallenge“They’re selling postcards of the hanging.”
This week, the NASL decided to issue a statement reiterating their commitment to moving forward, growing the game, and “laying the groundwork for an exciting future,” – basically, attempting to close down the internet rumors they were moments away from being bundled into the trunk of a ‘78 Lincoln Continental and driven out to the woods at the hands of the big, bad, MLS Cartel.
Minnesota is moving to MLS and a few NASL clubs are seemingly in financial disarray, but is it really the end of days? Statements like this are always viewed by those who want the issuer to succeed as confirmation that everything is hunky dory, and by those who want them to fail as “well, of course that’s what they want you to think.” Yet, as everyone clearly knows, the success or failure of a business depends on the customers it can attract, satisfy, and keep. For example: Pro/Rel won’t fix anything if there are no fans in the seats. It won’t attract new fans simply because the stakes are higher; if it did we’d have Tic-Tac-Toe Death Match on ESPN 24/7. At this point, it will just make people question even more why they should care about what it is they are being asked to watch.
A “better” quality of game will attract some fans. A cultural identity based on geography will attract some more. A big name signing might get a couple of people through the turnstile. But there comes a time when the reality has to be faced: maybe the product being sold isn’t one that people want to buy and all the bells and whistles in the world won’t change that.
Which brings us, with a crushing sense of inevitability, to Rayo OKC, the elaborate piece of performance art that occasionally has a soccer match going on in the background. Wait, let me qualify that statement. That is how the club is perceived by many, and the reputation it has achieved through a never ending series of lurches from one off-field drama to the next. Most of these things should not be laid at the door of the club, but at the door of the “fans,” of both Rayo OKC and other rival clubs, who seem obsessed with the drama ahead of the game. Beer sales, Rayo VdM relegation, new management, bussing to away games, attendance figures, pitch issues, anthem protests, the list goes on. I truly believe there is a hardcore group of supporters, and the management of the club, both present and former, that want Rayo to succeed. However, too often their voices are silent while Twitter allows a litany of “experts” to sound off about this week’s issue. But we’ve covered that before, and it’s not going to change; people will still call the Sheriff a puritan and the police “Nazi’s” regardless of any factual information.
Over the past few weeks one thing has become clear: Rayo OKC is in a better financial position than it was before. I know some people reading that will immediately shout that I’m wrong, citing, for example, the attendance. So, let’s do just that.
A few important caveats to bear in mind if you feel like wading through the rest of this article:
1. These numbers were obtained from public records and official league sources. If the numbers are incorrect, there is a much bigger legal problem to be addressed.
2. If you support another club and think this is going to give you ammunition to attack Rayo OKC, please remember this: any club that plays in a stadium owned by a school, a college, a city, a public body, or any organization that receives “taxpayer support” is in the same boat. Those numbers are obtainable too. Be careful what you say if you are reading this in a glass house.
3. Every attempt was made to give all parties a chance to address these figures. Some chose to comment; some didn’t. That is their right and should not be read as anything more than that.
Attendance figures:
According to the NASL figures, Rayo OKC’s total announced attendance for the 11 home games between April 2 and July 30 was 48,545. That gives an average attendance of 4,413 per game.
According to the contract between the club and the school district that owns the stadium, Rayo OKC must pay a “ticket surcharge” to Yukon Public Schools (YPS) of $1 per ticket sold. Payment is due on the last day of the calendar month. On August 9 – after the current management had assumed direct control of the club – a payment was made in the amount of $13,302 for ticket fees for April 2 through July 30. This payment was for all tickets sold during the season so far.
Average announced attendance per game: 4,413
Average charged attendance per game: 1,209
So, with simple math: Average attendance not charged per game: 3,203
With this in mind, and the statement that the new management is severely restricting the dispersal of “free” tickets, the attendance drop-off seems a little less precipitous.
I understand there were issues with advertising and promotions previously, and I am certainly not pointing fingers here, but, according to their own figures, 72.6 percent of all game attendees entered the game with tickets for which there was no money received. Maybe that’s the industry standard? Maybe that’s not uncommon? I sincerely do not know, but, as an observer, that percentage seems almost self-destructively high.
If this is an “industry standard” practice or percentage, the issues surfacing in the NASL as a whole move into a clearer light. You cannot give away 72.6 percent of your product and hope to stay in business. At least not for long anyway.
The sporting question this raises is one of retention. If these numbers are true, and they are the league’s own numbers remember, then we can surmise that 3,203 people were happy to come to a game for free, but when asked to spend $12 to come they decided it wasn’t worth it. Are Rayo OKC really not worth $12? Seriously, $12 to watch professional soccer with world class players and that doesn’t represent great value? If so, what is the magic number that the 3,203 people are willing to pay to come to a game, and conversely, what would represent a $12 value for the fans?
The other issue is this: Why had that payment not been ongoing, per the contract? Reason aside, the fact remains that the payment was due at the end of every calendar month. The new management assumed an obligation to YPS of $13,302, a significant portion of which (the six games in April, May and June) should have been cleared at least 30 days previously. Whether this constitutes a breach of contract is for finer legal minds than mine to decide. Sources at the club are adamant that the responsibility to make timely payments per the terms of the contract resides with Oklahoma City management.
Stadium Fees:
Again, if we look at the contract, Rayo OKC pays YPS $4,500 per game to rent the stadium. This payment is due 48 hours before the start of each professional game. On August 1, the club paid YPS $31,500 for stadium rent covering the games from June 1st to July 30th. Every penny of this payment was late per the terms of the contract. There had been a previous payment made to YPS on May 26 covering the games played in April, but that payment was also, by definition, late. How past due would Rayo OKC have to be before YPS revoked permission to play a match?
The point of this is that the new management assumed control of the club operations at a time when the club owed YPS $44,902 in outstanding, and arguably contract breaching, balances for rent, ticket surcharge and travel fees. That balance was cleared by August 9, hence my statement that “Rayo OKC is in a better financial position than it was before.” In short hand: the total amount received year to date by YPS is $76,577, of which $61,527 was paid under the new management.
With just these numbers, there is a prima facie case to be made that the new management “saved” the club. Previous statements by those close to the situation regarding pay cuts and financial trimming seem less extreme. Indeed, it is arguable, based solely on these numbers, that the club was dead in the water and potentially moments away from collapse. Was the club only still in existence because of the patience of YPS, or did YPS not have an issue with the situation?
Since the new management assumed control, the records show that stadium rent has been paid 48 hours prior to kick off for all three home games, and the ticket fees for August were paid on September 1st. Sources at YPS have confirmed that Rayo OKC are currently “paid in full” for stadium rent.
The point of this is, again, to emphasis the amazing power of facts. “The new managers have ruined the club! Look at this picture of empty seats!” is disingenuous, and based on the clubs’ own numbers, false. The actual average attendance per game before the management change, in tickets sold, was 1,209.
The same is true of the posts equating the actions of the local police with a political system that directly led to the deaths of 65 million people. Sure there are constitutional issues to be raised, questions about freedom, respect, etiquette, and so on. But, judging a situation from one tweet does a disservice to intellectual honesty, reality, yourself, and the club you claim to love.
As I have stated before, I firmly believe that Rayo OKC has a future here in the Oklahoma City metro. Sure, the form has been up and down. The injuries seem to come in waves. The off field drama is never ending. These things aside, the team is strong, energized and eager to play. You can see that from their social media posts, their communication on the field and the evidence of new set pieces they have learnt and practiced. Rayo OKC is actually, in my opinion, in a strong position to move forward and leave the drama of this first season behind. Alberto Gallego, the representative in OKC of RVdM, comes from a club, and a background, steeped in a century of soccer history. A small, arguably unfashionable, local club that has a loyal and vocal fan-base. Legacy soccer. Sean Jones, the local owner, comes from an Oklahoma background, successful business owner, strong ties to the community, entrepreneurial spirit, and a passion for the game that is unrivaled. Local knowledge. With an ownership team like this, each with essential strengths that balance the other, working together for the good of the club, we should be asking the question: how can Rayo OKC not succeed?
The owners, managers, players, employees, fans, twitter-verse, and most of all me, need to move on from this if the club is to have any chance of success. Things changed, assumptions were made, feelings were hurt, respect was not credited where it was due, communication was stalled, motives were ascribed, and the situation generally became contentious. Would people do it differently if they could? I like to think so, but what’s done is done.
So one last plea before we move on. Stop taking pictures of the stands and start watching the game. Stop tweeting your outrage at gossip and watch the game. Stop discussing how much better everything was in the olden days and watch the game. Stop treating every half-baked opinion you read online as a “fact” and watch the game. Because you can bet that the players on the field, coach on the bench, and substitutes warming up, you know – the team, don’t want to play their hearts out for a stadium half full of people whose complete attention is focused on their phones.
“And the only sound that’s left, after the ambulances go, Is Cinderella sweeping up, on Desolation Row.”It’s time for an apparently unpopular opinion. I guess that’s one way of getting back into this after such a long time of not posting…
Claudia Tajima recently made #1 on ESPNW’s Top 10 Plays, and was rightly lauded for an extremely athletic play. It’s brilliant stuff. But was it the right play? It seems to me likely that there’s an easier way to make this catch.
The gfycat is here – I don’t think I can embed it in this article easily – but here’s a few stills:
As you can see even from the stills, the feet slide through the catching motion, and it takes a pretty expert call from a well-positioned observer to say she was in bounds. Even with slow motion footage like that gif, people on reddit were having to crop stills to prove that the catch was in bounds. It’s not at all obvious in real time. It’s not even about self-officiation – for once, on this blog 🙂 – |
whispered Misty.
They quietly walked back out to the reception desk where Ash and Dr. Joy were waiting. Misty nodded and gave him a hug. “Okay. You can go. Are you sure you want to be alone for this? I don’t mind.”
Ash looked emotionally drained but resolute. “Yes. Thank you for the offer. It’s very kind.”
“You’re right. Go, okay? Take as long as you need.”
Dr. Joy gently intruded on the conversation. “Mr. Ketchum, when you’re ready, just press the button closest to his pillow. I’ll come in then.’
He stepped through the double doors and into Pikachu’s room. In the far corner next to the bed was a stand with a vase half-filled with water. Ash gently unwrapped the plastic from the stems and set the lilacs in the glass container. “I brought these from home, he said. I thought you might like them.” The only response was the beep of the heart monitor.
He stood next to the mouse’s bed and waited. He waited for Pikachu to wake up, and when he didn’t wake up, he waited for the words to come. When the words didn’t come, he spoke. “They say you’re the longest living pikachu ever. You made it 20 years. I told them that you’ve always been strong, but…well, here we are. Misty and Willow came to say goodbye. They’re outside right now, and you’ve got her all torn up. I don’t know what I’m gonna say to Willow yet. She doesn’t understand all of this. I don’t suppose I do either. You’re the damnedest little thing I ever met. We’ve saved each other’s lives more times than I can count and here we are and I can’t do a thing and I’m sorry, boy. I’m so sorry.”
The slow pulsing beep of the monitor echoed in Ash’s head. He reached over to press the button next to the pillow when he heard a very faint “Chuuuu.”
“You woke up!” Ash gasped.
“Ka-chuuu,” the mouse whispered.
Tears were streaming down Ash’s face and started rubbing his old friend’s paws. “They’re so cold! Here, let me get close to you. You shouldn’t be cold.” Pikachu closed his eyes as his master came close. “I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay with me forever.” The man rested his forehead on his pokemon’s cold nose. “I’ll give you all the berries you want. Just don’t go. I choose you, Pikachu. Don’t go. I choose you.”
The creature held his paws around Ash’s hand, beckoning him closer. “Ka-chuuu.” He opened his cloudy eyes towards his master and gave him the softest lick on the nose before he fell back asleep. Moments of time scattered around the room to the pulsing beep of the heart monitor. Finally, Ash pressed the button closest to the pillow. A few moments later, Dr. Joy entered.
“You’re ready, then?”
“Yes.”
“Feel free to hold his hand or pet him. This doesn’t hurt.”
Ash ran his hand down the grain of Pikachu’s fur in a tender rhythm and began to hum a tune of no particular significance. He could feel the rising and falling of breath as he stroked the soft fur. Lost in the moment, Ash’s fingers trailed too far and grazed Pikachu’s tail. There was no reaction.
“He’s gone,” said Dr. Joy.
“I know,” said Ash.
Arrangements were made. Paperwork was signed. It was still daylight when they all left the building. A passing rain cooled off the afternoon and made the air feel sharp. “Let’s go for a walk,” Ash said.
They walked down to the restaurant from two days before and sat in a booth. An older waitress came by with menus and sat them on the table. “Something to drink for you folks?”
“Coff-” started Misty.
“Ice cream,” said Ash. “Three ice creams. What do you want Willow?”
“Chocolate,” she immediately responded.
“Misty?”
“Do you have coffee flavored ice cream?”
Without even looking up from her pad, the waitress nodded.
“Then coffee for me.”
“And I’ll have strawberry,” said Ash, already gathering the menus and handing them off to the waitress.
“Be back with your ice creams.”
“Great,” he said. The sun was low and its blazing reflection shined off the windows of shops across the street. Leaves turned electric with iridescent beauty, creating fractal patterns on their spiral branches. The reverberations of melody from the jukebox fell upon themselves in layers until reaching a singularity of perfect harmony. Cars from his youth drove past in a procession of joy and peace. When the waitress returned with the ice cream and a smile, a small rainbow spilled out of her mouth. With the utmost sincerity, Ash spoke.
“Thank you.”In July, 1820, John Keats published his third and final book, “Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems.” He had no reason to expect that it would be a success, with either the public or the critics: in his short career, the twenty-four-year-old poet had known nothing but rejection on both fronts. After his first book, “Poems,” appeared, in 1817, his publishers, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, refused to have anything more to do with him. In a letter to the poet’s brother George, they wrote, “We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it.” They went on, “By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it.” When Keats’s long poem “Endymion” came out, the following year, from a different firm, the ridicule was even worse, and far more public. The leading Tory magazines of the day published savagely satirical reviews, linking the poem’s undisciplined exuberance with its author’s working-class origins. Keats was the son of a stable-keeper, and he had trained as an apothecary: no wonder, the critics smirked, that he had fallen in with the sentimental “Cockney School” of poets, led by the radical journalist Leigh Hunt. Keats’s class and his liberal politics were enough to damn him sight unseen, as the Quarterly Review made clear when its critic admitted that he had not bothered to read “Endymion” to the end: “If any one should be bold enough to purchase this ‘Poetic Romance,’ and so much more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success.” Blackwood’s Magazine said, “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’ ” After all this, Keats could hardly have been optimistic about his third volume. He grumbled in a letter to George that he ought to give up writing and become a doctor—it couldn’t be any “worse than writing poems, & hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review shambles.” But he must have been particularly unsettled by a review in the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review. The book was not mocked; the anonymous critic simply said, more in sorrow than in anger, that it was not much good. “We confess this volume has disappointed us; from Mr Keats’s former productions, we had augured better things,” the paper opined. “We are confident he can do better.” To Keats, this would have been the bitterest verdict of all, for by the summer of 1820 he knew that he would not live to publish another book. Tuberculosis was slowly choking him to death, leaving him without the will or the energy to work: he had written almost no poetry since late the preceding year, and would write no more before he died, in Rome, in February, 1821. Keats continued to believe that, with time and study, he would have become a great poet, but he was starting to agree with the critics that nothing he had written could prove it. A year before his death, he wrote that he was reconciled to failure: “ ‘If I should die,’ said I to myself, ‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.’ ” Of all the piteous elements in Keats’s story, none is more distressing than the idea that he went to his grave convinced of his failure. For Keats’s last book, in addition to the three masterpieces named in its title, included a series of odes—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”—that are now universally regarded as among the greatest poems in the English language. If any single book ever earned its author immortality, it was this one. And, as Stanley Plumly points out in “Posthumous Keats” (Norton; $27.95), his moving new study of the poet’s work and legend, “one could form a considerable collection from what was left out of this last book.” Some of Keats’s best poems, including “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” were never collected in his lifetime.
Did Keats really believe that, having written such poems, he was a failure? The question is more urgent in his case than in any other poet’s, for no writer ever yearned for fame more ardently than Keats. His ambition was all the more remarkable considering that he started life with none of the advantages of the noble Byron or the wealthy Shelley. Born in 1795, the eldest child of a prosperous working-class family, he soon learned how precarious his fortunes really were. His father, Thomas, died in a riding accident when Keats was eight years old, a blow made worse by the remarriage of his mother, Frances, just a couple of months later. The hasty marriage was brief, and when it collapsed Frances disappeared in a cloud of scandalous rumors, leaving her children in the care of their grandmother. When she came back home, a few years later, it was to die. John nursed her through the final stages of consumption, as he was to do with his youngest brother, Tom, in 1818. Keats, orphaned at the age of fourteen, was not entirely without resources. A small legacy paid for his apprenticeship to a surgeon, after which he went on to medical school, leaving in 1816 with a license to practice as an apothecary—the lowest, most menial kind of medical man. But by then he had decided that poetry, not medicine, was his calling. In the time remaining to him—less than five years—he lived off the remains of his inheritance in order to devote himself to greatness. From his first mature poem, the sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” written just before his twenty-first birthday, to his last—the dreamlike fragment “The Fall of Hyperion,” which he abandoned just before his twenty-fourth—this ambition was Keats’s major theme. In that first poem, written in the early-morning hours after a night spent reading Homer with friends, Keats evokes his dawning sense of the immense realm of poetry—“like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific”—and of the heroic effort required to carve out for himself one of the “goodly states and kingdoms” which “bards in fealty to Apollo hold.” In the last, he records a hallucinatory encounter with the goddess Moneta, who tells him that his quest has failed, that he is not a poet but a mere dreamer: The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. The one pours out a balm upon the world, The other vexes it. Keats offered an apparently unambiguous assessment of his short career when he told his friend Joseph Severn—a young painter who volunteered to accompany him to Rome, and nursed him through his last months—that he did not want his name to appear on his tombstone. Instead, he instructed, it should simply read, “Here lies one whose name was writ in* water.” Yet Plumly, an award-winning poet, is deeply attuned to the subtleties of poetic ambition, and he points out that the famous epitaph is not quite as resigned as it seems. “The fact that Keats did not want his name to appear on the tombstone adds only interest to the mystery of who might be buried so anonymously,” Plumly writes. “The unnamed is, after all, written in stone, not water.” It is the epitaph not of a man accepting oblivion but of a poet cultivating his legend from beyond the grave. Plumly quotes Keats’s publisher John Taylor, who approved of the anonymous gravestone because he foresaw “that it will be as clear an indication to posterity as the plainest, everyday inscription that one may find in Westminster Abbey.”
Such moments of canny sympathy justify the unusual approach that Plumly takes in “Posthumous Keats.” Instead of simply recounting the life and analyzing the poems, Plumly pursues his intuitions through a series of linked essays, all of them concerned with aspects of the poet’s death and afterlife. He explores the “drawings, paintings, engravings, and sculptings” of Keats’s face “by some forty separate artists,” showing how he was turned into the Victorians’ archetypal poet, “perfected and abstracted” into unrecognizability. He narrates Keats’s last days in Rome, evoking the eerie contrast between the sensual city and the increasingly incorporeal sufferer. He shows us Keats running into Coleridge on Hampstead Heath, and quotes the older poet’s prophecy: “When I shook him by the hand there was death!” Through this interweaving of themes and episodes—a “walk around in Keats’s life and art, not simply through them”—Plumly emphasizes, as a more conventional biography never could, the fatal, fated quality of Keats’s career. He shows how Keats, in a way that feels unique even among the doomed Romantics, became posthumous while he was still alive. In one sense, this is because he knew that he was dying long before death arrived. Thanks to his medical training, and to his experiences nursing his mother and his brother, Keats was well acquainted with the symptoms of tuberculosis. On February 3, 1820, when he fell into a coughing fit and brought up blood on the sheets, he had no doubt what was in store. “I know the colour of that blood. It’s arterial blood,” his friend Charles Brown remembered Keats saying. “That blood is my death-warrant. I must die.” For the next year, Keats went along with his doctors’ various treatments—bloodletting, starvation diets, complete avoidance of excitement. He agreed to leave England, on the slight chance that Italian air would cure him. But he could never trick himself into believing that his first, fatal diagnosis was mistaken. In November, 1820, in the last letter Keats wrote, he told Brown, “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.” Keats is hardly the only nineteenth-century writer to have died a lingering, consumptive death; what sets him apart is that his art, from the beginning, was connected with the imagination of death, especially his own. Like Socrates, he could have said that his life was a long preparation for death, so often had he written about it in poems and letters. Keats’s “posthumous existence,” one might say, began at the moment he became a poet. That is why, after he died, so many of his lines began to look eerily like premonitions. In “Sleep and Poetry,” an early attempt at a long poem, Keats was already bargaining for time to complete his work: “O for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed.” By the age of twenty-one, he was imagining what it would be like to lie in his grave: If I do fall, at least I will be laid Beneath the silence of a poplar shade; And over me the grass shall be smooth shaven; And there shall be a kind memorial graven. The union of poetry and death, in Keats’s work, only became more intimate as his powers grew. In March, 1817, shortly after the Parthenon marbles taken from Greece by Lord Elgin had been put on display at the British Museum, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon took Keats to see them. A day or two later, Keats recorded his impressions in a sonnet that invokes death in its very first line: My spirit is too weak—mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die. Why should the sublimity of these images immediately have reminded Keats that he must die? One might as well ask why he exclaimed, in another poem, “Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, / But Death intenser.” Or why, in one of his last poems, a love sonnet, he yearned “Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” It would be easy to explain Keats’s preoccupation with death by assigning it a straightforward biographical cause. Many biographers and critics have pointed to the early loss of his father, and to his bedside view of his mother’s and brother’s slow deaths. Then, there was his experience as a student at Guy’s Hospital, in London, where he attended gruesome surgeries and dissections. To an extent unusual even by the grim standards of his time, Keats was constantly surrounded by death and dying. It was only rational for him to wonder if he, too, would die young. This was, in fact, the subject of one of his most moving sonnets—the one that begins, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.” Plumly unsparingly relates the bodily reality of Keats’s sickness and death. His description of the poet’s last days is as clinical as anything Keats might have observed while walking the wards: First the coughing of “a fawn coloured mixture” of blood and phlegm, then diarrhea, then laxity and gripping of the bowels, then food—warm milk and pudding—then the cycle starting over again, with the sweats lasting usually until dawn. The waste itself was mucus, nothing solid, though in the struggle not to go under, the expectorations seemed to thicken and boil in the throat. After all this, it might seem insane to assert, with Wallace Stevens, that “death is the mother of beauty.” Yet Stevens was the most Keatsian of twentieth-century poets, and his famous line is absolutely faithful to Keats’s belief. To understand why Keats meditated so constantly on death, it is not necessary to look to his biography; one need only listen to his writing.MS Dhoni fails to finish as Jharkhand go down to Karnataka Posted: Feb 26, 2017 • 02:41 PM by Akshay Somani
Kolkata, Feb 26 ( ) Skipper Mahendra Singh Dhonis 50-ball 43 and his 81-run partnership with Saurabh Tiwary proved a trifle short as a fighting Jharkhand went down by five runs to Karnataka in a Group D tie of the Vijay Hazare Trophy cricket championship here on Saturday.
Jharkhand's innings folded up for 261 in 49.5 overs in reply to Karnataka's 266 all out in 49.4 overs at the Eden Gardens.
Powered by a 95-ball 77 from Manish Pandey and a 93-ball 71 from Ravikumar Samarth, Karnataka set Jharkhand a target of 267.
Pandey and Samarth were involved in a 140-ball 116-run stand for the third wicket that came to an end when the latter was caught and bowled by medium-pacer Anand Singh.
Pandey and Pavan Deshpande (36) then added another 57 runs for the fourth wicket, but just when Karnatak a looked set for a total close to 300, Karnataka began losing wickets in a heap.
From 224/3 in the 43rd over, the Karnataka essay came to an end adding only 42 more runs.
For Jharkhand, pacer Rahul Shukla (4/45) was the most successful bowler.
In reply, Jharkhand lost Anand Singh and Virat Singh early, before Ishan Kishan and Ishank Jaggi tried to repair the damage by stitching together a 58-run stand.
Dhoni joined Tiwary in the middle in the 20th over at 79/4, and hit two towering sixes besides picking up five boundaries during his knock that ended in the 37th over when medium pacer T. Pradeep shattered his stumps.
Tiwary (68) fell a little later, and despite a spirited fight, the later order failed to overhaul the opponent total.
Karnataka off-spinner K. Gowtham registered figures of 4/58.
Brief scores: Karnataka 266 in 49.4 overs (Manish Pandey 77, Ravikumar Samarth 71; Rahul Shukla 4/45) vs Jharkhand: 261 in 49.5 overs (Saurabh Tiwary 68, Mahendra Singh Dhoni 43, K Gowtham 4/58).NC Superior Court Judge Arnold Ogden Jones, II arrested and indicted on charges of bribing an FBI officer
North Carolina Superior Court Judge Arnold Ogden Jones, II was arrested Wednesday, following a grand jury indictment Tuesday on charges that he bribed an FBI officer.
Jones is the Superior Court Judge for Wayne, Lenoir and Greene counties. According to court documents, in October, he sent a text message to an FBI officer, asking him to access and make copies of text messages of two telephone numbers.
Law enforcement officers are prohibited from getting telephone records without a search warrant and then only if there is probable cause that they contain evidence of a crime. Court documents state that Jones told the FBI officer it was a family matter and he wanted to keep it on the “down low.” He promised the officer his involvement would never be disclosed and the two agreed on a couple of cases of beer as payment. In November, the FBI officer met Jones in Goldsboro to give him a disk that supposedly contained the text messages and Jones paid the officer $100 in lieu of the beer.
Department of Justice officials say the FBI agent acted as an investigator throughout the incident and will not be charged. Jones, who co-chairs the Innocence Inquiry Commission, is not being held. He faces a maximum of 37 years in prison and fines totaling $750,000.I’ve been carrying Appendix Inside-the-Waistband (AIWB) for almost six months now. The only holster I’ve used has been the Keeper Errand which I reviewed some time ago. I have found no reason to go away from Keeper’s fine holster.
One of the awesome things about Spencer’s holster is the foam wedge that helps pad the holster, cushion it for comfort and support an ideal carry position. For the most part, his foam holster wedges did a really good job of making AIWB carry that much more comfortable and convinced me they were a great addition to the AIWB way of carry.
However, after losing 10 lbs in the last few months I found the foam wedge not doing much to pad the holster. Not to mention the foam wedge only covered the tip of the holster, not the rest of the back where I needed more padding against my pelvic bone. The first wedge wore out (foam does that) and I was just about to change it to the next wedge when I went to the range. That trip changed my AIWB carry forever!
I have awesome ear pro! The muffs aren’t foam padded they are gel padded and even wearing glasses underneath of them is no problem. The gel forms a perfect seal around my ear and doesn’t leave pressure points or hot spots. That got me thinking. Could there be something similar for an AIWB holster?
So, off I went to walmart to look at shoe inserts. And there, descended from the heavens of the AIWB gods, were Dr Scholl’s Massaging Heel Cushions.
At $5.50, there was no reason not to try them.
Not wanting to whip out my holster to check which size I would need, men’s or women’s, I bought both along with a box of industrial-strength Velcro.
If you carry an AIWB holster, this is pretty much the best thing you can ever do in the way of comfort and cushioning.
The women’s size 6-10 might as well have been custom fit for the Keeper Errand holster. It fits like a glove.
Not only do they have the wedge shape that is great for AIWB that keeps it in ideal place for carry but they also have a wrap-around support meant for a heel that is perfect for protecting a wearer’s skin from the rough and pinching edges of kydex.
The back of the Keeper Errand is already covered in soft Velcro for the foam wedges so all I needed to do was carefully place the hook-side of the Velcro to the inside of the gel heel cushions and stick it to the holster.
Not only is it far softer and cushier, the increase in surface area of the heel cushions to the holster vs the foam wedge significantly increases the overall comfort all the way up the back of the holster vs one spot.
That evening, when my husband got home from work, I asked him to try it. He was amazed by how much more comfortable it was and asked me to do the same mod to his JM Custom Kydex AIWB holster. His holster has a larger footprint and, as fate would have it, the men’s heel cushion was the perfect size for his holster.
A quick application of Velcro to the cushion and the holster and he was rocking his own AIWB Lima-mod. another thing he noticed was the stickiness of the gel keeps the holster form shifting and even helps keep undershirts tucked in. Another added benefit.
Because it’s attached with Velcro its easily customizable to your needs to cover any hot spots and being a sturdy gel it will far out-last any other cushions you could hope to add to something so well-used as a holster.
If you carry AIWB, this might be something to check out.
Oh, by the way, you’re welcome!
Advertisements"We can just Google it!" is becoming our standard response to unanswered questions in life. Whether we are looking for the title of an irritating 80s song, a restaurant serving authentic Icelandic food or the quickest bus route to the Star Trek convention, the Internet usually offers the long-sought answers. However, when we enter key words in a search engine such as Google, we end up with thousands of websites - many of which are barely relevant to what we are looking for or are rife with inaccuracies.
Identifying the websites with the most accurate and relevant information are critical skills that are necessary for navigating our way in the digital information jungle, but unfortunately, these skills are rarely taught. In most cases, inaccurate or irrelevant information on the internet merely delays us for a few minutes until we do find the answer to what we are looking for. However, when it comes to medical information, inaccurate or irrelevant information could potentially have a major detrimental impact on our well-being.
Patients and their family members are increasingly using the internet as a major source of advice regarding their illnesses, treatment options, dietary advice and disease prevention. However, little is known about the accuracy of medical advice obtained via the internet. A study entitled "Safe Infant Sleep Recommendations on the Internet: Let’s Google It" by Dr. Rachel Moon and colleagues (published online in the Journal of Pediatrics on August 2, 2012) addresses this question by focusing on the question of sleep safety in infants. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has published guidelines for reducing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), suffocation or other accidental sleep-related infant deaths.
However, since such guidelines are written for clinical professionals, they often contain medical jargon that cannot be easily understood by concerned parents that want practical advice regarding how to ensure the sleep safety of their infants. Thus, instead of reading the AAP guidelines, most parents probably enter key phrases related to infant sleep safety into an internet search engine and may follow the advice displayed on the sites identified by the search engine.
Dr. Moon and colleagues tested the accuracy of such websites by entering thirteen search phrases such as " Infant sleep position", " Infant co-sleeping" or " Pacifier sleeping" into the Google search engine, and then cross-checked the medical information offered in the search results with the AAP recommendations, which was used as the standard for medical accuracy.
Since most parents would probably read the first few pages of the Google search results, the researchers only analyzed the first 100 websites identified by each of the thirteen Google searches (total of 1300 websites). Only 43.5% of these 1300 websites contained recommendations that were in line with the AAP recommendations, while 28.1% contained inaccurate information and 28.4% of the websites were not medically relevant. The accuracy was highly dependent on the type of question asked. The search phrase "infant cigarette smoking", for example, yielded 82% accurate results, while the search phrase "infant home monitors" resulted in only 18% accuracy.
Of note, the researchers also categorized the results by the organization or group that had generated the website. Out of the 1300 websites identified by the searches, 246 (19%) were retail product review site websites and 250 (19%) were websites associated with specific companies or interest groups. Product review retail websites were also the ones which had the lowest level of medical accuracy (8.5%). On the other hand, government websites and websites of national organizations (as identified by URL ending in.org) had the highest level of accuracy (80.9% and 72.5%, respectively).
Surprisingly, educational websites (universities or other websites with URL's ending in.edu, ebooks, peer-reviewed articles) only had 50.2% accurate medical information, possibly due to the fact that either some of the information was not updated or that a number of the linked articles required a subscription and thus could not be accessed. The majority of the books found by the search engine either provided outdated or irrelevant information, which may have also contributed to the low accuracy rate of educational websites. Blogs and websites of individuals also had very low rates of medical accuracy (25.7% and 30.3%).
This study highlights the opportunities and pitfalls of using the internet to communicate medical information. The internet is providing an opportunity for patients and family members to obtain additional medical information that they did not receive from their physicians, as well as to address questions that may arise and do not warrant a visit to a physician. On the other hand, the study also demonstrates that the quality of medical information on the internet varies widely. Searches for certain key phrases can unwittingly lead a user to websites that promote certain products or treatments without taking the medical evidence and professional guidelines into account.
One key factor to help address this pitfall is for physicians and other healthcare professionals to actively guide patients or family members to website that are likely to have information with high levels of medical accuracy. Instead of placing the burden of discriminating between accurate and inaccurate information on patients, healthcare professionals could advise patients or parents as to what websites should be used to address medical questions that they might have.
Furthermore, government institutions, organizations and educational websites need to realize the importance of maintaining up-to-date and accessible medical information on their websites. Concerted efforts between government or educational institutions, professional organizations and healthcare professionals are necessary so that patients can maximally benefit from the information opportunities afforded by the internet.Theresa May has rejected a request for government funds to buy water cannon, letter to Boris Johnson reveals
Met police want water cannon ready to use in Britain by summer
Britain's biggest police force wants water cannon ready to be used on the streets of mainland Britain by this summer, official letters reveal.
The documents also show that a request for the government to fund the controversial purchase has been rejected by the home secretary, Theresa May.
Public consultations on the deployment of water cannon will begin within weeks and a formal decision made next month.
Water cannon have not previously been available to police on mainland Britain, and their use has been limited to Northern Ireland.
In a letter sent on Monday by Boris Johnson to May, the London mayor explains his reasoning, saying it is a direct result of the 2011 riots that started in London before spreading, becoming the most serious and widespread riots to hit England in decades.
Ultimately the home secretary has final say on the acquisition of water cannon for use in mainland Britain. Critics warn it is a step towards the militarisation of the police and could be used to stifle the democratic right to protest.
In his letter, dated 6 January 2014, Johnson writes: "Following the disorder in August 2011, both the Metropolitan police service and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary stated that there are some circumstances where water cannon may be of use in future.
"Following briefing by the [Met] commissioner I am broadly convinced of the value of having water cannon available to the MPS [Metropolitan police service] for those circumstances where its absence would lead to greater disorder or the use of more extreme force."
The Met commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, has pledged that water cannon would be "rarely used and rarely seen", the letter says.
His letter to May, Johnson then discusses funding: "Finally, I am aware that you have declined to make funds available for purchasing the interim water cannon solution as a national asset.
"Subject to the public engagement process … I am happy to make the necessary funds available to the MPS for the most economical interim solution that allows the commissioner to meet his desire to prevent disorder on the streets. I would expect to do this in February, following the [public] engagement."
The latter adds that there is public support for the deployment of water cannon.
In another letter, written on Tuesday by Stephen Greenhalgh, deputy mayor for policing, says a formal decision to go ahead with water cannon will be made next month.
Greenhalgh wants public consultation to begin within weeks, which will involve public meetings and talks with MPs, councillors and what he describes as "stakeholders".
The mayor's office says water cannon would only be used in "the most extreme circumstances".
Greenhalgh's letter was written to Labour's Joanne McCartney, chair of the London assembly's police and crime committee.
The letter says: "In order to ensure that water cannon is available by next summer, something which the commissioner has been calling for, it is important that the process of engagement starts soon."
The Green party London assembly member Lady Jones said: "Allowing water cannon on the streets of London is a step in the wrong direction towards arming our police like a military force, and it goes against our great tradition of an unarmed police service.
"People have a democratic right to protest and my fear is that once the mayor allows these weapons on to our streets we will see them being used against people exercising their legal right to protest."
It is believed the Met are in talks with German companies about supplying water cannon in time for this summer.
The Met has approached companies about hiring or buying second-hand water cannon from overseas to have the machines available as soon as possible.
The Met is interested in acquiring around three units.
In a letter to Jones, assistant commissioner Mark Rowley detailed the training required. He wrote in July 2013 that no more than 20 staff would need to be trained in the use of water cannon and another 200 riot officers would need to be trained in how to quell disorder while working alongside water cannons.
Rowley's letter said the use of water cannon would require authorisation by an officer of the rank of commander.
The home secretary has already signalled her sympathy for the controversial tactic.
Some within the Met have privately told the Guardian they are sceptical about the need and effectiveness of water cannon on London's streets. They say streets here are much narrower than in Europe, where water cannon are already in use, thus making them less effective and potentially vulnerable to capture. They also say water cannon fire jets that could prove indiscriminate and strike innocent members of a crowd.Tom’s Hardware reports that a source within AMD has indicated that the company may release their upcoming Southern Islands GPU earlier than expected. Previous rumors suggested that AMD would have their performance desktop graphics cards out in the first quarter of 2012 with the lower clocked and mobile processors coming out a bit sooner than that.
If this new information turns out to be true, we may be seeing the high performance desktop graphics cards released in limited quantities of 7000 to 10,000 units in December with a full rollout of the company’s 28nm graphics card lineup in the months following. Specifically, the first cards may be available as soon as December 6th, 2011. It remains to be seen whether or not the lower power cards will still be released before the high performance desktop cards.
Personally, I'm interested to see how AMD's approach with their Southern Islands GPU will match up against Nvidia's current and future (more) general purpose computing design. Are you excited for Southern Islands?Shooting suspect Aaron Ybarra is led to a court hearing at a King County Jail courtroom Friday, June 6, 2014, in Seattle. Ybarra was arrested in the killing of a 19-year-old student and wounding of two other young people Thursday at Seattle Pacific University. Police say another student pepper-sprayed and tackled him. (Photo11: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
SEATTLE (AP) — The man charged with killing one student and wounding two others at a small Seattle college last week had stopped taking his medications because he "wanted to feel the hate," and he detailed his plans in a handwritten journal for two weeks before the attack, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
"I just want people to die, and I'm gonna die with them!" Aaron Ybarra wrote the day of the |
Sinnatt says Inmarsat had only provided the information and it was for the Malaysian government to draw its own conclusions, reports China Daily.
"We provide our information to the Malaysians, and they combine that with all the other information which they have, which we wouldn't know about, and then they draw their conclusions from that and make their own announcements on that basis.
"We aren't a party to what the Malaysians announced, that's up to them because they see the full picture. We just contribute one set of information," he is reported as saying.
Najib on the night of March 24 delivered a grim press conference announcing MH370 had "ended in the Indian Ocean" citing analysis of Inmarsat's satellite data.
However, the announcement has fuelled anger among the Chinese families of the passengers, who refuse to accept this until the aircraft is found.
Hisham meets families for three hours
2.15pm: Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and his family has met with some of the MH370 victims' next of kin at The Everly Hotel, Putrajaya. The almost three-hour meeting started at about 11am.
At the press conference later, Hishammuddin tells reporters that the families - where many of foreign nationals are staying at the hotel - have asked for the government's commitment to keep searching for the aircraft and possible survivors.
"I have said that from the beginning that no matter how remote, I am always hoping against hope and I am praying. And the search and rescue is also - in any remote manner - has always been to find for survivors," he says.
The families have also asked for smoother lines of communication between them and MAS, he adds without elaboration.
At the sidelines, 60-year-old Selamat Umar ( left ) tells reporters that he still has high hopes that his son Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat and others aboard the aircraft are still alive and in good condition.
"I am full of confidence because if it (the aircraft) has plunged into the water, it couldn't have taken so long to find it," he says.
To a question on how he feels about the dramatic shift in the search area yesterday, he replies, "Since they can't find it there, of course they would have to change. If there are clues or objects spotted, they have to go there."
NZ spots 11 objects, awaiting retrieval
2pm: Xinhua reports New Zealand air vice-marshall Kevin Short as saying today that the New Zealand Orion found a total of 11 objects yesterday.
One of the objects looks like an orange buoy, Short tells a press conference in Wellington today.
"Those objects turned out to be rectangular in shape, nothing bigger than one meter, some of them down to half a metre in size."
The objects have been photographed and marked for retrieval by ships, for further verification in Perth.
He adds that New Zealand air crew has yet to spot anything that could instantly be identified as belonging to MH370.
However, fuel tanks from the wings, composite materials and plastics from an aircraft would float, he added.
"So it's not unusual to have that sort of thing on the surface," he was reported saying.
Weather to deteriorate
8.30am: Amsa says the search for today is now underway, involving eight aircraft and six ships.
The Chinese vessel Haixun 01 has already began its duty at first light, while the first aircraft has departed Perth at 6.05am, it says.
More ships are expected to arrive late in the day or after dark.
These include three Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) P3 Orion, a Japanese Coast Guard jet and a Japanese P3 Orion.
Also involved are a Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) P3 Orion, a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Ilyushin IL-76, and one civil jet acting as a communications relay point.
However, although the weather is initially expected to be ‘reasonable’ for search efforts, Amsa now says it is expected to deteriorate later today.
Objects found in new search area
8.25am: To recap, new analyses on radar and aircraft performance data on Thursday finds MH370 had been flying faster than initially estimated, reducing the distance flown because of higher fuel consumption.
Despite the dramatic shift in the search area the next day, Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) head John Young says the previous searches were "not a waste of time".
He says this is because the earlier search was based on the best information available at the time, and it is common to move the search as the situation develops with the surfacing of more information.
Aircraft have already spotted suspicious objects in the new area, but Amsa cautions that they cannot be linked to MH370 until a ship can locate and recover them.
"It is not known how much flotsam, such as from fishing activities, is ordinarily there. At least one distinctive fishing object has been identified," said Amsa in a statement today.
US Navy pinger locators and autonomous underwater vehicles have already been stationed in Perth to help locate MH370’s wreckage.
However, these high-tech equipment cannot begin their slow, methodical work until the objects are recovered from the ocean surface and confirmed, which would in turn help reduce the search area and pinpoint the likeliest crash site.
Interpol: Passport check not 'too cumbersome'
5.30am: According to Reuters, the international police agency Interpol on Friday rejected a Malaysian suggestion that Interpol's database for checking passport was too cumbersome.
Interpol said that although several other countries used the database millions of times each year, the Malaysian immigration department had not checked plane passengers' passports against its database at all this year prior to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on March 8.
The agency's statement followed comments made by Malaysia's Home Minister Zahid Hamidi to Parliament on Wednesday that the burdensome nature of the Interpol database slowed down immigration checks.
Zahid said Interpol's database of 40.2 million lost passports was "too large" and would overwhelm Malaysia's database management system.
"Furthermore, Interpol's information of lost (passports) may slow down the process of immigration checks at counters," Zahid was quoted as saying by the Malay Mail Online.
Interpol, based in Lyon, France, said it takes just 0.2 seconds for its database to reveal to authorities whether a passport is listed as stolen. No member country had ever complained the process was too slow, it added.
"Malaysia's decision not to consult Interpol's Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database before allowing travellers to enter the country or board planes cannot be defended by falsely blaming technology or Interpol. If there is any responsibility or blame for this failure, it rests solely with Malaysia's Immigration Department," it said.
Two passengers with stolen Austrian and Italian passports were able to board the plane, which vanished over the South China Sea on March 8.
However, authorities do not believe they were responsible for whatever happened to it.The actor claims that the studio intentionally concealed 'Demolition Man' profits and is seeking to "end" bad accounting practices on Warners' part "for all talent."
In the 1993 science-fiction film Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone's character is brought out of a decades-long state of cryopreservation to pursue a nemesis. The actor himself has now wakened from a slumber of a different kind to take on Warner Bros. over its accounting of profits on the film.
On Wednesday, through his loan-out company Rogue Marble, Stallone filed contract and fraud claims against the studio. In a complaint lodged in Los Angeles Superior Court, he alleges that the participation statement doesn't make sense while demanding a fuller accounting on Demolition Man, which also starred Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock. The film made about $58 million upon its theatrical release and much more in home video sales.
In taking on Warner Bros., Stallone is fighting the same studio that distributed 2015's Creed, which earned him an Oscar nomination. But the 70-year-old actor believes the time is right and is making a stab at doing something about "Hollywood Accounting" with the stated intention of helping others in the creative community.
"The motion picture studios are notoriously greedy," states the complaint. "This one involves outright and obviously intentional dishonesty perpetrated against an international iconic talent. Here, WB decided it just wasn't going to account to Rogue Marble on the Film. WB just sat on the money owed to Rogue Marble for years and told itself, without any justification, that Rogue Marble was not owed any profits. When a representative of Rogue Marble asked for an accounting, WB balked and then sent a bogus letter asserting the Film was $66,926,628 unrecouped. When challenged about this false accounting, it made a double-talk excuse, then prepared an actual profit participation statement for the same reporting period, and sent a check for $2,820,000 because the Film had in fact recouped its deficit."
According to the lawsuit, Stallone got 15 percent of defined gross once the picture earned $125 million. When Demolition Man earned more than $200 million, his take would escalate to 17.5 percent, and when it surpassed $250 million, his profit participation would climb to 20 percent.
Demolition Man, states the complaint, achieved at least $125 million, so Stallone asserts he's entitled to at least 15 percent.
Stallone says that after 1997, he got no profit participation statements until his agent reached out to Warners in 2014 to inquire.
In January 2015, he received a short summary which noted an alleged deficit for the film and stated that no payment was due. Stallone's company then questioned the validity of numbers "because they did not make any sense." Soon, a second statement came along with a $2.8 million check. It was only one page. There wasn't much detail.
"Rogue Marble alleges on information and belief that it is owed additional contingent compensation on the Film," states the complaint.
The actor is seeking an unknown amount of restitution for the alleged contractual breach and also targeting much greater damages with a fraud claim. Stallone will be attempting to support the fraud claim by showing that the studio misrepresented and intentionally concealed facts. However, as the case moves forward, he'll likely need to demonstrate why such a claim isn't duplicative of the asserted contract breach.
Somewhat unusually, Stallone is also bringing a cause of action that alleges Warner Bros. has engaged in unfair business practices. The complaint characterizes the studio's conduct as "unscrupulous, unethical and offensive, and causes substantial injury to consumers" and "threatens or harms competition because other studios (that compete with WB) have their own agreements with profit participants and account using their own accounting methods.... WB attempts to keep its accounting methods hidden from competitors and the public at large because revealing such methods will have an impact on competition."
Besides money, the actor wants injunctive relief. The complaint states, "Mr. Stallone is entitled to, among other things, a full accounting, an explanation of how this practice came to be, interest, damages, and an end to this practice for all talent who expect to be paid by WB for the fruits of their labor."
We've uploaded a full copy of the complaint. Stallone is represented by attorney Neville Johnson.
Warner Bros. had no comment.Retrospective Review: Napalm Death – Harmony Corruption (1990)
A reviewer’s life is a tough one. “Oh sure! It must be so hard to sit and pass judgements on albums you clearly don’t have the skill to make”, is probably what is going on in your mind after reading that first sentence. While it is true that we get to voice our opinions more vocally than most, we rarely get to enjoy the albums we like. In the pursuit to keep up with the sheer volume of releases each month, we barely get to revisit albums that we loved once upon a time. So, in order to give myself an excuse to revisit albums from the past, I present ‘Retrosepctive Reviews’.
Now, what better way to start this series than looking at an album that redefined the sound of one of the most iconic bands of our times, Napalm Death. ‘Harmony Corruption’, the band’s third full length, turns 25 next month. This is an album that saw the godfathers of grind embrace the Floridian death metal sound that was exploding in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Another reason why this is an important release in the band’s career is because it gave Napalm Death their voice in the form of Mark “Barney” Greenway and the riff masters Mitch Harris and Jesse Pintado. When I initially heard this album for the first time, I was in my death metal phase where I enjoyed everything that sounded old school and Floridian. So naturally, this album was a godsend to me. Looking back at this album now, after spending a lot of my time listening to proper grindcore, it’s like looking at the album in a new light.
While their first two albums ‘Scum’ and ‘From Enslavement to Obliteration’ laid down much of the groundwork for the genre that is grindcore, ‘Harmony Corruption’ was a completely different beast. Death metal was the direction the band decided to go in and unlike bands that adopt what’s famous at the time for the sake of success, this album is a beast even by today’s standards. The riffs on this record, courtesy of the new axemen Mitch and Jesse, sound fresh and enjoyable even after 25 years. The buzz saw guitar tone heard on this record is adopted by a lot of bands till date.
The guitar riffs are much more structured and refined compared to the band’s previous work. Napalm Death opt mid paced brutality over uber fast assault and as a result the riffs are much more memorable. Though the sound is predominantly death metal, this record still retains grindcore elements in it, especially in the guitar work which became the foundation for most of today’s deathgrind.
Another thing that’s clearer on this record is the vocal work by newcomer Barney. He goes for a traditional death growl and it strikes a stark contrast with predecessor Lee Dorian’s frantic and often indecipherable delivery. While I’m a huge fan of Dorian’s work with Napalm Death, I gotta admit that Barney was a more than suitable replacement as history would later show us.
Mick Harris features for the last time on this record with Napalm Death and his drumming on this one shows a more controlled approach, only giving way to short bursts of madness in each track. The tracks are much longer here and as a result they leave a lasting impression. I still cant help myself but headbang like a mad man when listening to tracks like ‘Unfit Earth’, ‘Suffer the Children’ and ‘Circle of Hypocrisy’.
The production on this album is a huge improvement over Napalm Death’s previous releases, largely due to the involvement of Scott Burns and Morrisound Recording Studio. It gave the band the typical Florida death metal sound that was all the rave at that time. The sound is raw and yet everything on this album is audible. This pushed the band’s sound from the underground realm to a more mainstream region. In fact, the sound is so ‘Florida Death’ that even John Tardy and Glen Benton make an appearance on this record.
Over the next two decades, Napalm Death would go on to make a lot of little changes to their sound with the release of every record. But it is ‘Harmony Corruption’ along with ‘Scum’ that will go down in history as the albums that shaped the career of Napalm Death. This is a classic record for death metal in general.In honour of π day (03.14 – can’t wait until 2015~), I thought I’d share this little script I wrote a while back for an introductory lesson I gave on using Monte Carlo methods for integration.
The concept is simple – we can estimate the area of an object which is inside another object of known area by drawing many points at random in the larger area and counting how many of those land inside the smaller one. The ratio of this count to the total number of points drawn will approximate the ratio of the areas as the number of points grows large.
If we do this with a unit circle inside of a unit square, we can re-arrange our area estimate to yield an estimate of π!
This R script lets us see this Monte Carlo routine in action:
############################################## ### Monte Carlo Simulation estimation of pi ## ## Author: Corey Chivers ## ############################################## rm(list=ls()) options(digits=4) ## initialize ## N=500 # Number of MC points points <- data.frame(x=numeric(N),y=numeric(N)) pi_est <- numeric(N) inner <-0 outer <-0 ## BUILD Circle ## circle <- data.frame(x=1:360,y=1:360) for(i in 1:360) { circle$x[i] <-0.5+cos(i/180*pi)*0.5 circle$y[i] <-0.5+sin(i/180*pi)*0.5 } ## SIMULATE ## pdf('MCpiT.pdf') layout(matrix(c(2,3,1,1), 2, 2, byrow = TRUE)) for(i in 1:N) { # Draw a new point at random points$x[i] <-runif(1) points$y[i] <-runif(1) # Check if the point is inside # the circle if( (points$x[i]-0.5)^2 + (points$y[i]-0.5)^2 > 0.25 ) { outer=outer+1 }else { inner=inner+1 } current_pi<-(inner/(outer+inner))/(0.25) pi_est[i]= current_pi print(current_pi) par(mar = c(5, 4, 4, 2),pty='m') plot(pi_est[1:i],type='l', main=i,col="blue",ylim=c(0,5), lwd=2,xlab="# of points drawn",ylab="estimate") # Draw true pi for reference abline(pi,0,col="red",lwd=2) par(mar = c(1, 4, 4, 1),pty='s') plot(points$x[1:i],points$y[1:i], col="red", main=c('Estimate of pi: ',formatC(current_pi, digits=4, format="g", flag="#")), cex=0.5,pch=19,ylab='',xlab='',xlim=c(0,1),ylim=c(0,1)) lines(circle$x,circle$y,lw=4,col="blue") frame() #blank } dev.off() ############################################## ##############################################
The resulting plot (multi-page pdf) lets us watch the estimate of π converge toward the true value.
At 500 sample points, I got an estimate of 3.122 – not super great. If you want to give your computer a workout, you can ramp up the number of iterations (N) and see how close your estimate can get. It should be noted that this is not an efficient way of estimating π, but rather a nice and simple example of how Monte Carlo can be used for integration.
In the lesson, before showing the simulation, I started by having students pair up and manually draw points, plot them, and calculate their own estimate.
If you use this in your classroom, drop me a note and let me know how it went!Defense Attorney Glen T. Jonas "Medical Marijuana is the new frontier. Attorneys must break free of their paradigm and recognize that Marijuana is an asset, it is legal medicine, and when law enforcement seize it, they should file a motion to get it back." Glen T. Jonas Past News Releases RSS Bell Gardens Police Dept. Hit With...
Today January 8, 2010, in Case #BA350238, Los Angeles Superior Court, defense attorney Glen T. Jonas, argued in a motion to return property, that the court should order the C.H.P. to return 60 pounds of marijuana to his client, following the dismissal of felony criminal charges of possession for sale and transportation. The Honorable William N. Sterling presiding, in Dept 133., granted the defense motion and ordered the C.H.P. to return 60 pounds of marijuana to the defendant.
On December 9, 2008, Saguro Doven was stopped by the C.H.P. for a traffic infraction on the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles. The Officers conducted a search and found sixty pounds of marijuana in his vehicle. Mr. Doven was charged with possession of marijuana for sale and transportation of marijuana in violation of Health & Safety Code Sections 11359 and 11360, exposing him to a potential state prison sentence of 4 years, 8 months..
On November 12, 2009, defense attorney Glen T. Jonas argued in a motion to dismiss, that preliminary hearing Judge Ricciardulli failed to apply the Medical Marijuana Program Act. Judge Sterling in ruling on the motion to dismiss, stated the prosecutor’s “expert wasn’t an expert”. Judge Sterling further stated, “I don’t see how anybody would entertain a strong suspicion that he had the stuff to sell.” P118:L26-28. Judge Sterling reversed Judge Ricciardulli’s preliminary hearing order and dismissed the possession for sale count.
The case was set for trial on the remaining transportation count to begin January 4, 2010. On January 4, 2010, the District Attorney’s office appeared in Judge Sterling’s court and moved to dismiss the remaining charge because they concluded there was reasonable doubt on the remaining charge based on the Collective Cultivation Medical Marijuana Defense.
Following the dismissal, Glen T. Jonas filed a motion to order the C.H.P. to return the 60 pounds of marijuana to the defendant. Mr. Jonas argued that as a matter of due process the marijuana must be returned to the defendant. Judge Sterling agreed and ordered the C.H.P. to return the 60 pounds of marijuana to the defendant immediately forthwith.
After the hearing Mr. Jonas stated, “Judge Sterling and the District Attorney’s Office demonstrated professionalism and impartiality.”
Glen T. Jonas of the law firm of Jonas & Driscoll L.L.P. was lead counsel in defending Saguaro Doven. David R. Welch, Esq., associated as defense counsel and assisted in defending the case.
###A proposal to add the city’s homeless and atheists to its protected class list will hit City Council Tuesday.
According to its website, the City of Madison defines a protected class as, “a group of people defined by the law who share common characteristics and are protected from discrimination and harassment by federal, state and/or local laws.”
As one of the most vulnerable groups in society, it is vital that the homeless be protected, Georgie Nazos, The Road Home Dane County’s Housing & Hope Case Manager, said.
Madison’s homeless community faces discrimination in housing and employment, Nazos said. Potential employers often discard applicants who list no address or list job centers or shelters as their address, and landlords usually require housing applicants to have a housing history, references and their name on a previous lease. To have protections around this kind of discrimination, she said, would be great.
“We will not be able to solve the problem of homelessness when those individuals are unable to find housing or jobs; one comes from the other, it’s a vicious cycle,” Nazos said. “You can’t get a job, you can’t get housing. If people are discriminating based on that, then how do we expect to get people back on their feet?”
Adding the homeless to the protected class list would make it illegal to discriminate against the homeless just as it is illegal to discriminate against a particular race or gender, Nazos said. This is the first step toward solving the homeless crisis, she said.
Putting atheists on the protected class list will also be a significant advance in reducing discrimination in Madison, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Annie Laurie Gaylor said.
Religion is already a protected class, but many do not realize this also includes those who choose not to practice religion, Gaylor said.
The folks who lead the Freedom From Religion Foundation are used to drawing heat. In a move opposed by liberal… http://t.co/K3C5mjLKNw — FFRF (@FFRF) January 30, 2015
Gaylor’s Freedom from Religion Foundation, composed of atheists, skeptics and non-believers who support the separation of church and state, often face discrimination from vendors who refuse to print FFRF’s brochures and advertising, she said. Gaylor said she hopes adding atheists to the protected class list will stop this censorship of her and her organization’s views.
“Not only do you not have free speech, but you don’t have paid speech,” she said.
The foundation also receives discrimination in what Gaylor referred to as “crank mail” letters which do not threaten, but ask FFRF to move from the country.
For atheists, Gaylor said, becoming a protected class would mean a step toward changing the sometimes demonizing perception of atheists and deconstructing bizarre atheist stereotypes. Becoming a protected class would also make atheists feel safer from hate crimes, she said.
“It kind of puts you at the table,” she said. “You’re treated like a human being just like everybody else.”Amnat Ruenroeng, the man who upset the Zou Shiming apple cart last year and firmly established himself as one of the world's best flyweights, suffered the first loss of his career earlier today as former victim John Riel Casimero put him down with a wicked body shot.
Here's the final round for those interested.
Ruenroeng (17-1, 5 KO) had defended his IBF title, taken from Rocky Fuentes in 2014, five times against the likes of Kazuto Ioka, McWilliams Arroyo, and the aforementioned Shiming. Four rounds into the rematch with Casimero (22-3, 14 KO), as things started to get a bit chippy, Ruenroeng ran headlong into a check hook that sent him to his knees.
Ruenroeng clinched his way back into the fight, only to get leveled by a liver shot that put him down for good.
Does Casimero stand a chance against the likes of Roman Gonzalez and Juan Francisco Estrada? Probably not, but this is a major win for the young Filipino.By
It is often claimed that small firms are responsible for a disproportionately large share of new jobs that are created in the U.S. economy. If true, this speaks well of the entrepreneurial spirit of the U.S. economy, whereby newcomers introduce new ideas or production processes that lead to new and improved products or services. The rise of global companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Google from small beginnings is a testament to the importance of small businesses and the economic forces they sometimes unleash. However, the claim that small businesses generate a large percentage of new jobs must be evaluated carefully. First, there isn't a universal agreement on the definition of a small business. Furthermore, the failure rates of small business are quite high. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about half of the businesses that opened in 1994 were still operating five years later. Thus, when one accounts for job destruction, small businesses appear to account for a significantly smaller share of net new jobs created in the private sector than many people might believe.
What Do Past Studies Reveal?
The importance of small businesses to job creation has been part of the economic policy narrative for some time. In 1979, then-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor David Birch claimed that firms with 20 or fewer employees accounted for two-thirds of all new jobs created between 1969 and 1976; firms with 100 or fewer employees accounted for 82 percent of all new jobs created. Conversely, he found that large firms (500 or more employees) accounted for only 15 percent of net job growth. Birch's finding challenged the conventional wisdom about job creation at the time and, accordingly, had enormous influence on policymakers and researchers.
Some economists soon began to challenge Birch's findings. Using the same data as Birch, Catherine Armington and Marjorie Odle found in 1982 that businesses with 100 or fewer employees accounted for only 39 percent of net new jobs. Several years later, Charles Brown, James Hamilton and James Meddoff pointed out that 40 percent of jobs created in small businesses in 1980 no longer existed in 1986. A more up-to-date assessment of the job-creation characteristic of small businesses can be found in work published by Stephen Davis, John Haltiwanger and Scott Schuh in 1996.
These authors noted that "a common confusion between net and gross job creation distorts the overall job creation picture and hides the enormous number of new jobs created by large employers." The authors found that although gross job creation is high for smaller firms (100 or fewer employees), so is job destruction. Slowly, researchers were coming to the conclusion that small businesses did create a lot of new jobs, but the high failure rate of these businesses suggested that their net job creation was much lower.
Earlier this year, a study designed to look at the entire economy was published. The researchers found that small firms create more net jobs than do large firms, which is consistent with the conventional wisdom but generally not the thrust of past research. However, they concede that Birch overestimated the importance of small business in job creation and found that there is a much smaller difference between the net number of new jobs created by large firms and small firms than Birch originally suggested.
Business Employment Dynamics
Researchers who want to assess the claim that small businesses account for a disproportionate percentage of new jobs must first confront several issues. First, what is the best data source for the hypothesis to be tested? Second, how should a small business be defined? (The Small Business Administration says a business is small if it employs fewer than 500 people. However, it may not be wise to lump together a Silicon Valley startup with a relatively large, established manufacturer.) Third, should the focus be on the gross number of jobs created or the net number of jobs created? The research suggests the latter. Why? Because even during the depths of the 2007-09 recession, businesses were still adding an average of nearly 800,000 new jobs a month. But they were shedding an even larger number of jobs per month—about 971,000.
In this article, we use the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One drawback of the BED is that it has less than 20 years of history, which may limit the ability to draw firm conclusions. The analysis in this article uses the following breakdown of firm size: 1-19 employees; 20-99 employees; 100-499 employees; and 500 or more employees.
Job Gains by Firm Size
The table shows average gross and net job gains at all private business establishments from the third quarter of 1992 through the first quarter of 2010. Over this roughly 18-year period, gross job gains per quarter averaged a little less than 2.8 million, or about 929,000 per month. Since the 2007-2009 recession was extremely severe, the table includes a separate column that excludes the data from that period. The lower half of the table shows that businesses with fewer than 20 employees provided the largest percentage of gross job gains (about 30 percent). Businesses with between 20 and 99 employees accounted for the next largest share (about 27 percent), with the largest firms (500 or more) accounting for a somewhat smaller percentage (about 26 percent). The remaining category—businesses with between 100 and 499 employees—accounted for a smaller percentage of gross job gains. All of these percentages are little-changed if we exclude the recession period.
Gross and Net Job Gains by Firm Size Average job gains (in thousands) per quarter, 1992:Q3 to 2010:Q1 Gross Job Gains
Net Job Gains Size Total Sample Period Excluding 2007-09 Recession
Total Sample Period Excluding 2007-09 Recession 1 to 19 821 828
16 28 20 to 99 747 758
25 40 100 to 499 496 505
25 37 500 or more 722 739
40 68 TOTAL 2,787 2,831
105 173 Percent of Total 1 to 19 29.5% 29.3% 15.0% 16.1% 20 to 99 26.8% 26.8% 23.6% 23.1% 100 to 499 17.8% 17.8% 23.4% 21.3% 500 or more 25.9% 26.1% 37.9% 39.4% TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
The analysis in the table seems consistent with the conventional wisdom that small businesses are the largest source of job creation in the economy. However, as suggested by previous studies, the conclusion tends to change when the focus switches to net job creation.
The two right-hand columns in the table examine net job gains. Net job gains are defined as job gains minus job losses. Three findings are apparent from the table. First, net job gains were significantly smaller than gross job gains. The net gains per quarter averaged only 105,000, or 35,000 per month. Second, the table shows that the recession dramatically reduced the rate of net job creation. Once net job losses during the recession are removed from the calculation, the number of net jobs rose to 173,000 per quarter (about 58,000 per month). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the BED data show that since 1992, net job creation tended to be largest among the largest firms: These firms accounted for about 38 percent of the total. The smallest firms showed the smallest percentage of net jobs created. This result does not change if the past recession is excluded from the sample.
In short, small businesses showed higher rates of gross job creation, but they also exhibited high rates of job destruction. Looked at from this standpoint, net job creation matters most.
Linpeng Zheng provided research assistance.
Endnotes
Birch followed up his original study with several subsequent studies (not cited herein). [back to text] One drawback of this study is that it focused on the manufacturing sector, which is a relatively small share of the economy and, thus, probably not a good representation of total job creation. [back to text] See Neumark, Wall and Zhang. [back to text] The BED is a quarterly series that is based on the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which uses state unemployment insurance records. See Spletzer et al. for more information about the BED. [back to text] Changes in employment can arise from opening or expanding businesses, or closing or contracting businesses. Gross job gains include the sum of all jobs added at both opening and at expanding establishments. Gross job losses, then, include the sum of all jobs lost at both closing establishments or contracting establishments. [back to text]
References
Armington, Catherine; and Odle, Marjorie. "Small Business: How Many Jobs?" The Brookings Review, Winter 1982, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 14-17.
Birch, David L. The Job Generation Process. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Program on Neighborhood and Regional Change, 1979.
Brown, Charles; Hamilton, James; and Medoff, James. Employers Large and Small. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Davis, Stephen J.; Haltiwanger, John C.; and Schuh, Scott. Job Creation and Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Haltiwanger, John.C.; Jarmin, Ron C.; and Miranda, Javier. "Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young." NBER Working Paper 16300, August 2010. See www.nber.org/papers/w16300
Neumark, David; Wall, Brandon; and Zhang, Junfu. "Do Small Businesses Create More Jobs? New Evidence for the United States from the National Establishment Time Series." The Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2011, Vol. 93, No. 1, pp. 16-29.
Spletzer, James R.; Faberman, R. Jason; Sadeghi, Akbar; Talan, David M.; and Clayton, Richard L. "Business Employment Dynamics: New Data on Gross Job Gains and Losses." Monthly Labor Review, April 2004, pp. 29-42.If you haven’t heard by now, over the weekend a bit of neighborhood mischief unfolded in the mean streets of Los Angeles.
The creative folk at LAFC decided to paint an ‘84 Olympics-like mural on the corner of Pico and Union inside working class DTLA this past Friday. It didn’t last the weekend.
Last week: @LAFC put up a new mural in Pico-Union
This week: @LAGalaxy fans paid it a visit pic.twitter.com/rqVc7K7NKc — Eric Beard (@BeardEric) May 22, 2017
Well some hardcore LAFC supporters didn’t take too kindly to that, because photos depicting fans defacing Galaxy advertising appeared on the North American Terraces Facebook page last night, leading fans to believe the vandalism was an act of retaliation.
But that’s not what happened, as their latest post exposes. Claiming responsibility for the behavior, the timeline confirms the photo was taken Saturday at the latest, whereas the billboard was discovered on Monday morning. The LAFC fans did not retaliate to the original vandalism, they simply posted it on social media at a later date to appear so.
“Wow”, I said to myself. “These guys mean business”.
What exactly is RGLS, anyway? This is RGLS. (The group has since deleted their Instagram account, luckily we’ve got plenty of screenshots)
Short for LAFC Regulators, it’s literally four dudes. Not that I’m judging, small gangs are usually the way to go, just ask Bret and Jemaine, or Beavis and Butthead.
But come on. These photos are cringe-worthy to say the least. The fans the two clubs represent simply do not possess the social stratification required to justify such hollow wankery. LAFC doesn’t even have a roster yet! I like a good rivalry as much as the next fan, but there’s no rivalry there yet. Let’s leave the silly riff-raff to the New York supporters.
In New Jersey and immediately encounter crowd trouble ahead of the New York derby (Red Bulls-City). Video: pic.twitter.com/slY3hYn5aM — Rob Harris (@RobHarris) August 9, 2015
The only mystery left to solve: Who tagged the mural?A new bill being introduced by Democrats seeks to bar government spending at properties |
at hand. Sherman did not taunt his opponent when he made his plays. He turned to his brothers on the sideline and screamed, as if to say, “This is who we are!” There are no holdouts or distractions. There are no glaring weaknesses that will take a half season to buttress.
This team has proven it can attack you with the deep ball, the seam pass, the screen game, the rhythm throws and the unscripted genius plays. They have proven they can suffocate the run and the pass. Their coverage on both corners and the slot is excellent. Their pass rush is the best it has been in years, and may wind up being the best of the Pete Carroll era in Seattle. Special teams has been good, and will get better as Lockett heals and the young players learn their roles. The only thing you can pick on is the run game. I dare opposing coaches to underestimate that part of Seahawks football. It will come.
People can worry about Team A, B or C playing well all they want. The team I see developing in Seattle has only one true threat, and they play in New England. For now, their attention will turn to a crucible of top-shelf offenses with suspect defenses. After averaging 7.5 points through two games, the Seahawks are averaging 32 points in their last two. Imagine what they can do against the likes of Atlanta and New Orleans.
This group is growing older together. Aging can either lead to spoiling or refinement. This band of brothers has their sights set on a standard only they can set. Rest well NFL, the Seahawks are coming for you in two weeks.FLIGHT International, 4 April 1981 responsibility, because several com panies were involved in moving a single piece of freight. Smith proposed a concept new to the air cargo industry. Have one carrier, and one only, responsible for a piece of cargo1 from local pick-up right through to ultimate delivery, operating its own aircraft, depots, posting stations and delivery vans. To ensure accurate sorting and despatch ing of every item of freight, the car rier would fly it from all of its pick up stations to a central clearing house, from where the entire opera tion would be controlled. According to Smith, this was simple reasoning —"It was a systems approach to a systems problem." It may be ineffi cient on the microcosmic scale—fly ing cargo from New York to Boston via Memphis—but an overview would reveal it to be much more economical and reliable. Perhaps not surprisingly in view of the revolutionary nature of his pro posal, Smith's paper was only given a "C" by his professor. But the idea stayed with him through a career as a Marine Corps pilot and a subse quent venture into the aircraft main tenance business. His Arkansas-based company, called Little Rock Air- motive, often lost man-hours and sometimes valuable contracts because of delays in parts deliveries. So, at the age of 28, Smith took the plunge and formed Federal Express, invest ing almost all of his $4 million per sonal fortune to finance the company. Smith knew that $4 million was only a drop in the ocean. For his idea to work at all, the company had to be able to offer a nationwide service right from the start. The only way this could be achieved was by raising vast amounts of capital to finance the sorting facilities, local posting stations, aircraft, vans and, not least, the sophisticated telephone answering service necessary to deal with customer orders and enquiries from anywhere in the USA. So, with the aid of New York firm New Court Securities, Smith set out to accom plish what has been called "the greatest sales feat of all time." He managed to attract initial investment, variously estimated at between $50 and $70 million, from 20- of the USA's leading risk venture speculators, in cluding such companies as the First National City Bank of New York and the Bank of America in California. The enormous sum raised made Federal Express the most highly- financed new company in US history in terms of venture capital. Smith also' had to choose the site for the company's central sorting hub, a crucial operational decision. He chose Memphis. Apart from it being his home town, it was within 1,500 miles of anywhere in the 973 densely-populated Eastern half of the country, and its weather for flying operations was about the best in the USA: Memphis Airport is below Cat 1 operational minima for only about eight hours a year. The airport had plenty of space available, and chair man of the Airport Authority Ned Cook immediately arranged for Federal Express to lease old USAF terminals and hangars well away from the main airport buildings. By this time Smith had solved the most important problem of all: the aircraft that his company would use. He had been forced to find a way of circumventing the outdated regula tions then governing the US air cargo industry, which forbade a new airline with an unrestricted network from operating aircraft capable of carrying more than 7,50Olb payload. Smith did this by having Federal Express licensed as an air taxi operator and choosing Dassault Falcon 20s to fly the routes. Says Smith, "We saw the Falcon as a 500' m.p.h. delivery truck —which the rule-makers never envis aged. If it hadn't been for the 7,5001b payload loophole, Federal Express would never have been created." Federal Express began operations on April 17, 1973, and carried a grand total of 18 packages on its first night. But by the end of the year the car rier was serving more than 50 cities with 25 Falcons, all flying to and The carrier serves 225 major US metropolitan areas, as well as Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Alaska. Reprinted by permission of Federal ExpressImage copyright AFP
Three years ago, a Hungarian far-right politician with a strong line in anti-Semitism discovered that he was Jewish. He left his party, and set out on a remarkable personal journey to learn and practise his Jewish faith.
Only seconds before he goes on stage, Csanad Szegedi paces the school corridor like a bear in an unfamiliar forest. Then the headmaster's introduction is over, the pupils who pack the hall are clapping enthusiastically, and the big man is going up the steps, the blood roaring in his ears.
The confidence returns and he plays to the crowd, just as he once did at party rallies, or as a member of the European Parliament.
He comes across a bit like the American singer Johnny Cash. "Hello, I'm Csanad Szegedi." And the schoolchildren of the Piarist Secondary School in Szeged hang on every word.
"I'm speaking to you here today," says the tall chubby faced man, with small, intelligent eyes, "because if someone had told me when I was 16 or 17 what I'm going to go tell you now, I might not have gone so far astray."
As deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, Szegedi co-founded the Hungarian Guard - a paramilitary formation which marched in uniform through Roma neighbourhoods.
And he blamed the Jews, as well as the Roma, for the ills of Hungarian society - until he found out that he himself was one. After several months of hesitation, during which the party leader even considered keeping him as the party's "tame Jew" as a riposte to accusations of anti-Semitism, he walked out.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Members of the Magyar Garda, or Hungarian Guard
Not a man to do things in half-measures, he has now become an Orthodox Jew, has visited Israel, and the concentration camp at Auschwitz which his own grandmother survived.
He discovered that his grandmother wore long-sleeved shirts, or a plaster in summer, to cover the tell-tale concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. As his old personality collapsed, Szegedi performed radical surgery on himself. He even set fire to copies of his own biography, I Believe in the Resurrection of the Hungarian Nation.
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Today he speaks to the students without notes, sometimes striding along the stage, sometimes sitting back in a chair, but keeping their attention with a mixture of confessions, family histories, and jokes.
His volte-face seems complete - there are giggles from the girls, awkward squirming from the boys in the audience as he describes his circumcision. Then come the questions.
"Did you know any Jews before you discovered your own Jewish roots? How do you react when you hear anti-Semitism expressed today? Were you a practising Christian before you practised Judaism? Was it hard to break with your party?"
The answers are straightforward.
"Anti-Semitism doesn't need Jews, because its based on false premises. It is the projection of one's own fears, and lack of self esteem." He had a Protestant wedding, but was never christened. Every rupture was hard, but he tried to do it peacefully, and state firmly his own mistakes. And also did his duty to point to the extremism in his old party.
Later, we meet in a Budapest flat in a popular pedestrian street - one of several he rents out. While once he sold far-right paraphernalia, like T-shirts and flags, he's now moved into real estate, with equal success.
It's as though everything he touches turns to gold.
What does he think of the new, more moderate direction, imposed on his former party by leader Gabor Vona? I ask. If Vona succeeds, might he even consider rejoining it, this time as a practising Jew, rather than an anti-Semite?
Szegedi laughs. "Only the BBC would ask me that question!"
"Vona had to turn to the centre. But the party is still full of people who joined it for its radicalism, its nationalism, its extremism. And they don't want anything less now. So there is a limit to how moderate it can become." There is no way back into politics for him, he insists.
Still a patriot, he defends his people from the slur of racism. Hungarian people are not anti-Semitic, although there is an anti-Semitic discourse in society, he says.
In fact, Budapest is a great place to be a Jew in, he beams - with its kosher restaurants, synagogues, and Jewish shops. You can practise your culture, and practise your faith here. You might get funny looks if you wear a kippah - a traditional Jewish skullcap - but you won't be spat on, or physically threatened as you might be in France or Belgium.
"The paradox of Hungarian nationalism," says the man who used to fly its banner, "is that we are proud of our own achievements, but we're not willing to look at those of other peoples. We're afraid their cultures might be as valuable as ours."
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“What a lot of people don't know is that universities get massive tax breaks for their massive endowments,” he told a crowd in suburban Philadelphia. “These huge multi-billion dollar endowments are tax-free, but too many of these universities don't use the money to help with tuition and student debt. Instead, these universities use the money to pay their administrators, or put donors' names on buildings, or just store the money away. In fact, many universities spend more on private equity fund managers than tuition programs.”
Trump promised to make universities’ tax breaks contingent on schools’ willingness to reduce tuition prices — and lawmakers are now considering bills to do just that. New data released this week could fuel those legislative initiatives.
According to a study by Stanford University scholar Charlie Eaton, universities are using their endowments to haul in more than $19 billion in tax subsidies every year. The analysis, which compiled data from 1976 to 2012, found that as the tax expenditures have flowed to college endowments, those endowments have exponentially grown — and have funneled billions to Wall Street money managers who make big fees off the pools of cash.
Despite the tax breaks and the flood of cash to Wall Street, many of the universities that benefit from the subsidies have refused to use their additional endowment resources to expand enrollment, admit more low-income students or lower their tuition rates.
“Private colleges with substantial endowment wealth have increasingly become ivory tower tax havens,” wrote Eaton, whose study was published by the University of California-Berkeley's Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. “The metaphor encapsulates how exponential endowment growth at these colleges has been supported by large tax expenditures that disproportionately benefit a small elite.”
In the face of legislative initiatives to reduce their tax breaks, public and private universities have in recent years lobbied to influence the congressional debate about the policies governing endowments. Donors from the higher education sector have also made campaign contributions of millions of dollars to federal lawmakers. University officials and their trade associations have argued that critics of endowments and endowment-related tax preferences are undermining the key financial pillar of higher education.
“There is renewed pressure to force colleges with sizable endowments to spend more, and increased talk about revoking their tax-exempt status,” wrote Pomona College president David Oxtoby in a 2015 editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “These attacks on endowments reveal both an extremely short-term outlook, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do and how they work. Endowment funds provide scholarship dollars for students and allow colleges to expand student access and diversity. They help ensure that support for faculty teaching and research remains a long-term institutional priority. They support libraries and other facilities, public service, and student success and retention programs.”
“Wealth And Extravagance At Very Wealthy Universities”
In the last three decades, college endowments have grown to more than half a trillion dollars — and they reflect the economic inequality that defines America’s larger society. According to a 2015 Congressional Research Service report, roughly three quarters of endowment wealth is now held by just 11 percent of universities.
Eaton’s data shows that the growth in endowments — and the concentration of wealth at a handful of expensive elite schools with relatively small enrollments — coincided with the expanded use of three federal tax breaks formulated in an era before higher education became a major industry.
One tax break that costs $1.2 billion a year exempts donations to college endowments, meaning that wealthy benefactors of these schools can donate large sums and enjoy big write-offs.
Another annual break that costs $12.9 billion exempts universities’ investment earnings from capital gains taxes.
And a $5.5 billion break is the one that lets universities finance projects through tax-free municipal bonds rather than through their endowments. The latter essentially lets universities borrow money at tax-preferred rates and pay back a lower rate of interest than their endowments make through investments — a system Eaton calls indirect tax arbitrage.
Had endowments been used to dramatically reduce tuition or increase enrollment to make higher education accessible to more students, colleges would have little trouble arguing that the tax benefits serve an obvious public good. But Eaton’s report notes that enrollment at the wealthiest private undergraduate schools has remained flat since the mid-1970s, when endowments were a fraction of what they are now.
Rather than using rapidly growing endowments to increase enrollment and provide more educational opportunities, the wealthiest universities doubled their spending on individual student instruction, which Eaton says has a disproportionate impact on schools’ all-important college rankings — but hasn’t helped open their doors to more low-income students. Indeed, while elite public universities increased their percentages of low-income students, wealthy private liberal arts colleges and research universities saw barely any growth in those admissions.
Instead, a study led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty published in January found that the top universities admitted more students from families in the top 1 percent of earners than the entire bottom 50 percent. And while the universities with the largest endowments are often the most generous with financial aid, a 2015 ProPublica analysis found private universities with billion dollar endowments, such as New York University ($3.5 billion) and the University of Southern California ($4.6 billion), saddle low-income graduates with average debt burdens in excess of $20,000.
Photo: Charlie Eaton
While admissions of low-income students has remained flat, what has increased is Wall Street largesse. According to recent data compiled by Preqin, hedge funds and private equity firms now together manage roughly $200 billion worth of endowments. At the standard 2 percent management fee rate, that means American college and universities are handing over roughly $4 billion per year to the finance industry at the same time schools are enjoying what Eaton says is nearly $20 billion in tax breaks.
Taken together, Eaton argues that the higher education system — which has been depicted as a force for social equality — has instead become an instrument of economic stratification.
“I looked at this because you could see mounting public outrage about lifestyles of wealthy people in the U.S. and I saw parallels in that about the amount of wealth and extravagance at very wealthy universities and private colleges,” Eaton told the International Business Times. “If very wealthy schools don’t do more to increase the social and educational benefit that they provide to citizens more broadly, than proposals for taxing endowments are likely to continue to gain steam.”
“Get Universities To Use The Money”
Legislative measures to tax endowments had been considered by Congress before the financial crisis of 2008 and the issue received renewed interest on the campaign trail last year. Trump, a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (endowment: $10.7 billion ), openly slammed universities with “multibillion dollar endowments.” Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing to examine the relationship between endowments and tuition costs in September.
One of the members of that committee, Republican Rep. Tom Reed, an early Trump backer representing a rural New York district that is also home to Cornell University (endowment: $6 billion), is now preparing a bill that would implement new rules for wealthy endowments.
Reed’s legislation, called the Reducing Excessive Debt and Unfair Costs of Education (REDUCE) Act, would require any college or university with an endowment worth over $1 billion (or worth more than $500,000 per student) to invest 25 percent of yearly endowment gains to fund tuition for students from working class families.
The REDUCE Act would also tax large restricted donations. Those donations, which donors say can only be spent on certain departments or causes, make it difficult for schools to direct endowment funds to different areas of need, like financial aid, say endowment defenders. According to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), more than 90 percent of donations to universities are restricted. Wealthy donors want to choose how their money is spent. If they can’t do that, they might not give at all, the schools argue.
“The goal in taxing endowments would be to get universities to use the money,” Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall who helps compile Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings, told IBT. “The drawback is that donors might not want to give.”
In Connecticut last year, some lawmakers sought to impose restrictions on Yale’s endowment, requiring the university to spend more of its earnings, or have them taxed. Their bill ultimately died in committee.
Yale spent more than $41,000 lobbying the Connecticut legislature in 2016, according to state records reviewed by IBT. That same year, Yale had more than half of its $25 billion endowment in private equity and hedge funds. In 2014, Yale paid $480 million to Wall Street money managers— far more than the $170 million it spent on tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes, according to University of San Diego law professor Victor Fleischer. The university has argued that the investments’ returns for the endowment justify the fees.
The legislative barrage is fueled, in part, by a growing sense that the largest endowments are swelling because schools are hoarding wealth for no other purpose than to battle for prestige. How much money does Yale need, for example, to make sure it never goes broke? In fiscal year 2016, universities participating in a survey conducted by the NACUBO spent just 4.3 percent of their endowments. In comparison, non-profit foundations are required to spend 5 percent of their wealth every year. University endowments are not subject to similar requirements.
“Most of these very wealthy institutions receive billions of dollars a year in federal tax money. We are talking about a lot of money,” said Shamus Khan, an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and author of “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.”
Ivy League schools, for example, received $25.73 billion worth of federal payments in contracts, grants and direct payments for student assistance between fiscal years 2010 and 2015, according to a report from Open The Books.
“What is the public accountability of these institutions given the public investment in them?” Khan asked in an interview with IBT.
“Encourage The States To Provide More Support”
Over the last year, the higher education industry has made big expenditures on lobbying to shape the congressional debate over the intensifying questions about endowments.
An International Business Times review of federal records found that in 2016, 22 schools and three higher education groups disclosed $4.9 million worth of spending on lobbying forms that listed endowment-related issues as one of the policy areas being worked on. Among those lobbying Congress on those issues were Harvard University (endowment: $35.7 billion), Princeton University (endowment: $22.2 billion), Cornell University (endowment: $6 billion) as well as public schools such as Indiana University (endowment: $1.9 billion), the University of Oregon (endowment: $753 million) and the University of Virginia (endowment: $4 billion).
The lobbying blitz was buttressed by campaign cash: in 2016, donors from 20 major universities collectively gave more than $21 million to candidates for federal office, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That sum does not include millions more from the private equity and hedge fund industries that have received ever-larger investments and fees from the tax-break-fueled growth of university endowments.
The well-financed political efforts to shape college tax preferences are backed up by some experts who argue that while huge endowments at elite private universities make easy targets for populist politicians, they have little to do with rising tuition costs. Approximately three-quarters of U.S. college students attend public universities, which have made do with smaller and smaller budgets as states continue to slash education expenditures. State spending per university student fell about 38 percent between 2001 and 2012, according to the group State Higher Education Executive Officers.
As a result, schools have been forced to hike tuition to fill budget gaps.
“To a large extent, what goes on at the rich private universities is irrelevant to the question of student debt,” Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research, told IBT. “If we want to hold down tuition increases, we should look at the public sector.”
Ehrenberg said that while taxing endowments and denying tax benefits to donors are ways to redistribute income, those measures ultimately won’t help battle the growing student debt problem.
“I would rather prefer to think of ways to encourage the states to provide more support,” Ehrenberg said.
Whether or not federal tax and state funding policies are reformed, Eaton says some universities are already responding to the mounting criticism of endowments.
“Harvard, MIT, and Stanford have begun to experiment with mass online programs at low or no cost for those outside of their exclusive undergraduate cohorts (and) some liberal arts colleges have begun to increase enrollments of lower-income students,” he wrote. “It remains to be seen if other wealthy schools will follow suit and to what extent they will dip into their endowments to do so. And it is unclear if these initiatives can actually narrow the gap between an elite schools’ undergraduates and America at large. But the initiatives signal a recognition of the problem.”In the internships I've done at larger companies, and in the upper year Computer Science courses I've taken, I've noticed a disturbing trend: nobody can write code well. On one hand, it's a matter of practice and experience, but on the other, more grave hand, it's the effect of shyness and laziness, and an unwillingness to learn above what is taught in school or can be found by copying and pasting code from the web. Like any skill, it takes time and effort to develop. And while I certainly wasn't the best coder in my earlier years of school, and while I still have a tremendous amount to learn, there are some of the rudiments I wished had been taught to me years ago.
The compiler is smarter than you. Make friends with it.
This is not to say the computer is supreme and you, for one, should welcome your pedantic overlords, but you should accept its nature and work in harmony with it. Too often have I seen students slapping their computer, calling it stupid and wrong. You need to accept if the compiler is giving you errors, no matter how cryptic they may seem, it is correct and you are wrong. There is no shame in this, however, and petulance on your part will only slow you down.
So, when the compiler spews out an error message you don't understand, take this as an opportunity to learn something about how your language works. When you eventually track down the source of the error, you'll learn from the mistake, which will make you a better programmer, and you'll be far less likely to make the same mistake twice.
(Brief interlude about how to read compiler errors: If you're a particularly new programmer, you'll probably write all your code, save and then try to compile, resulting in what seems like a bazillion compile errors. Firstly, don't do this. Try to compile as often as possible, every time you finish some discrete unit of code, like a method. Secondly, and most importantly, when you get a ton of compile errors, it may seem daunting at first, but it's usually trivial to fix: start fixing the first error, save, re-compile, and keep going. You'll find by fixing the top ones first, most of the other errors disappear. Finally, if your compiler has an option to treat “Warnings as Errors”, you should enable this. Warnings are usually a sign you're doing something which may work. Programming fundamental: “*Could happen* should be treated as Will happen”, so you need to fix these warnings, too.)
Once you accept the compiler for what it is, your programming job becomes much simpler. Treat the compiler as a pedagogue and work with it. Remember, it's just a piece of software, it does not care how you feel.
Make effective use of Google and Documentation.
Taming the compiler is a great first step to writing better code, but eventually you'll master the syntax of your language and move into higher-level problems, where you'll need to use much more than just the basic syntax, instead using more features of the language and the libraries it provides. You need to learn this too. This means going beyond lecture slides and your textbook, and reaching up into the documentation provided by the language's vendor.
Most language installations come with some form of local documentation, in the form of Help documentation and usually Library references (I'll assume you're using an Object Oriented language, but the same applies to other language styles just as well). These documents provide references for all classes available to you as part of your language's standard libraries. Each class reference has written explanations of the Class, its purpose, and detailed descriptions of how to use each of its methods. If you're lucky, you'll also be provided with programming tutorials for certain problem domains (like “Collections Programming Guide”) and Sample Code for your perusal.
While so much documentation may at first seem overwhelming, in practice it's exactly what you need exactly when you need it. I don't recommend just opening up the help and reading every piece of documentation before you start, but I do recommend using a search engine and researching the classes you're using, so as to make the most of them, and to use them as they were designed. The Documentation is your best way to find out which methods are available for a class, which parameters they take, what they do, and what they return. If this documentation was provided with your language installation, chances are it's also available through Google.
Learning how to use your language libraries is going to make you a much better programmer.
Learn your environment.
I figured this one was a given, but I'm amazed time after time when programmers don't make the most of their compiler, code editor or IDE, and operating system. A startling number of programmers I know fear and loathe the command line, which paralyzes them from using some of the richer and helpful tools available to them.
(Brief interlude wherein I scold nerds for being afraid of their own computers: If you are a Computer Science student, or otherwise beginner programmer, you are expected to be at a certain level of comfort and proficiency with computers. This means you should know how to use a command line interface. You don't have to be an expert, but you shouldn't avoid it, either. You should be familiar with a Unixy system. OS X is a great one, and Linux works really well too. Your faculty's computer labs probably run Linux, so you have no excuse. But it goes deeper than just learning certain environments. I've encountered a large number of Computer Science students who seem to have a general fear of using computers, to the extent where menus aren't read, programs aren't understood, and Google isn't used. You didn't even try. This is how my non-nerd family treats computers. You need to do better.)
Integrated Development Environments, like Eclipse and Xcode are massive and overwhelming tools for the beginner. You'll probably start off writing your code in a basic text editor. I recommend moving to an IDE as soon as possible. They're big. They're scary. They're worth the pain. Once you become comfortable with your IDE, you'll be much more productive and learn quicker, as the IDE will provide things like Syntax Highlighting, Code Completion, and integrated and graphical debugging. These will help you find problems much more easily than had you been writing in Notepad.
IDEs are not the only way to write code, but they're an important one, and extremely useful. You won't regret learning how to use one.
Use source control.
Source Control is the most useful tool for your programming after your environment (if you're working in a good environment, source control is integrated), and the sad part is very few of my peers ever seem to use it, and schools rarely seem to teach it.
Source Control Management allows you to keep your code files in a managed way, so as you edit your files, you can make checkpoints or commits, and if you later botch your code, you can revert it back to a given checkpoint. It also allows you to create different copies of your code so you can change two separate pieces in safety net areas, without having them break each other.
Lets say you've got a project of files, and you're about to work on your next big task. Before you do any more work, you make sure you commit your changes. You can then create a separate branch of code to work on the next big task. As you're working on this task, you realize there was a bug in your previous task, so you can switch branches, fix the previous bug, and then resume working on your current task. When it's done, you merge the branches together, and now your code has both the old fix, and the newly completed task. Branches give your code an extra safety net so you can easily separate tasks.
SCM gives you other benefits, like having a backup of your code (as you can just go back to previous commits in your code if need be), and it allows you to keep your code on other machines. This also means you can collaborate with other coders, too. If you share a repository with other coders, each coder can push and pull commits from branches and repositories. This is great if you're working on group projects.
The real importance of Source Control, even for the solo programmer, is it gives you a safety net around your code. If you mess it up, you can always revert it and fix it.
There are many kinds of SCM tools available, but I'd recommend going with git. It's a little scary to use (but hopefully you're no longer afraid of using the command line, and you're not afraid to seek out answers, either), but it's also one of the most powerful. It's very popular, so there's a plethora of documentation and tutorials available on the web. There's also a little website called GitHub which hosts open source projects contained in git repositories. If you're looking for examples on how to code (or how not to code), learning to read open source software will take you a long way. And if you decide you'd like to practice writing code, contributing to open source software is an excellent exercise.
Learn how to debug.
Once you learn how to write code, read documentation and seek help, use your environment, and keep your code safe with source control, you'll need to learn how to properly debug your code as well.
Bugs are subtle mistakes in your code which can't be found with a compiler. You'll encounter them constantly, though hopefully not the same ones more than once.
Working with my peers, I'm again surprised at how few programmers know how to make the most of the debugging tools at their disposal. The extent of most debugging seems to end at print statements. And while printing and logging information to a console is helpful, if it's your only debugging tool, you're going to quickly find yourself bogged down.
Logging statements gunk up your code. They only reveal to you the state of whichever values you explicitly ask to be logged. They don't allow for conditional output. To really debug your app, you should learn how to use your IDE's graphical debugger and Breakpoints (of course, you could do this all from the command line, but I find graphical debuggers much nicer for visualizing the state of your app). You set breakpoints in your code, typically by clicking somewhere in your editor's gutter, and then Build + Debug your app.
When execution of your program code reaches the breakpoint's line, execution pauses and the debugger takes over. From here, you can now see the values of your objects and variables, which is incredibly helpful. You can also control the flow of your code, by telling the debugger to advance one line, or to jump in or out of a method. These primary functions are going to help you tremendously when fixing problems.
There are other helpful debugging features of breakpoints, like setting conditions for a breakpoint. You can make it so the debugger only kicks in if (x > 4) for example, which is helpful when a bug only happens under some condition.
Write an app.
Finally, and this one is simple: Practice! The best way to become a better programmer is to practice. Doing well on assignments is one thing, but it's not nearly as helpful as building your own app from start to finish. Or joining an Open Source project, finding your way around its codebase, and contributing to it.
These are all things I wish I'd known when I started programming. They are things which I've learned the hard way on my own, through painful mistakes. They are things I wish I could teach to all programming writing students, and they are things hopefully others can learn from.A Dover man faces an indecent exposure and lewdness charge after he allegedly stood naked in his window in hopes of alarming his neighbors.Police were called to Central Avenue after a woman reported seeing Richard Crotty, 55, exposing himself.Once they arrived, officers learned Crotty was standing naked from the waist down in his home in front of a window. Officers said he had done this on multiple occasions in hopes of alarming his neighbors.Crotty was arrested and charged with indecent exposure and lewdness.12967056
A Dover man faces an indecent exposure and lewdness charge after he allegedly stood naked in his window in hopes of alarming his neighbors.
Police were called to Central Avenue after a woman reported seeing Richard Crotty, 55, exposing himself.
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Once they arrived, officers learned Crotty was standing naked from the waist down in his home in front of a window. Officers said he had done this on multiple occasions in hopes of alarming his neighbors.
Crotty was arrested and charged with indecent exposure and lewdness.
AlertMeAsean bachelor degree holders have until the end of October to get their application in for eight fully funded scholarships at Thailand’s Chulabhorn Graduate Institute (CGI).
This year’s agreement between CGI and the Asean Foundation (AF) targets Asean bachelor degree holders with a cumulative GPA of at least 3.00 who wish to pursue a masters degree in applied biological sciences, environmental health, environmental toxicology, or chemical biology.
Offered as part of the AF Post-graduate Scholarship Programme in Science and Technology (Phase 2: 2016-2022), the scholarships are open to bachelor degree holders aged under 30 of any Asean nationality, except Thai.
The scholarships cover the cost of tuition and other academic fees (credit fee, laboratory expenses, refresher course, enrolment fee, thesis fee, production of thesis documents), round trip airfare, visa fee, first settlement allowance, relocation allowance, accommodation, monthly stipend, book allowance, and health insurance, among other things.
While primarily suited to Asean bachelor degree holders in the fields of sciences (chemistry, biology, biological sciences, molecular biology, environmental sciences), medical sciences (medicine, medical technology), or pharmacy or pharmaceutical sciences, applicants from other fields are also invited to apply.
Successful applicants will undergo a six weeks refresher courses in June 2018 followed by two years of master’s degree study commencing in August 2018.
To apply for the Chulabhorn Graduate Institute-Asean Foundation Joint Post-graduate Scholarship Programme in Science and Technology scholarships applicants need to complete a programme application form and submit it by email, along with all supporting documentation. Original documents must be then mailed to the Chulabhorn Graduate Institute (CGI) Scholarship Programme before October 31, 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by the school in February 2018.
More information on the Chulabhorn Graduate Institute -Asean Foundation Joint Post-graduate Scholarship Programme in Science and Technology scholarships for |
lot of people doing what I’m doing,” Wren said. “It just so happens I’m in a unique position and setting at the McDonald Observatory. My goal is much clearer and simpler, but I still get to travel and speak with state and local governments, including the city council of both Houston and El Paso. This job is all about education and experience. When people can see the effects with their own eyes, they understand the importance of Dark Sky lighting.”
For locals in the area, Dark Sky practices are just as important to them as they are to the observatory.
“We’re seeing fewer stars, especially on the horizon,” Alpine resident and amateur stargazer Wayne McLaughlin said. “Balmorhea lit up last year and Pecos was before that. Some of the oil companies have complied after the observatory spoke to them, but there’s still a long way to go. I’d like to see fracking eliminated entirely.”
Currently both the National Parks Service and Texas Parks and Wildlife include Dark Sky initiatives in their agendas. The Trans-Pecos region is home to two national parks, Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains, as well as several state parks, including Big Bend Ranch, Davis Mountains and Balmorhea.
Zach is a journalism major, philosophy minor at Texas State University, a former Boy Scout and an avid reader from New Braunfels. He traveled to West Texas and New Mexico as part of a Study in America program offered by the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.If you’re a UI designer or product designer and you haven’t heard of Sketch yet, then you must not be on Twitter, or reading industry blogs much. In all seriousness, Sketch is fast becoming the go-to app for user interface design on Mac.
You can try Sketch for free before you buy it. Already using Sketch? Here are a few best practices that have helped make our designs better and more efficient, and we want to make sure you’re up to speed too.
1. Use good naming conventions.
When you set objects to export, they are exported into the folders you group them in with the layer names given. To prevent headache when exporting assets for development, stick to layer names that match your naming conventions, and use folders that will make sense to the developer.
As discussed in the piece 7 Tips for Sketch users, it can be as simple as inserting a prefix “_ic” before all icons and using the prefix “img_” before all images. Whatever naming system you decide, make sure you discuss with the developers first so you can find what’s most intuitive for everyone. This will make for a more organized process of exporting the assets and importing them to Xcode.
2. Manipulating logotypes? Convert to outlines first.
If you’re manipulating or resizing logotypes, make sure you convert it to outlines first. In other words, Sketch stops treating this as a string of text, and treats it as a group of vectors. You can then tweak out specific letters, adjust spacing better, and resize without losing your proportions.
3. Use text styles for headlines and other repeating text types
Sketch lets you create Text Styles that you can apply to any layer of text in any artboard or page. This is great if you’re creating a website UI, web app interface, or mobile UI.
Here is an excellent step-by-step tutorial on how to create Text Styles, complete with plenty of screenshots and GIFs.
4. Create symbols for repeating patterns or UI elements.
Symbols are like text styles for groups of layers or non-text objects. You can turn any button, box, or entire UI frame into a symbol. This way you just need to modify your that element, let’s say your navigation, in one place and it will apply across all artboards and pages.
5. Architect your UI design by taking advantage of multi-screen view
Zoom out at a bunch of artboards so you can quickly see your flows and product depth. Use this high-level view to design an onboarding flow or user journey. Then dive in and design screens one by one. Later, you can zoom out to get a high-level overview. As discussed in Web UI Best Practices, doing this from time-to-time will help you stay focused on the big picture.
6. Use layouts and your developer will love you
Seriously — design based on a web grid like Foundation, Bootstrap, or 960gs and your developer will be grateful. Turning design into code is a whole lot easier when you don’t have to build a bunch of custom layouts. Of all of these front-end frameworks, Bootstrap is the most popular and versatile. Foundation is great too, especially with the new Foundation Mobile. 960gs used to be more popular but is beginning to be outdated (TutsPlus actually explains how to migrate from 960gs to Foundation). We invite you to check them all out and discuss with your developers before you pick one (Treehouse has a great piece comparing and contrasting Bootstrap and Foundation).
If you’re building in Bootstrap, it helps to set up your layout like this:
– Total Width: 1170px
– Number of Columns: 12
– Gutter on Outside is checked
– Gutter Width: 3px
– col width: 95px
7. Export CSS Attributes
If you’re strapped for time, this is a lifesaver. Select any object or text layer, right click it and select Copy CSS Attributes. Fire up your text editor or notes and paste it in.
You can do this for all the complex layers in your mockup to make it dead simple for you or your developers to code. This is especially necessary when you’re dealing with gradient backgrounds or shadows.
8. Take advantage of Plugins and UI Kits
There are a bunch of great plugins that will speed up your design workflow.
As you might expect, we use the UXPin Export plugin (which also integrates with Sketch) to quickly turn high-fidelity mockups into an interactive prototype to get feedback from the team.
If integrating with UXPin will help simplify your workflow, check out this tutorial.
If you want to discover new plugins, we recommend you check out Sketch Toolbox. This little app lets you manage and install your Sketch plugins.
UI Kits will help you quickly mock up prototypes and early UI designs. You can customize them and add visual treatments later, but why reinvent the wheel? One of our favorite UI kits is the Bootstrap V3 GUI, which you can find on SketchAppSources here. If you’re designing for iOS 8, check out our free iOS 8 UI Design Kit (quite helpful since the 90 elements work with iPhone 5s, 6, 6+ and are compatible with Sketch and Photoshop).
9. Engage with the Sketch community
While there’s tons of helpful tutorials, there’s no substitute for learning from those with experience. Paying it forward is a rule of thumb all of the best designers follow because they have been on the receiving end of it themselves. We’ve included some of our favorite Sketch resources and community sites.
Sketch Resources
Sketch Community
10. Make it work
The most important rule of all: if it works use it, if doesn’t, don’t. We discovered, then tested, then finally embraced Sketch through a series of tests on projects back in 2012. So far, it’s worked great for us. If these tips work for you, great! If not, don’t force it.
If for whatever reason you’re not satisfied with the other options available to you, Sketch might be worth checking out (here’s an interesting comparison between Sketch and Photoshop). If you’re already a Sketch convert, take these tips to heart when designing your next mockup.
Not all of these may apply to you, but it helps to know the landscape better. Got a tip or suggestion that belongs here? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter @uxpin.
If you’d like to simplify your workflow, you can also check out UXPin’s integration with Sketch and Photoshop. Once the plugin is installed, just drag and drop your files and start adding animations and interactions to any layer for easy prototyping. If you’d like to start prototyping your Sketch files, go ahead and create a free trial below to get started.Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a small group of lawmakers in late September he was recused from appointing a special counsel to look into potential corruption surrounding the Uranium One deal and Fusion GPS’s work on the Trump dossier, according to one of the lawmakers present.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told Breitbart News on Wednesday that he and other House Judiciary Committee Republicans had met with Sessions at the Justice Department on September 28 in advance of an upcoming committee hearing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein later this month.
Gaetz said that when he asked Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2010 Uranium One deal and Fusion GPS, the attorney general stood up, said he could not discuss the matter because he had recused himself, and walked out of the room, leaving them with a group of Rosenstein staffers “who showed no interest.”
“He said that anything that had to do with 2016 election, or Russia, or the candidates in the 2016 election, fell under the scope of his recusal, and he left the room,” Gaetz said.
“It was Sessions’ position that his recusal on the Russia matter divorced him from any oversight on Uranium One and Fusion GPS. That’s troubling. Sessions’ recusal is a function of his involvement in the Trump campaign. In no world does that impact his judgment as it relates to Fusion GPS and Uranium One. But he views the recusal more broadly. That’s troubling because that puts Rosenstein in charge,” he said.
Gaetz said Rosenstein’s staffers provided “no answers” and “no timeline for answers.”
“It must be very frustrating for the president that the Department of Justice is overreacting to fictitious allegations and subsequently paralyzed to truly vet incursions into our nuclear assets,” he said. “Attorney General Sessions does not believe he has the power to appoint a special counsel on this matter.”
Other House members present at the meeting were Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and Louis Gohmert (R-TX).
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said others in the room do not remember Sessions saying anything like that and that the subject was “discussed.” She would not comment on whether Sessions has recused himself.
“I’ve talked to people who were in the room and they don’t remember him saying anything like this. The subject was discussed so maybe someone misconstrued what he said. I can’t comment on recusal issues though because to do so would confirm or deny the existence of an investigation,” she said in a statement to Breitbart News.
Republican pressure is mounting on the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to look into the 2010 Uranium One deal and potential corruption surrounding the deal involving then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and the Clinton Foundation.
The Hill reported last month that the FBI had gathered evidence of widespread Russian bribery and a kickback scheme to grow Moscow’s nuclear energy business inside the U.S. the same time the deal — which allowed Russian firm Rosatom to purchase one-fifth of U.S. uranium assets — was allowed to go through. Lawmakers say they were not informed of the FBI’s probe at the time, which they say would have stopped the deal from going forward.
Sessions’ recusal could mean that any decision to appoint a special counsel would fall to Rosenstein.
Last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) expressed frustration with Sessions and perhaps Rosenstein, calling on “whoever” was not recused at the Justice Department to call for a special counsel.
“Whoever in DOJ is capable w authority to appoint a special counsel shld do so to investigate Uranium One ‘whoever’ means if u aren’t recused,” he tweeted.
Sessions has so far refused to confirm publicly whether he has recused himself from the Uranium One case.
When asked by radio show host Hugh Hewitt last week if he was recused, he responded: “Well, the, you know, of course there was one case that’s already been prosecuted, and people have been sentenced on, but as to what may happen after that, if anything, I’m not able to comment.”
When asked if he was recused from any investigations into the Clinton investigation, he responded, “Yes.”
Gaetz said he was heartened by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s call for a special counsel to look into the Uranium One deal during a Fox News interview on Monday, and he and his fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee plan to press Sessions and Rosenstein during the upcoming hearing on the need for one.
“My expectation is that there will be very tough questions asked about why we have not pursued the Uranium One scandal with the same vigor that we’ve pursued Trump Russia allegations that so far have proven unfounded,” he said.
He said Mueller cannot lead any investigation into Uranium One since he led the FBI at the time of its investigation into the bribery scheme and at the time the Uranium One deal went through. The FBI also reportedly threatened a witness from talking to members of Congress about what he knew.
“Mueller was not a spectator to the transactions that now give us grave concern about our uranium assets,” he said.In 1918 Russia, leftist Bolsheviks conducted a campaign of murder so vast and depraved that media and entertainment organs committed themselves to forever shielding the public from its horror. The Red Terror was a starburst of logical conclusion liberalism that has persistently evaded capture in American museum dedications and feature films. Though this omission was certainly not from a lack of enthusiasm. Of its many publicly-mute recountings I thought Wiki’s entry captured the spirit of the occasion well. Please do read it all.
At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims’ hands to produce “gloves”; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim’s body in an effort to escape. Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves. According to Edvard Radzinsky, “it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body.” During Decossackization, there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately, “on an unheard of scale”. The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a “day of Red Terror” to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander, the Cheka in Kislovodsk, “for lack of a better idea,” killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders “sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the ‘class struggle'”. Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse. According to documents cited by the late Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.
Estimates of the dead range from five figures to seven. But they were only Cossacks, after all. Nevertheless you would think such innovative carnage might warrant a brief classroom mention between elegies of black men who were once called ******. Though admittedly that would consume time otherwise devoted to far more sacred and politically useful events.
Of course Soviet liberals were hardly content to commit only one forgotten eradication. So 14 years later they intentionally starved to death millions of Ukrainians. The story of whom could never quite find space in the Hollywood release calendar between Iron Man installments.
And that certainly wasn’t all. Historian Robert Conquest believed in total Stalin may have stuffed his stat sheet with up to 30 million souls in a quixotic, but ultimately futile, quest for Western infamy. Alas, he chose his victims poorly. So poorly in fact that he killed people by the bushels who don’t even have American advocacy organizations. Which, as far as education and media organs are concerned, may as well have been killing no one at all. As a result, he’s no more than a fading historical footnote whose name rarely attracts an accusation of being literally Stalin.
Though poor Joe is in poor company. China’s leftist Chairman sent some 45 million shuffling off the Earth, and yet no one is ever literally Mao.
The petite Cambodian was a relative piker in absolute numbers. But given the clay with which he had to work, his butcher’s bill was probably as high a percentage of the population as any leftist in modern history. Which is beating a field of extraordinary depth. But still, he languishes without a single literally Pol Pot.
An earlier and entirely unremarked upon vintage was the 1804 Haitian massacre.
Squads of soldiers moved from house to house, torturing and killing entire families. Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed. A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.
Given precedent I presume that American schools systematically browbeat black students about their inherited guilt for this racial atrocity. Despite this, practically none of them ever suffer accusations of being literally Dessalines.
And that’s a shame. Because being a literal historical villain grants very dumb and programmable drones the moral license to physically attack their political opponents with a clear conscience.
This being a course the world’s few circumspect shitlibs may want to reconsider before continuing. Because history’s pantheon of literal leftist monsters is absolutely brimming with choice. Social justice retards may or may not consider themselves literal Bolsheviks, but it’s not their evaluation to make. And if a literal nazi can be attacked on the streets to media cheers, then the people who literally used to peel hands into gloves and feed nuns molten lead have a very modest moral defense against suffering a similar experience.
The left is going down a sure path to mutual misery in implying a man’s legal protections cease once a gaggle of yard-sale fanatics sees a mustache in the clouds. Never comprehending what faces others recognize in them. But at least there is one country that will never forget the Red Terror. Unfortunately, that country is Ethiopia.
AdvertisementsTurkey: pregnant women in public 'immoral and unpleasant' Islamic thinker sparks protests with comments on public TV
(ANSAmed) - ANKARA, JULY 25 - Islamic thinker Omer Tugrul Inancer in a TV program exhorted pregnant women not to show themselves in public, sparking protests from secular Turks and opposition politicians, Hurriyet online reported.
''It is against our civilization to use fanfare to announce a pregnancy. Pregnant women also should not go around in public with those bellies. It's not aesthetic'', Inancer said on public TRT 1 TV channel. ''After seven or eight months, future mothers should only leave the house by car with their husbands to get some fresh air, and only in the evening. Instead we see them all over television. It's unpleasant. This is not realism, it's immorality''. The program presenter thanked him with ''May God listen to you''. Secular Turks immediately took to social media, with #Omer Tugrul Inancer trending instantly. Activists have called for a protest on Istanbul's Istiklal Avenue, near Taksim Square, with a pillow under their clothes in solidarity with pregnant women. ''They must stop interfering with women in this country. If they could, they would rule on the very air they breathe'', thundered Aylin Nazliaka, a Social Democrat.
''Inancer says it is unpleasant to see pregnant women on the street. But isn't it unpleasant hearing the premier say women must have at least three children?'' protested secular nationalist Mehmet Oktay, accusing TRT of having become a mere mouthpiece of the Islamic government. Islamist Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan has more than once called on Turkish women to have at least three children in the name of national growth, berating abortion and cesareans. The Grand Mufti, who heads the Religious Affairs Directorate, intervened.
''Religion does not call for the isolation of women, pregnant or otherwise. Becoming a mother is a gift from God'', he said. ''However, pregnant women should dress carefully, as all women should, and not wear garments that reveal the belly or the lower back''. (ANSAmed).The sexual relationships were "brief in nature" and included the sharing of nude photos between Himmelspach and the two students, Butte County Sheriff's Department said in a statement. The events took place over summer break.
Authorities were tipped off to the alleged relations by the school superintendent, who reported a message from an anonymous caller about students having inappropriate relationships with a physical education teacher.
Officers arrested Himmelspach at Las Plumas High School in Oroville, California, where she teaches PE.
She was booked into the Butte County Jail on two counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, two counts of communicating with a minor for purposes of committing sexual acts, and two counts of communicating with a minor to commit a lewd or lascivious act.
Himmelspach has taught in the Oroville Union High School District for about 10 years, according to officials. She has been placed on paid administrative leave.Rahul Gupta has been adding extra tours of the old INS building in the neighborhood because of intensifying interest in immigration. He suggests we’re more a nation of multicultural stories than a nation of immigrants.
Is this a nation of immigrants?
Rahul Gupta asked that question of a group of people clustered around him in a hallway of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) building in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District.
Gupta was leading a tour of the building on May 6, the 135th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act was supposed to last 10 years, but the government kept renewing it until World War II, when our alliance with China made it awkward.
But that act, Gupta said, has colored America’s approach to immigration since.
“Immigration is about who gets to be here,” he said. “It’s about who gets to be American.”
Columnist Jerry Large takes a tour of the former U.S. Immigrant Station and Assay Office in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. (Jerry Large / The Seattle Times)
Periodically, America turns hostile toward immigrants, especially when the country faces difficult economic times, or when some Americans fear being overwhelmed by people who seem so different.
This is one of those moments, which may be why a chance to remember some immigration history drew more people than Gupta expected. He’s the director of education and tours for the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience. He expected around 30 people, but more than 100 signed up, and he had to add extra tours.
The four-story building we were walking through was used as an immigration station from 1931 to 2004. Now it provides space for artists, but it was built primarily to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Significant numbers of Chinese began coming to the U.S. in the mid-1800s, pushed outward by famine at home and pulled toward America by jobs and by the chance of getting rich in the gold fields of California. The labor was welcomed at first. The newcomers built railroads, worked in logging camps and did other dangerous, labor-intensive work.
But as the economy in the U.S. developed troubles, white workers feared the competition for jobs. Every evil you can think of was attributed to the Chinese, which stoked the anti-Chinese sentiment that led to the exclusion act.
In Seattle, hostility rose to the point that half the Chinese population fled the city, then, in February 1886, some white residents rioted to drive the rest of the Chinese people out. According to an account in historylink.org, the Chinese population of Seattle dropped from nearly 1,000 to a few dozen. In Tacoma, officials ran Chinese residents out of town the previous November, and Chinese people were under assault across the state.
When immigrants are demonized, and efforts are made to keep specific ones out, as is happening now, the rejoinder is often a plea for acceptance based on the idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants.
Gupta reminds us that where we are standing was once Duwamish land.
Certainly, Gupta says, many people have chosen to come to the United States, but saying that we are a nation of immigrants leaves out people who came as refugees. It leaves out people who occupied the continent before there was an American nation, and people who were brought here against their will.
This is a nation of people who have many different stories to tell about how their families came to be here. Each group story and even each family within a given group has its own version of the larger story.
Gupta told me later that his mother and father came from separate parts of India to get an education in the U.S. They came in the 1960s and met at a university in Florida. Gupta was born in Cincinnati and grew up first in New Jersey, where the family had friends from many ethnic backgrounds, then Dallas, where the family was often bullied for being different, for being Hindu or for being too dark.
He learned how to throw a punch, but he also began thinking about America and its peoples. In school, Gupta said, “There wasn’t one history book that spoke to the experiences of any of my friends of color.” How would people learn what it is to be an American?
Gupta sees the museum galleries and the neighborhood outside as classrooms and himself as an educator trying to give people the context they need to see the world more clearly.
He’s especially proud that about two years ago the museum began partnering with schools and school districts to add to the stories students get from their textbooks.
The INS building has a second-floor courtyard, where detainees would get a little air. The walls are covered with the names of places of origin, such as China, but more recently El Salvador, Michoacan, Honduras, Vietnam.
People need to have their stories told and their existence acknowledged. We are a nation of many stories.In his reporting, Fahrenthold had learned that Trump’s charity paid for portraits of the businessman, potentially violating laws regulating how charities operate. One key question that would help determine the legality of the move was the use to which the portraits had subsequently been put. The location of one was already known, but not of a second picture that Fahrenthold’s reporting had turned up.
Other reporters might have quietly embarked on a search, racing to be first to the scoop. Fahrenthold, instead, asked his Twitter followers for help. An internet—and real-world—treasure hunt ensued. And in the space of just a few hours, with the help of an Atlanta woman, Allison Aguilar, and a Florida Univision journalist, Enrique Acevedo, the location became known. Here’s the sequence, as Fahrenthold described it in an email:
1) 10:34 a.m., 9/20/2016. I posted this tweet, revealing the new portrait and linking to a story asking where it was:
ALSO...There is another.@realDonaldTrump bought 2nd portrait of himself w/ charity money. This time, for $10K. https://t.co/JnBuBLu3fS pic.twitter.com/KnAFMzIzuZ — David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) September 20, 2016
2) Less than an hour later, at 11:04 a.m., Allison Aguilar (@alkaguilar) tweeted at me that she’d found it:
@Fahrenthold You don't follow me, so can't DM, here is the $10K one at Doral National in Miami. ref Tripadvisor :https://t.co/uomyGGduuN — ALKA (@alkaguilar) September 20, 2016
3) I didn't see this, in the avalanche of twitter traffic, so I didn’t see that Aguilar had found it until that night, when she sent me an email.
4) 7:11 p.m., 9/20/2016 When I did see her message, I tweeted out that Aguilar had found it in a photo from trump's golf course at Doral.
Thanks to awesome, amazing WaPo reader @alkaguilar for spotting this. https://t.co/gXCl0l8WvC — David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) September 20, 2016
5) Then, at 12:30 a.m. that night, Enrique Acevedo Tweeted at me that he’d found the portrait in real life:
Hey @Fahrenthold just checked and the portrait is still hanging at the Champions Lounge. How much did you say it cost the Trump Foundation? pic.twitter.com/hGAun6KgCO — Enrique Acevedo (@Enrique_Acevedo) September 21, 2016
“It was an amazing day,” he told me. “I never would have found it myself.”
One of Fahrenthold’s most clever transparency techniques combined low-tech with digital media: He made a list, with a pen and paper, of “more than 400 charities with some ties to the GOP nominee in an effort to find proof of the millions he has said he donated to them,” and posted results as he got them. (“We’ve been mostly unsuccessful,” he wrote dryly in the Post.)
Trump and his supporters are known for trolling and attacking their critics, including people in the news media. Perhaps surprisingly, Fahrenthold says he didn’t get much abuse. “Trump called me a ‘nasty guy’ on the phone, and some of his surrogates called me ‘obsessed’ and biased on TV,” he said. “But I heard almost nothing from the Trump campaign, and very little from Trump supporters (at least compared to the reports I heard from others).”I was kneading bread dough when I heard that my mother was dying. Well, to be precise, I was kneading when my sister’s call came to tell me that there were only a few minutes to go. I couldn’t answer, because I was wrist-deep in a bowl of very sticky rye sourdough: one of a production line of 40 loaves that day at my home-based micro-bakery. It took a few seconds of washing off the bread gloop to get the heart-breaking voicemail. I never finished those loaves.
That terrible moment, viewed at a couple of years’ distance now, makes me smile. Not only did my mother teach me to bake, so everything to do with it remains comforting and nurturing, but it underscores one of the key reasons making bread is so good for you: you really can’t do much else while you’re baking.
I’ve taught nearly 1,400 people to bake in my domestic kitchen in Cardiff, in small groups of four or five, and I see the transformative effects of bread-making in every single class. No matter how people arrive for a day of baking – and mostly that’s frazzled from a long, stressful week, but it includes the full spectrum of emotions and situations, with some in recovery from serious illness and trauma – they leave looking and feeling different, beaming as they carry warm loaves home.
For Julia Ponsonby, author of The Art of Mindful Baking, it’s all about the immersive nature of baking. “People feel incredibly empowered by baking bread. It’s really creative, satisfying and good fun, the physical act of kneading bread and seeing it rise,” she explains. “When you knead, it’s giving your hands an exercise, which is really good for us, and it gives us a connection with being patient – it’s almost a meditation. It’s a natural slowing process; you are slowing your actions down but you can still have your thoughts at the same time, so you are freeing up mental space for doing other things with no noise interrupting you.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elisabeth Mahoney: ‘There is something deeply therapeutic about bread.’ Photograph: Gareth Phillips
Those key elements of creating a space outside of the frenetic day-to-day and using your hands in direct contact to make something, when many of us rely on keyboards and screens to make things happen, apply to other realms as well of course: other types of cooking and cake-baking, art and the whole craft revival, knitting and sewing, growing your own. All of these home-based activities have flourished in the austerity years, with their affordable basic materials and 1940s nostalgia vibe, and they are almost always about sharing the results with others – as gifts, dinner, or at the very least a smug Facebook or Instagram post. But there is something deeply therapeutic about bread, and for Ponsonby that connects it directly to mindfulness.
“Breadmaking is an intrinsically mindful process,” she suggests, “both consciously looking at your ingredients, getting the right balance of flours, and the meditative aspects of the process to make something healthy. Mindfulness is about the awareness of others, awareness of ourselves, to look at our surroundings or ourselves with new eyes, to take our blinkers off.”
This philosophy underpins a week-long workshop Ponsonby is co-hosting next month in Devon, which unites meditation, mindfulness and baking. I co-teach day classes and retreats (in Wales, Bristol, and London) that unite bread-making and dynamic yoga for the same reasons: there is an enjoyable profoundness and sense of achievement about bread-making that marries with other reflective practices that stretch you in different ways.
These are all, crucially, about time. Mirroring the rise of the “slow food” movement, the resurgent interest in bread that doesn’t come pre-sliced in plastic is about detaching yourself from smartphones and emails, deadlines and panic about everything you haven’t got done. You are rooted in the moment of making bread, its phases and rituals. It can’t be hurried – especially not sourdough, which brings the added palaver of making a starter to use instead of yeast, keeping it alive, panicking about it being dead, and feeling bad if it conks out because you already gave it a name. “Stan’s dead”, a friend texted me last week. It took a while to remember that Stan was her sourdough starter and even longer to word the condolence text in reply.
But these rituals connect us to what we are eating, and how it’s made, and that’s why they are freeing and vital. There is also the good old-fashioned fun of waiting for your loaf to come out of the oven, and the brilliant get-out clause that, however it looks, you can always use the cover-all term “artisan”, which you can’t do with fancy cakes. Making bread takes you outside of whoever you might have been that day, that week, just for a bit.
I learned the hard way that making bread is about more than what you might be mixing in the bowl. For several months after my mother died, I couldn’t bear to bake – this was highly inconvenient given the day job – and I got as close to phobic about it as I’ve been phobic about anything (except seaweed and frogs, both of which deserve it). I cried into dough, threw dough away because I couldn’t face it, paid someone else to bake for me – just because the process was etched on me as a reminder of someone I’d lost. That’s why it’s good for us, and makes us happy. It makes us think; it makes us talk; it makes us reflect on where we are and who we are. It means something.
Mindful Baking, Mindful Food is at Schumacher College, Dartington, Devon, 23- 27 March. There are Stretch + Knead bread and yoga day classes at Hamilton House, Bristol, on 11 April and The Arc, London N1, on 19 April, and a weekend retreat of yoga and sourdough bread in Monmouthshire on 8-10 May.University of California, Berkeley is on a campus-wide lockdown after protests broke out against Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, an "alt-right" leader who was scheduled to speak at the school.
Yiannopoulos's event has been canceled, and university police urged students to shelter in place and stay away from the protest area.
.@UCBerkeley Milo event cancelled. Shelter in place if on campus. All campus buildings on lockdown. #miloatcal — UC Police, Berkeley (@UCPD_Cal) February 2, 2017
Videos from campus show fires breaking out, and students on the scene say firecrackers were thrown.
Yiannopoulos took to Facebook to post about the incident after he left the California campus.
"I have been evacuated from the UC Berkeley campus after violent left-wing protestors tore down barricades, lit fires, threw rocks and Roman candles at the windows and breached the ground floor of the building," he wrote.
"I'll let you know more when the facts become clear. One thing we do know for sure: the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down."
University officials had braced for protesters throughout the day, setting up metal barricades around the building where Yiannopoulos was set to speak.
But the hundreds of protestors reportedly began pulling down the barricades, breaking windows and setting off fireworks, according to SF Gate
The Berkeley Police Department reportedly clashed with protestors, who threw bricks and fireworks at officers. Officers then fired rubber pellets and threatened to use tear gas on demonstrators.
UC Berkeley police threatening to use tear gas and batons in 10 minutes if hundreds of protesters don't disperse. — Shane Bauer (@shane_bauer) February 2, 2017
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Indeed, tax experts have said that as a real-estate developer he seems uniquely positioned to benefit from tax reform.Get the biggest Sport stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
IT was as long ago as January 2012 Darren Fletcher warned me that a young Frenchman, by the name of Paul Pogba, at Manchester United had almost every attribute needed to go on and become the best midfielder in the world.
Fletcher not only played nearly 350 times for United but, while the Scotland star was recovering from ulcerative colitis, he coached Pogba with the United reserves.
Moreover Fletcher was the kind of midfielder Jose Mourinho adored.
Indeed the Special One tried to sign the Scot whilst he was building his treble-winning side at Inter Milan.
Who better to vouch that not only is Pogba worth the world record transfer fee but that while United’s new purchase already has the imposing power of one of the Premier League ’s greatest players he’s also got comparable technique to one of the best passers in the club’s history.
“This is the prototype player for English football,” Darren told me this week at Hotel Football opposite Old Trafford.
“If you could computer-design the perfect composite of abilities for someone you want to dominate and win the Premier League Paul’s precisely that.
“Right now he’s got the size, power and athleticism of Patrick Vieira but what people might not have seen is that he’s going to develop technique and passing skills to rival Paul Scholes.
“He can ping a ball 50 yards, move it short, create openings.
“He’s 23 now but by 24 or 25 he’ll be the best at box to box, he’ll score headers, he’ll score from distance, he’ll generate goal assists, he’ll win you attacking and defensive headers - he’ll have some of the best footballing technique anywhere in the world.
“Paul’s got so much talent that under Mourinho he’ll be able to develop and instead of usually playing in wide midfield for Juve he’ll either be able to organise in front of United’s defence in that central midfield role... or be deployed as a No.10 or ‘second striker’.
In January 2011 Fletcher was recovering from the illness which snatched valuable seasons away from him at the peak of his exceptional career.
We met up to watch Barcelona draw 2-2 with Real Madrid in the Copa del Rey and, post match, fell to talking about a couple of kids, Ravel Morrison included, who he thought oozed ability.
“I told a few people at the time that I believed Pogba would go on to be one of the best, if not the best, in the world given what I’d seen,” he explained on Thursday.
“While I was working to recover my fitness I helped Warren Joyce coaching the reserves/U21 and Paul was one of our specific projects.
“This was a guy who was likeable, easy to teach, good to work with and bursting with evident ability.
“But back then if there was one thing that he required to improve it was his defensive duties.
“Simply the idea of tracking runners, concentrating, making good positional decisions.
“Paul was already something like 6’2” or so but had the skills of Nani.
“Even when he played with guys who were older than him he seemed big, powerful and athletic … and if he mis-controlled something then he’d just stick out one of those big, long legs into a tackle.
“He was also quick so there was a time when Warren and I put on specific drills aimed at teaching him about wider responsibilities in the team.
“He had such athletic capabilities that he could get himself out of trouble simply by sprinting or tackling if there had been a situation which he could have anticipated better.
“Warren and I wanted just to teach him to be reading the game, seeing a couple of passes ahead.
“Now it looks to me as if that’s the player he’s become. Honestly, I can’t speak highly enough of either his skills when I was helping coach him or his personality.”
Pogba, like Fletcher at the beginning of his United career, often played wide - just as he often did while winning a sackful of trophies with Juventus.
The row which followed the young Frenchman opting to leave United for free, and criticism of the club for not playing him in central midfield, disappointed his Scottish tutor. But he recalls: “Sir Alex really liked the lad, very much."
Had it not been for the two-year battle with ulcerative colitis – which once he’d won it – left West Brom captain Fletcher with a record of starting and finishing all but two of his 58 matches for the Baggies – Pogba would need to be competing with the Scot in United’s midfield.
That said, he feels this is the ideal time for club and player to be reintroduced.
Also that the price may prove a sound investment.
“He ticks all the boxes. Made for English football, he knows Manchester like the back of his hand, he’s got friends throughout the club - he left a kid and he’s come back a man.
“Look at Mourinho’s team and what he likes - height, power, hunger, aggression, competitive intelligence.
“Pogba fits right in. The fee mustn’t bother him. I’d tell him it’s just irrelevant.
“Like with Rio, like with Rooney. “There was a fuss about the money it cost to get them but if you look at the years of service, success and trophies then their prices look really shrewd investments.
“The evolution of fees mean there’s always going to be a steady rise towards a figure which people gasp at.
“But as soon as there were deals of £50m and £80m it was just a matter of time until some club deemed a player worth investing £100m in.
“And while football remains the best, most popular sport on the planet and it’s expanding rapidly in the US and China then I don’t see this ‘bubble bursting’ moment in the future.
“What I see happening is that United will react well to Pogba signing.
(Image: Andrew Couldridge/Action Images)
“Players around him, just like with Zlatan, will try to show the new guys how good they are.
“I know from experience that when a ‘big salary’ guy comes in everyone tries to impress him.
“Also, in Michael Carrick he’s got one of the best teachers - a guy who’ll help that final development of knowing how to read the game and anticipate so that even more than now Paul’s ability to use his power and athleticism will be taking him into positive situations around goal rather than getting him or his team out of a problem.
“Carrick will pass on his knowledge.
“My vision is that in 10 years we’ll be looking back at this purchase and it’ll look like a pivotal moment, the right player, the beginning of good times and a good financial investment.”IDEAS Elle Cosimano is the author of Nearly Gone and Nearly Found.
I had my mid-life crisis during a sales meeting. Or more specifically, during one of those cliché icebreaker games in a room of a hundred real-estate agents, where we all stumbled around in designer knock-off pumps, wielding cheap logo-emblazoned ballpoint pens, sharing interesting tidbits about our lives in a mad race to fill up a bingo card so one of us could win a free lunch at some overpriced restaurant chain. “Tell me something interesting about you,” said a silver-haired man. “Quick. I’ve almost got bingo!”
The epiphany hit me with the force of 14 wasted years.
I was successful real estate agent at the top of my game, living in a six bedroom, two-story colonial on two acres in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. I had a home theater in my basement, a fireplace in my bedroom, two ovens in my granite kitchen, and enough square footage that I didn’t have to hear my children killing each other in X-Box games on the other side of the house. I had it all.
And I was miserable. Our whole family was miserable. In that moment, I couldn’t think of one interesting thing about my life.
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“I’m writing a novel,” I said. I had no idea where the words came from — only that they came from some deep forgotten place. What I didn’t realize at the time was that not only had I just committed to writing that book, I had also committed to rewriting my family’s life. It was terrifying. And exhilarating. It was empowering! We were going to have a brand new story, and I was determined to make it better.
That summer, I took a sabbatical and moved our family to a grass hut in the jungle on the Riviera Maya where I wrote the first draft of a novel. When I reached the end, it felt more like a beginning. I never went back to real estate. My kids never went back to public school. We never went home, and I’ve never looked back. Here’s what I’ve learned.
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1) Less really is more.
For years, I was buying stuff, and more stuff, and then better stuff because I thought it would make us all happy. The value of our stuff has become the measuring stick of our success. And the more stuff I accrued, the more space I needed for all that stuff. And the more space we had, the further apart our family grew.
We co-existed in a state of parallel play, each of us more attached to our cell phones and tablets and game systems than to each other. My husband and I slept in a California King bed because it filled the aesthetic space in a room so vast we never had to touch each other.
The grass hut we live in now is tiny and spare. We have small rooms and small beds. We live close and we cuddle more. We rid ourselves of things we don’t absolutely need (like the $500 designer mixer we whipped out when company came, or the glossy shelves in the living room containing hardback books with perfect spines that we never had time to read). And in doing so, we learned that the only things we truly need are each other.
2) It’s OK to be selfish.
For many years, I denied myself the time and space to discover my own self-fulfillment in the name of being a “good mom.” It’s drilled into us from an early age that parenting means sacrifice—giving up the person we once were for the sake of the adults we hope our children will later become.
But here’s the thing: I don’t want my children to give up on their dreams or set aside their happiness for others. Through my own choices, I was teaching my children that adulthood is soul-sucking, that parenthood is exhausting, and that growing up means putting everything you’re passionate about on hold. Now, I teach them through my own example that they are part of my dreams.
3) It isn’t a race.
Why are we all in such a hurry for our kids to grow up? So many of my friends are pushing their kids ahead, drowning them in extracurricular activities, and lobbying their principals to let them skip kindergarten because their darling daughters and sons are “advanced” and they want to improve their chances of getting into a good college. They’re buying smartphones for their fourth graders so they can keep up with Facebook and Instagram accounts they’re not old enough to have.
Are we only trying to give our kids a competitive edge at life? Or are we rushing them through it, expecting them to behave like adults, so we can sooner arrive in that empty nest where we might rediscover the youthful passions we set aside in the name of raising them?
4) You don’t have to follow the herd.
Don’t settle for a standardized education if you don’t want your kids to live a standardized life. When we left the U.S., we took our OCD/TS/ADD son off the medications we’d be using to keep him anchored in front of a textbook and in test prep eight hours a day. We enrolled the boys in a non-standardized school that embraces music, art and handcrafts, free play, and outside recess.
We took away the anxiety and pressure of surviving school and made learning joyful again. My oldest son doesn’t have anxiety attacks anymore. My youngest son isn’t singled out as a problem-child because he can’t sit all day and regurgitate a textbook. I have given back to my children the gift of their childhood. And I have given myself the gift of my life according my terms.
5) There’s a great big world out there.
We cling to the ideology that America is the only place to have a life. We live with the assumptions that our children will always stay where they are. We think that their world will never need to expand beyond the one or two weeks a year when they use vacation days to rush, rush, rush off someplace else where they can “relax,” only to rush home and start the clock ticking again so they can accrue enough leave to do it again next year.
When we moved to Mexico, I received letters from friends and family back home suggesting that it was all well and good to need a break, but everyone has to come back to reality at some point. After all, we can’t live in a grass hut forever. To this, I ask: Why not? Why is this life any less imaginable than one lived someplace else? There’s a great big world out there. And there’s plenty of time to live it—really live it.
Elle Cosimano grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, the daughter of a prison warden and an elementary school teacher who rides a Harley. She majored in psychology at St. Mary’s College, Maryland, and set aside a successful real-estate career to pursue writing. Nearly Gone and Nearly Found are her first novels.
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Contact us at editors@time.com.The channel showed images of a prototype space fighter being assembled whose outward appearance was almost identical to a U.S. pilotless upper-atmosphere military spaceship, the X-37B, the daily said.
Hong Kong's Ming Pao daily on Tuesday said Shaanxi TV last Saturday quoted acting provincial governor Zhao Zhengyong as saying China has "succeeded in the test flight of a prototype aircraft that can fly through the atmospheric layer." Zhao was visiting a state-run aircraft corporation at Xi'an high-tech industrial development zone.
China is making progress in building an "upper-atmosphere" jet fighter, an official said last week, adding to a flurry of speculation about China's growing air power.
In April last year, the U.S. successfully tested the X-37B, which is about a quarter of the size of existing spacecraft.
The daily said China's development of the aircraft was leaked to the pres like recent stories about its new stealth fighter dubbed the J-20, but authorities were "deleting all Internet posts about the space fighter."
The Ming Pao and the Zhongguo Pinglun (China Review), a news website in Hong Kong, posted an article headlined "China succeeds in spacecraft test flight in tandem with U.S. X-37B" until early Tuesday, but no mainland Chinese media websites mentioned anything about it.
Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday he expressed concerns about China's test flight of a prototype of the J-20 during his visit. But Hu assured him the timing is not related to his visit, he added.
China's official Xinhua news agency reported a J-20 took off around 12:50 p.m. and landed at 1:11 p.m. after a successful flight of about 18 minutes on Tuesday." It showed 23 stills of the fighter flying over an urban area or in maintenance.
Gates' visit achieved maximum exposure for the images. The U.S. defense secretary had earlier said the Chinese stealth fighter would not be ready until about 2020.Charged
Daniel Chan Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 26, 2016
I used to think fighting games were terrible. I grew up playing videogames and definitely played a lot of different fighting games throughout those years, but they were never my favorites. They were kind of just something I played because they were there and I wanted to play games no matter what they were. I never actually had any one favorite game genre so if something like Killer Instinct or Mortal Kombat caught my eye, I would play it regardless of my general feelings for those types of games. I remember playing some version of Street Fighter Alpha whenever we visited my uncle’s house just because it was one of the few games he had on his PlayStation. The closest I came to really liking any fighting game when I was a kid was Soul Calibur II. That was probably the first fighting game that I actually tried to learn to play properly. That little stint didn’t go on for very long, but it was the first time I saw that there was more to fighting games than just mashing whatever buttons seemed to work.
One of my friends that I met through another hobby of mine, was really into fighting games unlike me. It was actually one of his passions — I found out he used to play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike with his older brother all the time from his childhood onward. He was also into other games like Dota (even before Valve snatched it up, when it was just a Warcraft III mod) and his passion for those games ended up being pretty infectious. It was not long after I met him that I started to become interested in the intricacies of fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom and Street Fighter. At the time, I mostly played games on my PlayStation Portable and so I picked up Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes. I believe this game was a bit more of a simplified version of the typical Marvel vs. Capcom games, which was probably for the best as I later realized I was not into the craziness that is Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
It would still be a couple of years before I decided to take on fighting games seriously. Once I had realized what my tastes were in fighting games, I picked up an arcade stick and started playing 3rd Strike along with Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (which was my favorite at the time) and Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. Street Fighter IV would soon go on to be my main game as I realized there wasn’t much of a community for 3rd Strike or Jojo’s except for those who were already exceptionally skilled in them. With the latest Street Fighter as my game of choice, I remembered those times playing Street Fighter Alpha at my uncle’s place, and that made me really want to play Vega. The Spanish ninja was always my favorite just because he looked so cool. He was insane, but at least he looked cool. That is where I ended up having a dilemma because I felt, if I want to get into this game properly, should I not start learning the basics with either Ryu or Ken? Vega is a charge character where you have to hold down a direction (to charge it) then press a different direction plus an attack button for his special moves — this was not something I ever had any experience with. It felt like playing Ryu or Ken would be the way to go and that is exactly what I did. I tried learning the fundamentals through Ryu and Ken but it never really felt quite right. There is something to be said for approaching a task the “right” way and learning it in a way that resonates with you on a more natural level. Learning to play Street Fighter with Ryu is considered by many to be the “right” way to start off but it is certainly not the only way. I talked to my friend about this and, for him, if I liked Vega, I should just go for it.
There was a lot of life events that ended up getting in my way of learning of Street Fighter IV. Whenever I came back to it, though, I took a lot of beatings with Vega. The learning process ended up being fairly slow. I would only play the game seriously for relatively short periods of time to what you actually needed to become competent. This was also the time that I was introduced to the more competitive side of fighting games. My friend often went to compete at the Wednesday Night Fights and Thursday Night Runback events at the Super Arcade in Walnut, California. I went with him a few times as this seemed like a pretty cool opportunity to hang out with him and also see what serious play for these types of games looked like in person. I did not recognize most of them at the time, but a lot of strong, competition-level players went to hone their skills there. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 seemed to be the game of choice for most of the players so I did not get to see much high-level Street Fighter IV play. It was interesting, nonetheless, and I did get to check out other stuff such as competitive King of Fighters matches and there was even a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure cabinet that I got to play on! These were some of the coolest memories for me — being able to see passionate, high level players duke it out against each other is amazing. This is especially so considering that these were not competitions on the level of Evo, the world fighting game championships, where everything is on the line.
My friend happened to know the mastermind behind Skullgirls, this new, unreleased fighting game (at the time), pretty well. He and his brother were often going to Mike Zaimont’s place to test Skullgirls and give feedback on whatever the current build was. Consequently, my friend was one of the better Skullgirls players and, later on, he even placed highly at a Skullgirls side tournament held at Evo. I remember getting to meet Zaimont at one of the Super Arcade events which was pretty cool. With Street Fighter not being much of a focus, I did not really have anything to do and Mike offered to play against me on the awesome Street Fighter IV cabinet they had set up at the arcade. I, of course, told him that I was not any good and he reassured me that he sucks at the game. Relativity can be pretty important, though. Zaimont probably was not good compared to some others but, unlike me, his fundamentals were solid. He picked E. Honda, the gigantic sumo wrestler, and I obviously went for Vega which, in contrast to Honda, seemed to be a wimpy, fiddly fighter. At least, in my hands he seemed that way. I was run over pretty quickly and felt fairly embarrassed that I was not able to put up much of a fight. I think this was when I truly understood how far behind I was in comparison to the people who took these games seriously. As much as I wanted to get better, life and other interests would end up intervening in that plan for a while.
A new version of Street Fighter IV entitled “Ultra Street Fighter IV” is what would push me past the basic beginner’s stage and into a realm where I was not just learning Street Fighter, but playing it as well. I started to feel like I understood the fundamental concepts and needed to learn how to apply them better. Vega was not a hugely combo-reliant character — getting big damage from each hit was secondary to out-poking your opponent with normal moves and more hit-and-run tactics than anything else. Since I was not very good in my execution of complex sequences, anyway, I just focused on those specific aspects of Vega. I never actually felt that I had a complete handle on the character through my time with Street Fighter IV, though. This was magnified by the fact that Street Fighter V would be released soon and I really had only just started to feel like I knew what I was doing with Vega. Previews of the new game showed that Vega had become an almost entirely different character. He had some of the same moves but also lots of new ones and he was not even a charge character anymore. The thing that initially turned me away from him had actually become something I embraced wholeheartedly and even preferred by that time.
I started to win a lot more games against people I played online during this period. I could sometimes feel flashes of excellent fundamentals in my play but I would often default to more risky, gimmicky playstyles. Street Fighter IV was a lot more complex and technical than it appeared to be at first glance. Even just doing basic combos required a lot of skill to pull off consistently. The only game during my time with Street Fighter, that I felt I could pull off high-damage combos with was Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. That game sadly never gained much traction as a popular, competitive title though. This often left me feeling very lacking in my technical skills. This, I believe, is why I played Vega more as a slippery foe going crazy around the screen rather than a patient ninja waiting for the right moment to strike. With Street Fighter V just around the corner, I wanted to get back to playing with a more solid game plan — I wanted to outplay my opponent more than surprise them. Vega looked to have changed a lot in the upcoming game, but Street Fighter V still looked more appealing to me than it’s predecessor ever did. I was never a fan of the way Street Fighter IV’s graphics looked. It did not look very cool and somehow just felt a bit unpolished even though it was a big step for the franchise at the time. This is why games like 3rd Strike and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure or even Tatsunoko vs. Capcom are what I consider my favorite fighting games from that period. I might not have been an expert at them, but their style made them fun to play and look at.
Guile and Cody seemed to be two characters that could do a lot for improving the way I played. I often opted to run away with Vega than try to weather the storm when I was being pressured by the opponent. This was where Guile came in as he is known for his amazing defense and options when the opponent tries to take their offense right to his face. Cody, on the other hand, had a lot more solid, technical offensive options I could focus on. Unfortunately, I never reached the same level of competency with these characters as I had with Vega, however small that was. Playing these characters did open me up to trying some of the other cast members of Street Fighter though, like Sakura and Cammy. This would help a lot when I would eventually transition into Street Fighter V.
At the tail end of my Street Fighter IV experiences, I revisited Street Fighter Alpha 3. I worked out that this was probably the Street Fighter I played at my uncle’s place all those years ago. I was moving so I did not have my arcade stick and instead had to deal with playing on the PlayStation DualShock 3 game pad. It was a bit tough to adjust but it helped sharpen up my execution. The experience came in handy for when it came time to try out the Street Fighter V betas since you either needed a Dualshock 4 or a PS4 compatible arcade stick, of which I only had the DS4 available to me. My Street Fighter IV play dropped off quite a bit during this period as I came to really enjoy the newer game and realized how much it resonated with me. The graphics, mechanics, and general gameplay all seemed so much better than in Street Fighter IV — it gave me that same feeling I had when playing Jojo’s or 3rd Strike. I did not want to return to Street Fighter IV though I did still have some short sessions with it. Whenever I got my hands on the beta for the new game, I noticed I was trying out a lot more different types of characters than I did when I played its predecessor. It seemed like every character was fresh and exciting — I really wanted to experiment with each of them. The possibilities felt a lot more open than they were before.
When Street Fighter V finally released, I had three arcade sticks and a fighting-game-specific pad. They all served me well but I had decided that I was going to stick it out with the DualShock 4 despite having less experience with it. A lot of people make a big deal about the controller you use in fighting games — maybe even more so than in any other genre of video games. For me, some of my favorite pro players used game pads as opposed to arcade sticks, so it did not seem like there was any barrier to entry if you used a certain controller or not. I liked the idea of not requiring a specific controller for the game (it would be easier to replace) as well as my weapon of choice being much more portable than your typical arcade stick. Regardless of my thinking, it required some work to just get basic movement and special moves down. Street Fighter V is very lenient on the inputs it accepts to activate special moves along with just general execution so, while it was tough at first, I quickly overcame that and was able to get into the meat of the game. This leniency really helped me to get an understanding of how each character worked and quickly decide whether certain characters fit my playstyle or not.
My decision for this new Street Fighter was that I wanted to play characters that had very solid, fundamental options to deal with opponents. I did not want to end up hopping around and trying to “steal” the game from my opponent by being more clever or unpredictable. Sure, sometimes a more unique approach is required to defeat an opponent, but I did not want to always rely on shenanigans to win a match. The first couple of weeks or so with Street Fighter V had me acclimating to the new game and experimenting a lot. At first, Karin seemed to fit my desired playstyle the most. It felt like she relied on turning pokes into big damage and things like spacing or reading the opponent were important to her gameplay. I found out very quickly, though, that some of her combos require more precision than I could muster having only just converted to a new controller. It was very depressing knowing what I should be doing in certain situations and not being able to execute my plan. I started thinking about what my options were — whether I should just stick it out playing Karin or move on to a different character. This is when I remembered trying out R. Mika quite a bit during the Street Fighter V betas. Mika was a grappler that seemed to have decent mid-range options. She wanted to get in close but she could also poke and prod the opponent a bit while approaching. The mix-ups she has available to her were very compelling but I found it pretty hard to actually get in on my opponents while using her. I knew there were some people that were having success with Mika at the time but it also seemed like the general consensus was that playing her was too much of a guessing game. I eventually settled on Cammy and that’s when things started to work out. In Street Fighter IV I had wanted to try out Cammy but my unfamiliarity with a quarter-circle-based rushdown style made that pretty hard. Now that I was over that hump, Cammy seemed to give a lot of great options especially for the new, more solid style of gameplay that I wanted to master. With some practice, I was finally able to play Street Fighter more confidently.
Although I can safely say that Street Fighter V is now one of my favorite games to play, I never lived and breathed fighting games until now. I have played a lot of others games since the release of the latest Street Fighter, but none of them have me thinking about them and wanting to come back to them as much as Street Fighter V does. One of the coolest things about Street Fighter is that, when you play different characters, it can feel like completely new sets of games. There’s very different strategies and goals for winning matches depending on the character you pick. The depth in these games is amazing but they also do not require as much time and commitment as compared to other competitive games. A match of Street Fighter usually only takes a couple of minutes and can sometimes end in seconds. There are few other games with the competitive depth and time requirements that the Street Fighter games have. These qualities really spur Street Fighter forward as one of the more interesting video game series that have been able to bring people back to it time and again. Whether it has been from a drive to have fun or to compete at the highest levels on a global stage, Street Fighter has turned a lot of people like me into world warriors.SANDY, Utah — A suspect is in custody after a woman said she was sexually assaulted at the TRAX station at 9000 S. in Sandy.
Officers arrested 19-year-old William Alexander Morroquin-Martinez Thursday.
Police said they were able to arrest the man thanks to all the tips from the public.
Authorities said Morroquin-Martinez allegedly tried to start a conversation with the victim while they were both on a southbound TRAX train.
The victim said the suspect was incoherent and she tried to ignore him, then she left the train at the 9000 S. station and began walking to work.
She said the suspect then ran up to her, grabbed her from behind and began to sexually assault her, but she fought back.
“She did everything right. This is what we tell everybody to do. She fought back. She yelled, screamed, tried to draw attention. She bit this individual, which, in essence, ended the attack and he fled,” Sandy Police Sgt. Dean Carriger said.
The suspect was described as a Polynesian man in his early 20s, with a heavy build and scraggly facial hair, between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, with black afro-style hair. He was wearing a red shirt and Chicago Bulls baseball cap.
Please enable Javascript to watch this videoSilent Hill: Downpour removed from Xbox Live
It has come to my attention that Silent Hill: Downpour, the latest main entry in the Silent Hill series, has been removed from the Xbox Live Games on Demand service. Previously offered for $19.99 alongside the Silent Hill HD Collection and Silent Hill: Homecoming (both of which are still available), Downpour can no longer be purchased digitally from Xbox Live in North America.
It’s rather strange that Downpour has been removed while the controversial Silent Hill HD Collection still remains at $29.99 and the older Silent Hill: Homecoming at $19.99.
What could be the reason for the game’s removal? Licensing? Cutting losses? Either way, the game is still available online from retailers, but with limited stock, it won’t be forever. The loss of a digital version means Downpour may slip into obscurity in due time, and that’s a shame. I’ve sent an inquiry to Konami to find out why the game was removed and will update this post if I get a response.The Final Fantasy XV Episode Duscae demo was released in March. Square Enix then released an update to the demo that improved the gameplay and more. Now it sounds like another update will be added to it.
Chinese website, VGTime, had a chance to interview Hajime Tabata who is the director for Final Fantasy XV. It sounds like a new demo might be in the works, or some sort of update to Episode Duscae will be added in the near future.
Update: We’ve received clarification from Square Enix about this speculation and the demo mentioned in the interview excerpt below was in reference to the previously announced Final Fantasy XV playable tech demo. This demo will be available as a separate release in the future.
The translation from the article says: “About the demo version, Tabata confirmed they will launch a new demo, on the PS4 and Xbox One platforms. “Final Fantasy 15” had been included with “Final Fantasy Type-0 HD” launching a demo version, and the subsequent optimization of the demo version 2.0”
A clearer translation was given by a Twitter user by the name of ZhugeEX. He posted: “Hajime Tabata said in Shanghai today that a new demo is being produced, there is possible plan for free dlc & there is no plan for FF15-2.”
It sounds like it could just be Episode Duscae 3.0 as opposed to an all-new demo for Final Fantasy XV. Square Enix might be making an announcement in the new year about it. It’s also nice they are thinking of adding free DLC for the game. Fans have been waiting ten years for this game to come out…Even the most obsessive Trekker will likely uncover fresh details in the thick chunk of photos and text titled Star Trek: The Original Series 365. The new book examines in microscopic detail each of the 79 episodes of Gene Roddenberry's enormously influential sci-fi series, which ran from 1966 to 1969. In this must-have Trekkie tome, concept art, matte paintings and freshly remastered production stills drawn from the CBS archives are bolstered with exceptionally detailed synopses. The book serves as an eye-popping artifact that captures the spirit of a show that regularly hit profound notes while sometimes veering into zany tangents ("Spock's Brain" anyone?). Star Trek: The Original Series 365, by Paula M. Block with Terry J. Erdmann, includes an introduction by Dorothy "D.C" Fontana and retails for $30 from Abrams Books. For a sampling of the book's startling visuals, captioned with excerpts by Block and Erdmann, check the gallery above. Above: Star Trek: The Original Series 365 The 366-page hardcover opus features pictures and stories about each of the original series' 79 episodes.
"The Cage" Gene Roddenberry originally wanted Spock’s skin to have a red tint, but early tests showed that red makeup didn’t translate well on black-and-white television (it appeared to be jet black!). Since the majority of the public watched TV in black and white in the mid-1960s, Fred Phillips suggested a change from red to Max Factor’s Chinese Yellow makeup. The color — a kind of yellowish green — appeared a nice, neutral gray in black and white, while on color TV sets it made Spock look distinctly alien. For the episode’s other aliens, the Talosians, Roddenberry initially had even more extravagant plans: He wanted them to resemble crabs. But as they were being developed, the production staff realized that crabs might come across as too "1950s horror movie," which was the antithesis of what Roddenberry wanted the series to project. Making the Talosians humanoid served two purposes: Humanoid Talosians were likely to have more empathy for an injured human female, and, perhaps more importantly, they would be far less expensive to create. To enhance their "alien-ness," diminutive actresses were cast and their dialogue dubbed by male actors. Legendary sculptor and prop designer Wah Chang took on the task of fabricating oversize foam latex heads for the Talosians. To give the highly advanced aliens a truly cerebral look, Chang placed rubber bladder "veins" just beneath the latex "skin." By |
cigarette smoke [160]. Chronic cigarette smoking prevented exercise-induced improvement in brain mitochondrial function and neurotransmission [161]. Perturbed mitochondrial energetics is critical in normal brain development [6, 162]. Cerebellar perturbation can broadly impact regulation of behavioral and cognitive domains [163]. Aerobic demands increase postnatally with heighted synaptic development, requiring more ATP to maintain membrane polarity. Exposure to cigarette smoke perturbed the mitochondria and associated aerobic pathways. The effect of BA in regulating the key aerobic ATP production, probably by preventing the peroxidative changes in mitochondria, could be crucial in mitochondrial mediated neurotransmission pathways. Brain energetics is highly regulated process and further studies in the mechanistics can provide an insight into the role of BA.
8.6. Membrane Integrity and Electrolyte Balance Derangement of membrane bound enzymes and modifications of lipid bilayer alterations following cigarette smoke exposure resulted in significant decrease in the activities of ATPases [164]. Free radicals in cigarette smoke deplete cell protein sulfhydryl groups and increase in protein carbonyl formation [165] and so does acetaldehyde in cigarette smoke [166]. Membrane bound ATPases are thiol-dependent enzymes, and modification of thiol groups within the active sites of these enzymes lowers their activities in cigarette smoke rats. The antioxidant role of BA prevented the membrane damage and restored the activities of ATPases. Also the restitution of ATP levels by altering the mitochondrial dysfunction maintained the activities of ATPases. Inhibition of Na+/K+-ATPase and elevation of Na+ in chronic exposure to cigarette smoke are attributed to the increased cholesterol/phospholipid ratio [167] followed by neuronal apoptotic death mediated by intracellular depletion of K+ and accumulation of Na+ and Ca2+ [168]. Plasma membrane Ca2+-ATPase (PMCA) is a regulator of intracellular calcium which undergoes early developmental changes in rat brain as a function of its maturity [169]. PMCA is very sensitive to the inhibitory effect of reactive oxygen species (ROS) due to the age dependent oxidative modification of PMCA and the related chronic oxidative stress [170]. In addition to generation of free radicals, cellular degeneration that is involved in cigarette smoking is related to the accumulation of advanced glycosylation end-products (AGE). Activities of several enzymes are inhibited due to enzyme protein glycation [171, 172]. The changes in the Ca2+ ATPase can be related to the increased glycation found in cigarette smoke exposed rats that in turn may lead to the enzyme protein glycation [173]. Alterations in the capacity to maintain normal calcium homeostasis underlies the reduced cellular function bound with the aging process. In the brain, multiple methionines within the calmodulin molecule become oxidized to methionine sulfoxides, resulting in an inability to activate a range of target proteins, including plasma membrane Ca2+-ATPase [174]. Mg2+-ATPase is not uniformly distributed and differs in respect to affinity for ATP in rat brain regions [175] and is activated by millimolar concentrations of Mg2+. Comparison of Na+, K+-ATPase, and Mg2+-ATPase activities in the synaptic plasma membrane from various regions of rat brain reveals that moderate hypoxia increases the activity of synaptosomal Mg2+-ATPase whereas activities of both Ca2+- ATPase and Na+, K+-ATPase are decreased [176]. Increased concentrations of Ca2+ by stimulating Na+/Ca2+ exchanger produce cellular Mg2+ depletion since excessive calcium displaces magnesium from its binding sites [177]. Decrease in Mg2+ in turn inhibits Na+/K+-ATPase further, as ATP-Mg complex is the actual substrate for the enzyme [178]. Rats exposed to cigarette smoke showed a decrease in the activity of brain Mg2+-ATPase. The restoration of membrane bound ATPases maintained the electrolyte homeostasis in brain, impairing electrolyte balance in cigarette smoking.
8.7. Apoptotic and Neurogenic Changes Dysregulation of apoptosis is an important factor in the pathogenesis of cigarette smoking [179]. Nicotine is involved in both stimulation and inhibition of neuronal apoptosis [180–182]. Apoptosis is suggested as a possible contributing factor in the pathogenesis of smoking-induced toxicity. Exposure to cigarette smoke induced apoptosis as characterized by DNA laddering, increased TUNEL-positive cells, and apoptotic features evident ultrasctructurally in the brain. Administration of BA prevented expression of hsp70 and neuronal apoptosis during cigarette smoking [183]. Extract of BM reduced oxidative stress by improving Nrf2 expression and results in improvement in antiapoptotic (Bcl2) expression and decreased proapoptotic (Bax and caspase-3 activity) indicating neuroprotection [184].President Barack Obama delivers remarks about the faltering immigration reform agenda to the news media with in the Rose Garden at the White House on June 30, 2014 in Washington, D.C. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said Monday that the House of Representatives would not take up immigration reform legislation this year and Obama said he would continue to use his executive power to bolster enforcement on the southern border. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON (WNEW/AP) — President Barack Obama announced that he will bypass Congress and take steps on his own to make the necessary changes to the immigration policy.
With Vice President Joe Biden at his side standing in the White House Rose Garden, Obama stated that he is frustrated with how Congress has done nothing to fix the immigration problem.
“I take executive action only when we have a serious problem, a serious issue, and Congress chooses to do nothing,” Obama said. “And in this situation, the failure of House Republicans to pass a darn bill is bad for our security, it’s bad for our economy and it’s bad for our future.
He said that there are more than enough Democrats and Republicans in the House to pass an immigration bill today, but that he has waited for a year to give House Speaker John Boehner the space he needed to act.
“They’re unwilling to stand up to the Tea Party and do what’s right for the country. And what’s worse — a bunch of them know better,” Obama stated.
He continued by explaining that the “argument seems to be that because the system’s broken, we shouldn’t make an effort to fix it. It makes no sense. It’s not on the level. It’s just politics, plain and simple.”
The president said that Boehner told him last week that the House will not vote on immigration this year, despite the crisis at the border.
“Pass a bill. Solve a problem. Don’t just say no on something that everybody agrees needs to be done,” he said.
Obama will direct Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Eric Holder to shift immigration enforcement resources from the interior section of the country to the border. He is asking his administration to send him recommendations on other additional actions that he can force without having approval from Congress. Obama wants the suggestions by the end of the summer.
The president stated that the intensifying border crisis only underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation instead of waiting.
“While I will continue to push Republicans to drop excuses and act,” Obama said, “Americans cannot wait forever for them to act.”
During the press conference, Obama also announced that Johnson along with Secretary of State John F. Kerry will travel to Central America in July in an effort to enlist regional governments to reduce the number of children from those countries coming across the border from Mexico.
Obama is seeking more than $2 billion to respond to the flood of immigrants illegally entering the U.S. through the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas and ask for new powers to deal with returning immigrant children apprehended while traveling without their parents, a White House official said Saturday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi visited a Border Patrol facility in Brownsville that held unaccompanied children. More than 52,000 unaccompanied children, most from Central America, have been apprehended entering the U.S. illegally since October.
“The fact is these are children — children and families,” Pelosi said. “We have a moral responsibility to address this in a dignified way.”
Obama plans to make the requests of Congress in a letter to be sent Monday, the White House official said. Details of the emergency appropriation, including the exact amount and how it will be spent, will come after lawmakers return from their holiday recess on July 7, said the official, who was not authorized to speak by name and discussed the requests on condition of anonymity.
Obama will also ask that the Homeland Security Department be granted the authority to apply “fast track” procedures to the screening and deportation of all immigrant children traveling without their parents and that stiffer penalties be applied to those who smuggle children across the border, the official said. Obama’s requests were reported first by The New York Times.
In Brownsville, Pelosi said she holds little hope that Congress will pass comprehensive immigration reform this year but that politics should be set aside.
“A few days ago I would have been more optimistic about comprehensive immigration reform,” Pelosi said. “I thought that we had been finding a way because we have been very patient and respectful of (Speaker of the House John Boehner) trying to do it one way or another. I don’t think he gives us much reason to be hopeful now, but we never give up. There’s still the month of July.”
U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s surprise primary loss this month almost certainly doomed the chance for an immigration overhaul in the GOP-controlled House this year. Cantor, R-Va., had spoken in favor of citizenship for immigrants brought illegally to this country as youths. But he lost to a political novice who made immigration the race’s central issue, accusing Cantor of embracing “amnesty” and open borders.
This past week, a leading House supporter of policy changes said legislative efforts on the issue were dead. Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, who’s been one of the most bullish Democrats about the chances for action, said he had given up. Boehner’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Republicans have criticized Obama’s immigration policies, arguing they’ve left the impression that women and children from Central America will be allowed to stay in the United States. The administration has worked to send a clear message in recent weeks that new arrivals will be targeted for deportation. But immigrants arriving from those countries say they are fleeing pervasive gang violence and crushing poverty.
The Border Patrol in South Texas has been overwhelmed for several months by an influx of unaccompanied children and parents traveling with young children from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Unlike Mexican immigrants arrested after entering the U.S. illegally, those from Central America cannot be as easily returned to their countries.
The U.S. had only one family detention center in Pennsylvania, so most adults traveling with young children were released and told to check in with the local immigration office when they arrived at their destination. A new facility for families is being prepared in New Mexico.
Children who traveled alone, like those visited by Pelosi in Brownsville, are handled differently. By law, they must be transferred to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department within 72 hours of their arrest. From there, they are sent into a network of shelters until they can be reunited with family members while awaiting their day in immigration court.
Also Saturday, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said up to 2,000 unaccompanied immigrant children could be transferred from overcrowded facilities in McAllen, Texas, to his county by the end of next month. He said the plan is to have youngsters spend about three weeks in the North Texas county before hopefully being placed with relatives who are elsewhere in the U.S. The federal government will cover the costs, Jenkins said.
Meanwhile, Pelosi said immigrants’ cases should be handled on a case-by-case basis.
“We don’t want our good nature abused by those who would misrepresent what’s happening in the United States on the subject of immigration to affect how we deal with a refugee problem,” she said.
The situation is drawing attention and politicians from both parties to South Texas. While Pelosi was speaking in Brownsville, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, appeared with the first lady of Honduras, Ana Garcia de Hernandez, in McAllen.
Next week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte is scheduled to lead members of that panel to the Rio Grande Valley, and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, is scheduled to hold a field hearing Thursday in McAllen.
Pelosi said she came to Brownsville at the invitation of local U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela to find out what Congress can do to help.
(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)Newport Gwent Dragons' home ground, Rodney Parade, is owned by Newport RFC with the Dragons sharing the facility with fellow tenants Newport County
A deal that would see the Welsh Rugby Union become the majority stakeholders in Newport Gwent Dragons is expected to be completed this month.
Dragons announced last April they were seeking further investment but a sale of the region has not materialised.
The WRU owns a 50% stake in the Dragons, with Newport RFC owning 50%.
Talks are still ongoing between the WRU, the region and potential external investors but an agreement is close between the three parties.
Dragons had previously targeted 'independence' from the WRU - who were willing to sell their current 50% stake in the region - but further involvement from the Welsh Union is thought to be attractive to potential investors.
"Whether it's as governors or joint-owners of the Dragons, the union have been very close to this process all along," Dragons chief executive Stuart Davies told the BBC in January.
"They've been shoulder to shoulder with us on this."
The Dragons have finished as the bottom Welsh region in eight of the past 12 seasons and are currently tenth in the Pro12, above only Treviso and Zebre.Anushka Sharma is determined that her debut production, NH10, should be as ‘real’ as possible. So director Navdeep Singh decided to fly down French make-up artist, Romy Angevin, from Paris to sculpt her 'look'.“It’s a gritty, gory film but thanks to Romy, when you see Anushka lying in a pool of blood, her skin peeling off, you will never guess the amount of prosthetics involved,” says a source from the unit.The 26-year old actress-producer spent over four hours in make-up before several sequences. It was tedious because most of the shooting was done outdoors in summer and abrasive chemicals were used on her skin.The film revolves around a young couple, Meera and Arjun, who are attacked after a party in Gurgaon in the wee hours. “The action is not romanticized or over-the-top, but it will make you cringe,” adds the source.When prodded on the need to fly down a French artist, the director explains, “It’s a new-age thriller and the prosthetics helped to break stereotypes. Anushka is a star but in this film we did not want to glamourise her at all.The protagonist is a woman who is assaulted but she is spirited and fights back. We wanted the scratches, bruises and gashes she sustains to look convincing. That's why a specialist in make-up and design was brought in. Romy's experiences on stage and European films gives the film an world cinema look."The latest addition to Vancouver’s expanding cycling infrastructure is a bike repair station in the city’s newest, and yet to be named, park along the Yukon bike route at 17th Avenue.
The park, located in a leafy residential neighbourhood, officially opens Oct. 12, with events planned between 8 and 11:30 a.m., including live music, coffee and pastries. A bike expert from Our Community Bikes will also be on hand to provide basic repairs.
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The repair station — the first of its kind in a city park — can service two bikes at once. It features a bike pump with gauge, as well as tools such as screwdrivers, tire levers, a pedal wrench, cone wrenches and hex key set securely attached by retractable stainless steel cable.
“[The station is] great because it’s on the bike route and we’re trying to encourage active and recreational healthy living,” said park board chair Sarah Kirby-Yung.
The.15 hectare park was built on what was a residential lot that the city paid $1.64 million for in May of 2013 —specifically with the intention of turning it into a park.
“That’s common,” Kirby-Yung said. “Typically, land purchases are made through various amenity contributions and then they are designated as permanent park space. That’s ongoing on a regular basis.”
In this case, the city also closed Yukon Street between 16th and 17th to vehicle traffic, which allowed for the doubling of the park’s size.
A winding asphalt path through the park site is designated for cyclists. There’s also play equipment, benches, greenery and a creek in the park, which cost $600,000 to build.
The park board is unveiling one of its newest parks, located in a leafy residential neighbourhood at Yukon and 17th this week. It’s also looking for suggestions for the new park’s name. Photo Dan Toulgoet
Kirby-Yung said the city might see more bike repair stations in parks if this one proves popular.
“Possibly. Any time we have an opportunity to either add a new park or do a park redesign, we look at updating and providing enhanced features,” she said. “We’ll put them in and then we’ll gauge what the public response is. We’ll see what the usage is and how the public responds to it and then our staff we’d see if that’s appropriate to put in other locations.”
The park board, which is responsible for more than 230 parks, is also trying to name its 22 unnamed city parks, beginning with Empire Fields and Plateau Park. The board just finished a month-long consultation process to gather input on those two. About 100 names were suggested for Empire Fields and 70 for Plateau Park. The naming committee is reviewing suggestions and it will create a shortlist for park board commissioners to vote on in October.
The park board is now accepting suggestions for the new park at Yukon at 17th, as well as one at Main and 18th. Decisions on those names will be made this fall, while all the unnamed parks are expected to be named within the next 18 months.
Kirby-Yung, meanwhile, expects the new park at Yukon and 17th to be popular.
“It’s a really lovely little neighbourhood park. People love our destination parks in the city, but it’s important to have green space close to where people live,” she said. “So it does have some beautiful plantings, it has a miniature adventure playground, it’s got seating for people and nice garden beds, so I think it’s going to be a really nice addition to the neighbourhood.”
@naoibhWhen Usain Bolt defeated Justin Gatlin in the 2015 final of the men’s 100 metre World Championships there was a profound sense of relief, that the sporting moral compass had been righted, and in some respects that Bolt had saved Athletics. Gatlin’s return from a drugs ban was not welcomed in all quarters and the lingering suspicion of cheating in the sport was then heightened by the accusation that Russia had adopted a widespread doping policy in the 2012 Olympics.
Drugs in sport is not new and cycling also bears the scars of many years of systematic cheating that was rife in the sport. Guilty parties have generally served a ban and returned to the sport at some point later, with the exception being Lance Armstrong’s life ban.
The general intention of these actions was to gain an advantage – or if you are to believe the cycling peloton, simply stand toe to toe with others in the race who were also doping. That advantage could well then generate a financial benefit from winning, but the act of winning itself would still have to be achieved and in most cases the individual bore the brunt of any litigation.
This is what makes the spot-fixing bans issued to Mohammad Amir, Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif a slightly different story. With jail time and four years suspension from the game behind him, Amir has started his return to the game in fine style within domestic cricket. The youngest of the trio, Amir pleaded guilty of bowling no-balls at selected times in the Test series against England in 2010 and now, aged 23, is back on the scene.
But he is not an individual in an individual sport. He was a member of the Pakistan cricket team that, as Mohammad Hafeez has publicly opined, suffered hugely as a result of the actions of the three. Building integrity, developing respect and restoring confidence in Pakistan international cricket team has been a long journey since 2010. Amir will have a similar job to do to restore others faith in himself.
Should he have the chance at all? All sport is played competitively with rules tested to their limits often and bent considerably at times. In the case of drugs, those limits are swept aside in the pursuit of success. In this case those rules were ignored purely for personal financial gain within a team environment. However, Amir was just eighteen at the time, a young man starting out in the world game.
His five-year ban (reduced to four after co-operation with cricket’s anti-corruption team) was a strong statement of intent, especially contrasted with the bans handed out to the likes of Gatlin and others. In no way can he be considered in the same light as Armstrong whose life ban came on the back of a decade of manipulating and bullying people into silence. Everyone deserves a second chance and everyone makes mistakes. Amir made a big mistake and he deserves a shot at redemption.
However, how he is received in the game will be an interesting story to follow. Hafeez has stated that he does not want to play on the same side as Amir, certainly at domestic level. The Pakistan selectors will have a tricky conundrum to contemplate if and when Amir, or the others, press for international call-up.cover
Anthro-Adventures is Pathfinder compatible world setting designed to be accessible to children playing their first RPG. By using anthropomorphic races, whose cultures are based on famous Children's Literature, Anthro-Adventures creates a unique system that's perfect for family game night.
Don't think that Anthro-Adventures is just for kids though. It fits right into any Pathfinder campaign and offers new and exciting ways to craft an anthropomorphic setting in the vein of Redwall and other Anthro-Fantasy stories.
This kickstarter will provide the main source book, which will consist of the following:
180-200 pages of background, rules, and illustrations that create an immersive setting filled with conflict, intrigue, danger, and even a few laughs. this includes:
A short history of how Layna came into existence.
How this setting can be incorporated into your Pathfinder experience.
Twenty-one brand new playable races, with unique racial abilities, feats, and spells.
Character art for each race, and full page scene art for each kingdom
Stretch goals have added an adventure module for level three players called "A Tundra of Fun" that follows your group as they track and attempt to apprehend famous Penguin art thief "Bow-tie" Bill Pepperwiggle. (25+ pages with two new races, colored maps, full page illustrations and character art, unique monsters, NPCS, and enough adventure for several game sessions)
All physical copies of the main source book also include a PDF version.
First Look:
The working draft of the rules for the Canine Kingdom is free to download. While this is a draft and is subject to change after beta testing, you can get a good idea of what the final product will look/feel like. https://www.dropbox.com/s/yrij0bo05ptpj93/Canines.pdf?dl=0
An overview of the Seven Kingdoms of Layna:
The Alliance of Woodland Creatures: Made up primarily of nomadic forest dwellers and protectors of nature, the races of the woodland alliance hold many of Layna’s oldest secrets, and they’re not willing to share. (raccoon, Hedgehog, Rabbit)
Aviana: An isolationist nation off the southwestern coast, the birds of Aviana hold a great distrust for “walkers”, particularly those who wield firearms. They often attack unseen from the clouds and disappear again before enemies can respond. (Owl, Falcon, Swan)
Empire of Rodentia: Led by the inventive Guinea Pigs and experiment obsessed Rats, Rodentia boasts the most technology in Layna. They also endure the most accidents, something that keeps their rapidly growing population and advanced urban centers from taking over the world. (Rat, Guinea Pig, Mouse)
Ruminant Republic: The banking and trade center of Layna, The Ruminants and their allies enjoy unheard of prosperity. Unfortunately this wealth doesn’t always extend to everyone. While the royalty sits inside exquisite palaces, some of their starving people grow angry. (Goat, Cow, Wallaby)
The Feline Federation: A desert and savanna dwelling nation, the Cats, masters of the arcane arts, and the Lions, masters of axe to the face, are in a constant state of conflict over who is more destined to lead. This is the only thing that keeps them from taking over the rest of the world. (Cat, Lion, Leopard)
The Canine Kingdom: Content to sit behind their enormous stone walls and preach the word of the Big Red God, the Canines have never lost a battle on their own soil in their thousand year history. Supported by the Wolves’ Alpha squads, The Dog’s unmatched resilience, and the Foxes’ dedication to knowledge, the Canines are Layna’s immovable object. (Dog, Wolf, Fox)
The Herptile Hegemony is a nation of Swamp Barbarians dedicated to the pursuit of glory and military victories. They do this to honor their ancestors and their imaginary friends. (Bullfrog, Poison Dart Frog, Turtle)
As a bonus, orders over a certain amount will also receive a copy of "Reigning Cats and Dogs", the first Anthro-Adventures novel.
If you're thinking about introducing your kids to gaming, or you've just always had a desire to role-play a goat musketeer or a wallaby monk, then this is the game for you.
Add-Ons:
Add the following amounts to your pledge for extra copies:
Hardcover source book: add $50 per extra copy to your pledge.
Paperback source book: add $35 per extra copy to your pledge.
Paperback, Reigning Cats and Dogs: add $15 per extra copy to your pledge.
Coloring Book: add $5 per extra copy to your pledge.
Keep in mind that all order with physical copies of the book also receive a complete set of PDFs for all rewards. Nothing further is required
Stretch Goals Unlocked
Stretch Goals Unlocked
Stretch Goals
Artwork of Anthro-Adventures:
Layna Map
Monsters from A Tundra of Fun, level 3 adventure module.
Cat and Leopard of the Feline Federation
Fox and Wolf of the Canine Kingdom
Goat and Kangaroo of the Ruminant Republic
Guinea Pig and Mouse, Empire of Rodentia
Swan and Owl of Aviana
Bullfrog, Poison Dart Frog, and Turtle of the Herptile Hegemony
Rocklyn Slickfur, Polar Bear Ranger. (from A Tundra of Fun)
Canine Kingdom defends against a dragon.
Raccoon Wizard
For the coloring book:
Coloring book line art
Portrait Art/NPCS (added at $7500):
Sir Barkly Strongpaw, Shield of the Queen
Adventure Module Hooks:
Tundra of Fun: (level 3) A priceless work of art, the Mooing Lisa, has been stolen from the Ruminant Republic by the famed Penguin thief, Bow-tie Bill Pepperwiggle. Can you recover it from his frozen hideout before the Cow queen's birthday?
A Dog Dazed Knight: (level 4) As you travel home you find a confused Dog knight lying injured on the side of the road, with no memory of who he is. Can you uncover his identity and help him complete his important secret mission before it's too late?
Ways to follow this campaign:
http://www.tjlantz.com/anthro-adventures.html
https://twitter.com/happygnomebooks
https://www.facebook.com/authorT.J.Lantz/President Donald Trump met with lawmakers to discuss health care Friday. The Justice Department faces a Monday deadline to hand over any evidence related to the president's wiretapping allegation. Evan Vucci/AP
Today's the day.
The Trump administration faces a Monday deadline to back up the president's incendiary claim – offered without proof – that Trump Tower was wiretapped under President Barack Obama's orders during the 2016 election campaign.
Top lawmakers on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent a letter to the Justice Department last week, requesting the agency turn over any evidence that might support the accusation, which President Donald Trump made on Twitter on March 4.
Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, echoed the committee's call Sunday, telling CNN in an interview Sunday, "The president has one of two choices, either retract or provide the information that the American people deserve."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., took questions during a press conference Tuesday. Win McNamee/Getty Images
FBI Director James Comey reportedly asked the Justice Department to rebut Trump's claim hours after the president's string of tweets.
In an interview Monday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said she did not have "any evidence" to back up the president's claim.
"The answer is I don't have any evidence and I'm very happy that the House Intelligence Committee are investigating," Conway told Good Morning America.
The day before, in an interview published by The Record newspaper in New Jersey, Conway had suggested that the surveillance may be even broader, stating “you can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets – any number of ways" – including, she went on, “microwaves that turn into cameras," a line that has since drawn ridicule.
Conway the next morning insisted she was referring to "surveiling generally," adding "I have no evidence, but that's why there's an investigation in Congress.... Of course I don't have any evidence for those allegations."
The statements echoed comments by some top Republican lawmakers. House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a CBS interview aired Sunday that he had not seen anything to suggest that Obama had ordered that Trump Tower be wiretapped.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told reporters last week that the press was taking the president's words too literally.
"The president is a neophyte to politics," the chairman said. "He's been doing this a little over a year. I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally."
Nunes co-signed Monday's letter with ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif. It is part of a broader promised committee probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. A copy of the letter was apparently sent to FBI Director Comey.
"The letter requested certain specific pieces of evidence like FISA applications, if they exist, that would indicate surveillance was being conducted on Trump or his associates during the campaign," a congressional aide said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which grants warrants for monitoring foreign agents.
There is no specific time associated with Monday's deadline.The number of so-called "failure to act" lawsuits against the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) rose sharply in the first three months of 2016 compared to last year, according to a German newspaper report on Saturday.
The "Thüringer Allgemeine" noted that 3,271 such cases against the BAMF were pending in administrative courts at the end of March.
The numbers indicate a 40 percent increase in the first quarter of the year compared to the end of 2015, which saw a total of 2,299 cases. The BAMF recently released the data upon request from members of Germany's Left Party, according to the newspaper.
Almost one third of these cases (1,066) are registered in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia whereas 849 of the cases are located in Bayern.
Germany's bureaucratic asylum system has been working overtime since the country accepted 1.1 million refugees last year, and the number of applications has continued to rise in 2016. The clogged system has led to long wait times and left thousands of asylum-applicants stuck in limbo.
Such "failure to act" cases may be brought against the ministry when applications are not decided upon within a suitable time period.
The Left Party's spokeswoman for migration policy Sevim Dagdelen criticized the "inaction of the state" for the rising number of open asylum cases. She told the "Thüringer Allgemeine," that refugees require certainty about what will become of them and their cases.
rs/rc (AFP, dpa)Overall there's a 0.3pc fall between the amount of funding that Trump has requested for 2018 and the 2017 figures.
The largest cuts on cabinet departments are due to fall on State, Agriculture and Labor. Meanwhile, the Environment Protection Agency is set to lose 31.4 per cent of its funding in 2018.
These cuts make way for Trump to boost funding by nearly 10pc for defence - already by far the government's largest expenditure.
The largest single increase in funding is for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which handles "the military application of nuclear science".
An extra $54bn for the military
One of Donald Trump's key promises on the campaign trail centred around defence spending. He vowed to increase the amount the US spends on its military to increase America's standing on the world stage.
He has proposed a $54 billion increase to the defence budget, a 10pc increase compared with last year's funding.
During a meeting with state governors at the White House, Mr Trump described this increase as "historic", and pledged to "rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it".By the time the dust settles on this Wilf legal rigmarole, the Vikings may have already moved into their new home.
That was the message from a pair of lawyers that represent principal team owner Zygi Wilf, his brother Mark Wilf and their cousin Leonard Wilf, who were ordered Monday to pay $84.5 million in damages in a 21-year-old New Jersey real estate case. The resulting appeal process, attorney Peter Harvey said, will last between two and three years.
The franchise’s new, state-of-the-art, multipurpose replacement for the Metrodome is slated for completion by July 2016.
Article continues below...
“The stadium will be built and opening kickoff will have taken place long before this case is decided by the appellate division and, if necessary, the New Jersey Supreme Court,” Harvey told reporters during a conference call early Monday evening.
That’s the next step, then, in an ongoing and highly-publicized civil battle between the Wilfs and a pair of real estate partners? In early August, Judge Deanne Wilson found the trio had illegally withheld agreed-upon revenue from Ada Reichmann and Josef Halpern, who each claim partial ownership in a New Jersey housing development.
The judge’s findings sparked rampant speculation about the Vikings’ preparedness to finance their part of the $975 million stadium, wrought strict criticism from Minnesota governor Mark Dayton and prompted a thorough Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority review of the Wilfs’ fiscal health and the team’s plan to pay its allotted portion.
The authority released findings Sept. 13 that assured taxpayers the Vikings will, in fact, be able to fork out $477 million for construction and operation costs, and the ownership group’s attorneys reiterated that notion Monday.
“It’s just a non-issue,” Harvey said. “It never was an issue, frankly.”
With the team flying Monday to London for an overseas contest against Pittsburgh on Sunday, the Wilfs were notified of the judge’s ruling. But it could be years before they ever cut a check for the punitive and compensatory damages, accrued interest and plaintiff attorney fees (a figure that has yet to be calculated and added in) Wilson says they owe.
If their legal counsel has its way, they’ll never have to.
“We believe the appellate court will conclude the Wilfs are not liable to any wrongdoing and that the decision will be reversed,” attorney Shep Guryan said.
As the proceedings wound down last week, Wilson opted to not go through with an order mandating the Wilfs’ reveal publicly their net worth. She’d originally said they should before she made a final ruling, but knowledge the case will go to an appeals court convinced her to think twice — if the decision is overturned, information that was supposed to remain private will have been exposed.
As far as the stadium goes, any final sum drawn from the Wilfs’ pocketbooks isn’t expected to delay or hamper construction. According to Sports Business Daily, the team will borrow about $250 million from lead lenders Goldman Sachs, U.S. Bank and Bank of America — the same consortium the San Francisco 49ers used to finance their new venue.
The NFL also will lend Minnesota approximately $200 million, and the team hopes to generate substantial revenue via personal seat licenses. The city of Minneapolis owes $150 million for the project, while the state is on the hook for $348 million.
Meanwhile, negotiations between the team and the MSFA continue to progress, team president of public affairs and stadium development Lester Bagley said. The sides are working out the final details on the project’s use and development agreements, both of which must be signed before a groundbreaking can occur.
“I think the negotiations and discussions have been going very well,” Bagley said. “We’ve been working collaboratively with the stadium authority and are working hard to keep the project on track.”
Bagley declined to put a timeline on completion of the discussions, but MSFA spokeswoman Jennifer Hathaway told FOXSportsNorth.com in an email the authority expects to wrap up agreements by Friday. That’s also the MSFA’s next scheduled meeting and the first time it can vote to sign off on the integral accords.
The stadium timeline then calls for an early-November start date. The Metrodome will be torn down after this season, and the Vikings will call the University of Minnesota’s outdoor TCF Bank Stadium home for two years before moving into their new digs.
Follow Phil Ervin on TwitterPopular retailer Target this morning announced that the Apple Watch would begin arriving at some of its stores this week, with a plan to have the wearable device available at all of its United States retail locations by October 25. Customers who are interested in buying the device online on Target's website can do so beginning October 18. The move sees Target gearing up for the holiday season, calling Apple's wearable "one of the season’s hottest gift items."The retailer says it will carry a total of 20 |
, the secretary of health and human services and the Attorney General have done during Trump’s first 100 days.Scientists have long been frustrated with a lack of viable discoveries to prevent or thoroughly treat Alzheimer's disease. But a new genetic mutation may hold the key to preventing the development of Alzheimer's in the general population.
Please Read This: Potential Advance In Reversing Effects Of Alzheimer's
The Gene Mutation
Scientists have recently discovered a rare mutation in human DNA which may contribute to the prevention of Alzheimer's development. The mutation is found in a gene known as APP, and affects a part of genetic code with a single differentiation in one of its bases. Ordinarily, the gene contains the genetic information that forces proteins in the body to break down into smaller components.
One of these components is known as beta amyloid, a compound suspected of initiating early onset of Alzheimer's disease by building up in massive quantities in the brain. Other mutations of the APP gene have been discovered in the past, but most of them actually increase the quantities of beta amyloid,contributing to faster amyloid plaque buildup in the brain.
The most recently discovered mutation affects the gene by reversing this tendency. It is thought that this strain actually disrupts one of the enzymes responsible for breaking down protein, reducing the beta amyloid formation in the body by up to 40 percent. This hypothesis is further substantiated by research showing carriers of this mutation over the age of 85 are seven and a half times less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, than their ordinary-gene carrying counterparts.
The Importance Of The Study
Other mutations have been found to protect against the development of Alzheimer's disease, such as the previously studied APOE2 allele, which breaks down beta amyloids within and between cells.
But the new APP mutation is thought to have more significant effects, reducing the aggregation of beta amyloids to a much greater degree. The study also lends more evidence to the science of beta amyloids as the biggest indicator or cause of Alzheimer's disease.
Possibilities For Future Drug Development
Previous tests of experimental drugs have targeted the elimination of the buildup of beta amyloids in the brain, but the failure of these drugs has led to questioning as to whether targeting beta amyloids effectively prevents Alzheimer's.
New theories suggest that these types of drugs will always be ineffective, because they take action only after the damage has been done. A successfully developed treatment eliminating beta amyloid buildup before it occurs may effectively prevent Alzheimer's disease from ever occurring.
However, such a drug would be years away, and require further research and biological development, but the notion is promising in a field with few viable hopes for preventative treatment in decades.
The mutation of APP may be years away from leading to a useful pharmaceutical development, but with a 750% drop in Alzheimer's development among the population with the gene mutation, the potential future for the treatment is enormous.
0636Though things will undoubtedly continue change for the Florida Gators throughout the 2015 season, especially with players coming back from injury, the team released its fifth depth chart of the season ahead of Saturday’s game against the Ole Miss Rebels
The contest will be head coach Jim McElwain‘s fifth with the Gators, and it will all go down inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Florida, at 7 p.m. and air live on ESPN.
Here is Florida’s fifth official depth chart release.
OFFENSE
QB: 7 Will Grier OR 3 Treon Harris
RB: 21 Kelvin Taylor, 25 Jordan Scarlett OR 32 Jordan Cronkrite
TE: 83 Jake McGee, 80 C’yontai Lewis, 30 DeAndre Goolsby
WR: 11 Demarcus Robinson, 5 Ahmad Fulwood, 85 Chris Thompson
WR: 81 Antonio Callaway, 10 Valdez Showers, 18 C.J. Worton
WR: 4 Brandon Powell 89, Alvin Bailey
» Robinson was promoted back to first team receiver.
LT: 78 David Sharpe, 73 Martez Ivey
LG: 63 Trip Thurman, 52 Travaris Dorsey
C: 54 Cam Dillard, 64 Tyler Jordan
RG: 71 Antonio Riles, 77 Andrew Mike
RT: 75 Mason Halter, 74 Fred Johnson
DEFENSE
DE: 96 CeCe Jefferson, 17 Jordan Sherit
NT: 91 Joey Ivie, 93 Taven Bryan OR 54 Khairi Clark
DT: 90 Jonathan Bullard, 57 Caleb Brantley
RUSH: 94 Bryan Cox Jr., 14 Alex McCalister
MLB: 3 Antonio Morrison, 48 Anthony Harrell
WLB: 40 Jarrad Davis, 13 Daniel McMillian
» Bullard was moved from starting DE to starting DT, Jefferson elevated to starting DE, Brantley demoted behind Bullard.
CB: 1 Vernon Hargreaves III, 15 Deiondre Porter
CB: 6 Quincy Wilson, 31 Jalen Tabor
Nickel CB: 24 Brian Poole, 7 Duke Dawson
S: 42 Keanu Neal, 26 Marcell Harris
S: 20 Marcus Maye, 8 Nick Washington
» The OR designation was removed between Wilson and Tabor.
SPECIAL TEAMS
K: 98 Jorge Powell OR Austin Hardin
P: 19 Johnny Townsend, 16 Austin Hardin
H: 19 Johnny Townsend, 24 Case Harrison
LS: 41 Ryan Farr OR 47 Jonathan Haney
KR: 4 Brandon Powell, 81 Antonio Callaway
PR: 81 Antonio Callaway, 4 Brandon Powell
» An OR designation was added at kicker with Powell (who played Saturday) placed ahead of Hardin.Editor's note: Brian Stephens, a former U.S. Air Force pararescueman, is founder and president of Stephens Consulting Enterprises, which works with health care institutions. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- "Terrorist bombers were last night believed responsible for the Air India jumbo jet crash off of the Kerry coast in which 329 people died." -- Irish Independent, June 24, 1985.
The rubber seals on our dry suits squeezed our necks like boa constrictors. When I tried to follow Stan out of the helicopter door to jump into the cold, dark waters of the North Atlantic, there was a loud "chunk" as I was yanked backward by the gunner's safety strap, which I'd forgotten to unhook.
"Nice!" the flight engineer yelled as he shook his head. I handed him the belt and jumped.
In my training to become a U.S. Air Force Pararescueman (otherwise known as a 'PJ'), they taught us to time the waves when jumping from a helicopter, so you landed on the crest rather than in the trough. The difference could be 20 feet in heavy seas. Water has the hardness of concrete if you hit it with too much velocity. The pilots would typically try to get us down to 10 or 15 feet above the level of the sea.
I couldn't wait. I had to get out quickly or risk being separated from Stan.
When I hit, the force nearly ripped my fins off. The deep plunge into the 50-degree water took away my breath. I kicked hard to get to the surface. I breached with a closed-fist above my head. This signaled the crew in the 25-ton helicopter hovering over us that I was OK.
The rotors generated 100-mph winds as the helo departed and set up for the hoist pattern. The taste of salt and rolling swells enveloped me. The helicopter grew smaller, its beating cacophony replaced by a lonely silence. I swam to Stan. The embarrassed look I wore under my SCUBA mask disappeared mid-stroke when I saw her body.
The search for survivors
It was 29 years ago this week. I was a member of the U.S. Air Force's 67th ARRS Pararescue team. I was trained to find survivors anywhere on Earth and bring them back alive. Sometimes that wasn't possible. Instead you came back with the only thing you could -- closure for the victims' families. You brought home the bodies.
That was the case for Air India Flight 182 that Sunday in June 1985.
Stan Sanders called me that morning and told me to "get to work and get ready, there's a 747 down off the coast of Ireland."
Stan and I had been stationed together for three years. He was my good friend and mentor. We had both recently moved from Northern California to the Royal Air Force base at Woodbridge, in Suffolk County, England. My wife and I had returned from our honeymoon the night before. It was her first morning in England.
Watching the world's rescue efforts this year in the desperate search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 brought these 29-year-old memories to the surface for me. As we mark the anniversary of the Air India crash, we should remember those 329 individuals lost.
"So That Others May Live"
It was a six-hour helicopter ride from RAF Woodbridge to the crash site. I sat in the back and watched as the sun flickered through the rotors with a strobe light effect. The cabin vibrated, it was hot, and it smelled of hydraulic fluid and jet exhaust. We prepped our gear.
The atmosphere was hopeful. Surely with 329 people on board there would be survivors? I imagined life rafts full of survivors waving. This is why we became PJs. Our unit's motto was the definition of service: "So That Others May Live." With fewer than 500 team members, Pararescue is one of the smallest Special Forces units in the United States military. The selection process is considered one of the toughest. As an indicator of the high regard for Pararescuemen within the Special Operations community, the Navy's SEAL Team Six incorporates PJs for their unparalleled rescue expertise.
During the flight, we discussed deployment scenarios. We'd focus our efforts on the survivors first and then bodies. That hope disappeared when we reached the debris field. Our full crew of seven knew it instantly. Nobody survived this.
I leaned my forehead against the scratched oil stained Plexiglas window to get a better look. The debris scattered on the water looked as if someone had crushed the airplane into a bowl of soup. No single piece was larger than two seats floating together. I could feel the excitement we had for the mission give way to the recognition of the human tragedy we were witnessing. It was gut-wrenching.
The HH-53 flew across the debris field. On one pass I saw something brown and white floating on the surface. Was it a body? As we got closer the details became clear, puffy ears, dark eyes, arms outstretched — a teddy bear -- floating face up. We looked at each other.
"A body," someone said over the intercom. "Right side, close in." That's when Stan and I went into the water and swam to her.
She was a young Indian woman, in her early 20s. Her clothes were in shreds; a thin white blouse with a white camisole tank underneath. Her hair and the remains of the blouse undulated in the water. She floated face down between us. I touched her arm. No reaction. Her skin was cold and hard. I looked at her and wished she would turn her head and take a breath. It seemed very strange to me that she wasn't breathing.
The trauma she suffered became evident. I could feel fractures in her vertebrae grating as the swells lifted us up and set us back down. The three of us rose, and fell rhythmically, suspended in 6,000 feet of water. We were 90 miles off the coast of Kerry, Ireland.
Stan and I held her in the water between us. We waited for the helicopter to come back.
Disaster at 31,000 feet
I learned that injury patterns determined that the plane had broken up at altitude, tossing bodies into the sky at 31,000 feet while moving at 580 miles per hour. None of the 131 bodies recovered was wearing a life jacket. The victims had no time to prepare.
The helicopter flew directly over us and the crew lowered a steel-tubed litter wrapped in a chicken wire skin. It had flotation devices and carabiners attached to metal lift cables. We fumbled around, moving straps and opening the cables. It wasn't easy controlling the body in the swells as the helicopter created chaos around us.
After a few failed attempts, Stan had had enough. In one explosive movement, he pulled the body by the hair, face down, across the length of the litter. I cringed thinking how it would have felt. It was brutally effective. It was not the way we'd practiced hundreds of times with live volunteers. Stan had shown me in an instant what we had to do. We didn't have time to be gentle.
Stan later told me that he pulled the woman into the litter quickly for another reason; he had heard that the RAF crews had spotted sharks in the area.
As the cable tightened, it pulled the litter skyward. The pilots flew a long downwind pattern so that the flight engineers could get the body out of the litter and get the cable back down to us.
After 30 minutes in the freezing water our exposed faces were numb. At this temperature, even if anyone had survived the impact, it's doubtful they would have survived long enough to be rescued. I learned later that the first ships were onsite within two hours of the crash. The debris field was 4.5 miles long. Dozens of bodies were visible then. By the time we arrived eight hours later, the young woman in the flowing blouse was the only body we found.
The next day the wind and waves moved the debris field across 20 miles of ocean. Only one male infant's body was found that second day. His was the last body to be recovered.
When the bird returned for us, we attached ourselves to a mechanical seat and were hoisted up. We both reached up to the aircraft to clear ourselves from antennas that hung along the bottom of the HH-53. Inside, I pulled at the rubber seal around my neck. It was still strangling me, but at least I was dry — and I hadn't made any more mistakes while trying to get this young woman back to her family.
Once inside, I looked to my left and I saw her face for the first time. When the flight engineer had emptied the litter, they left her lying on the floor under the left window. She was inches from me. Stan reached across and turned the body over, face down. We got up off the floor and got back to work.
Saving families from lifetime of uncertainty
We spent the next hour recovering bodies from a container ship. Stan lowered onto the ship and began loading bodies, three at a time onto the litter. We were pushing the limits of the cable and hoist capacity with each load. The container ship didn't have body bags so they used clear plastic garbage bags. The images were surreal, 500-pound litter loads of broken bodies. Condensation and seawater caused faces to become fuzzy and dreamlike with barely recognizable features. Faces. Hands. Shredded clothing. The plastic diffused the angulated bodies. Funhouse mirrors in a sad carnival of death.
Onboard the helicopter, I struggled for a handhold in the plastic and lifted and carried each bag 35 feet back into the cabin. I thought of my youth, baling hay on my grandparents' farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin. Wet bales were always the heaviest. Dead weight. Some bags were incredibly difficult to carry. Others, I could carry with one hand.
The floor of the helicopter was now slick with blood, gore and seawater. It mixed with the hydraulic fluid that always leaked from the HH-53's aging hydraulic system. We recovered 16 more bodies from the ship and headed for the Cork Airport, which was a two-hour flight away.
The crew was standing with their backs to the forward bulkhead. Everyone was looking back at our silent passengers. It was getting dark. We'd been flying for eight hours with two more to go. I was smoked. I moved aft toward the bodies wrapped in plastic and I lay down on seats suspended from the cabin wall. I was completely surrounded by death.
I remember feeling drawn to them. I wanted them to know I wasn't afraid. I was there for them. They weren't alone, and soon we would have them back to their families. It's not the mission I thought it would be. I thought I'd be saving lives. Yet in a way, maybe I was. I was saving families from a lifetime of uncertainty, of not having to wonder, where in the deep Atlantic did their loved one rest?
Exhausted, I began to fall asleep. Rocked by the rotor head's vibrations. I noticed a plastic bag across the cabin from me, at eye level. It had a perfectly round hole in it the size of a quarter; a single woman's finger protruded. The finger was adorned with a ring and her fingernail was red. The ring and her manicure looked expensive. Maybe it was my exhaustion, but I reasoned that the finger through that hole wasn't a coincidence. I focused harder willing it to move. I watched for any sign of life in her plastic cocoon. I prayed for her to move. My eyes shifted across the dimming scene of faces and distorted bodies that played out behind the thin plastic walls in front of me. As I watched for life, I fell asleep amongst 17 of the 329 dead from Air India flight 182.
Terrorist fears and high security
As we taxied in to Cork Airport I could see armored personnel carriers with troops manning machine guns, power carts with bright lights, lots of uniformed people and multiple rescue aircraft from the RAF and the USAF taxiing, parking and shutting down. Ambulances everywhere. It reminded me of a scene from the Ridley Scott film "Blade Runner": futuristic, somber, and dangerous. Weapons everywhere. It's important to remember why the armed precautions were being taken.
Expecting that this may have been a terrorist act, the security levels were high. Reading through the newspaper articles, I was reminded of the historical context. Another 747 had been bombed that same day, in Tokyo. Luckily the bomb went off on the ground and the loss of life was much less.
The Buckingham Palace staff had recently been evacuated when an IRA bomb was found nearby. Forty-one Americans were being held hostage in Beirut after being hijacked. It's easy to look back and see why the people manning those weapons looked very serious.
We parked, and after nearly 11 hours of flight, shut down. We were met by groups of Irish military and civilian medical teams to help us move the bodies.
Each body was gently moved from the helicopter onto a litter, and a green blanket was placed over them. The blankets hid the plastic distortions and the shapes became human again. The attendants smoothed the blankets and carefully carried them off into the night. The people took the bodies and treated them as if they were our family members. We never said a word.
After a few days, I was able to make it back home, and while lying in bed with my arm draped across my wife's warm back, I thought of holding the cold, broken body of the young woman in the North Atlantic. She was about the same height and age as my wife. I quietly wept for her but also felt relieved that she did not remain long in that lonely place. We brought her home.
Canada led investigation
Canada, as the originating country for Flight 182, had jurisdiction over the investigation. It was believed to be a Sikh militant group's retribution bombing for an earlier Indian Army anti-terrorist operation. Hindus were being targeted on Flight 182 and unbelievably on another flight that same day in Narita, Japan. Luckily that explosion occurred after the plane had landed 15 minutes early just as the luggage and passengers were being off-loaded.
Two baggage handlers died in the Narita explosion that could have downed the aircraft killing hundreds more. Canada spent 20 years and millions of dollars seeking justice. However, only one person ever served a sentence for these 331 deaths. Those sentences included 15 years for two counts of manslaughter and building the bombs used in both attacks. In 2003, an additional nine years were added for perjury during trial testimony where two other suspects were eventually acquitted.
In the presiding justice's final conclusion of the acquittal trial he states, "I began by describing the horrific nature of these cruel acts of terrorism, acts that cry out for Justice...". He further stated that the police and the Crown did not meet the requisite standard of proof "despite the best and most earnest efforts".
As an eyewitness to the events that day, I can say with absolute certainty that justice was not served.
29 years later
I've retired from the Air Force but often think about the work we did during the Air India incident. As I reread the articles I collected, I discovered that one RAF crew had recovered a doll, initially thinking it was a body. It made me regret that we hadn't recovered the teddy bear as a reminder of the child that it belonged to. I remember catching sight of the bear floating underneath the helicopter, right before jumping. Maybe that, not the neck seal, was the distraction that made me forget to undo the gunner's belt.
Now, 29 years later, I type, "Air India Flight 182 Teddy bear" into an Internet search engine. I find an article stating that in addition to the doll recovered by the RAF, there was also a "bedraggled Teddy Bear" pulled from the sea. I smiled, not fully realizing until that moment, the importance of closure. I hope the search for the Malaysian flight continues until those families have theirs. We all need to know how the story ends.
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Join us on Facebook.com/CNNOpinion.It’s that time of year again. Girl Scouts everywhere are beginning to sell their famous cookies. And while you certainly should support their entrepreneurial ventures, you should also be thinking about how you can take the cookies to the next level. Because nothing makes an already fabulous cookie taste better than an even more fabulous glass of wine. With 12 different flavor profiles to choose from this year, we’re offering up 12 different pairing suggestions.
Next to the holiday season, Girl Scout Cookie season is my favorite time of year. And, thankfully, there are 12 different flavor profiles available now.
So what does a wine lover do with all those cookies staring at her? She invites her girlfriend over, who happens to be an uber wine expert, so they can get to pairing.
Now I am pretty indiscriminating. Good wine and good cookies go together no matter what. But Jessica Norris, wine director at New York City's Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steakhouse and one of Wine Enthusiast's Top 40 under 40 Tastemakers, insisted we take it up a notch.
So with cookies and wine in hand, we are pleased to present the ultimate Girl Scout Cookie and Wine Pairings Guide:
Thin Mints® are my all-time favorite Girl Scout cookie. These round, mint-flavored cookies with a chocolate coating scream for a good Brunello and since the 2010's are awesome and just hitting the shelves, we figured why not?
Brunello recommendations:
Caramel deLites® and Samoas® are the iconic caramel and toasted coconut-covered cookies that will taste even better (if you can imagine that) with an aged Rioja. Norris tells us she keeps a stash of these cookies in her freezer – for emergencies, of course.
Rioja recommendations:
Peanut Butter Patties® and Tagalongs® are coated in chocolate and peanut butter and have a big taste, which means they need a big wine. Go get an Amarone.
Amarone recommendations:
Trefoils® are shortbread cookies that will go great with an off-dry German Riesling. Clean and simple.
German Riesling recommendations:
Do-Si-Dos® are oatmeal peanut butter sandwiches that pair exceptionally well with a big California Zinfandel. The combo will taste like your favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
California Zinfandel recommendations:
Cranberry Citrus Crisps have a zesty citrus flavor that made us reach straight for a complementary New Zealand Pinot Noir.
New Zealand Pinot Noir recommendations:
Lemonades™ are lemon-icing-topped shortbread cookies. Norris got adventurous here suggesting an Italian Roero Arneis. Arneis is a white wine grape that originated in Piedmont, Italy and is most commonly found in the hills of the Roero, which is northwest of Alba. Yum.
Roero Arneis recommendations:
Rah-Rah Raisins™ are oatmeal cookies with raisins and Greek yogurt-flavored chunks that need a heavily merlot based wine like a left bank Bordeaux.
Left Bank Bordeaux recommendations:
Savannah Smiles™ are lemon-flavored cookies dusted with powdered sugar. Pair them with a Sancerre and you will have a match made in heaven.
Sancerre recommendations:
Thanks-A-Lot™ cookies are made of shortbread with fudge on the bottom. “Try a Bandol Rouge," says Norris. Bandol is an appellation in Provence, in south-eastern France. Bandol's red wines are at least 50% Mourvedre, which is a spicy grape, so it'll work great with the chocolate.
Bandol recommendations:
Toffee-tastic™ cookies are buttery with toffee bits. While the toffee alone screams for a tawny port, accompanied with the cookie, a Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a red blend from southern Rhone valley, would be a better choice.
Chateauneuf-du-Pape recommendations:
Trios are peanut butter oatmeal cookie chocolate chip cookies, which also happen to be gluten free. Pick a Washington State Syrah because the dark berry in the Syrah will work great with the peanut butter and chocolate chips.
Washington State Syrah recommendations:
So that's our list. No doubt yours will be different. But let us know — then we can eat more cookies and taste more wines.What is it that keeps some people on the white left in denial?
This election was the siren’s song of hate, and white supremacy Hating that a black man and his family dared soil the lily white White House. Hating that a woman dared to follow in his footsteps.
Have you ever bothered to listen to the clarion call of Trump and Company who are vilely and openly antisemitic? Don’t you know the Klan hates Jews?
This shit isn’t about the economic insecurity of the poor white workers. Hell — Trump voters have it pretty damned good from where I sit on the economic ladder.
Hat tip to ExpatGirl
x All due caveats about exit polls, but this is not looking like a revolt of the jobless. It's about identity: race, nationality, gender pic.twitter.com/5G4bFe3ixl â Dana Goldstein (@DanaGoldstein) November 9, 2016
Pleas go take a long browse over to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
What America did you grow up in? I lived through the frigging persecution of my parents communist and socialist friends and comrades — most of whom were non-religious Jews. I watched my dad stand up to the Klan. I suffered through COINTELPRO. I am lucky to be alive, and I know it. A whole lot of folks aren’t.
This movement of ugly angry white people and their deluded not-white lackeys should be a wake up call to you all.
You can keep on posting diary after diary on how this loss is Hillary’s fault, Obama’s fault, Markos’ fault, black people’s fault, latinos fault — but in the end it ain’t gonna change things.
You can keep fantasizing about Bernie woulda... coulda.
Nothing will change till the white left decides to embrace anti-racism and anti-misogyny.
Got a message for you.
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
It does flow strongly here.
Listen to Jay Smooth.These days, it seems that regulation for ICOs and token sales is popping up everywhere. The SEC has already famously ruled on the DAO tokens, and both China and Korea have banned ICOs for the foreseeable future. Even the Swiss are starting to get cautious. It may well be that the ‘wild west’ days of the ICO are over.
However, some ICOs are seeking new ways to work around regulations in different countries, both regulations that deal with ICOs and other regulations dealing with distributed businesses. Below is a summary of three attempts to overcome regulation in a legal way, and how they might fare.
Divide and conquer
One option to dodge the regulatory climate is to divide the tokens into ‘security’ type tokens and ‘utility’ type tokens. The goal of this work-around is to allow for investment without falling afoul of the SEC.
The key distinction between the two coins is the dividend payout. In the case of DCorp, for example, the non-security tokens will hold voting rights on the platform, but the security tokens will receive dividends. This framework allows the company to still issue tokens and receive investments from US investors, while at the same time, protecting themselves from SEC regulatory oversight.
Will it work? It seems that by dividing the token, the move may well protect DCorp from SEC oversight. Dividing the tokens means that there are, in fact, two instruments of investment rather than one, and only one of the two will fall within the securities definitions stipulated by the Howey test.
Buying your freedom
Another option that some companies are considering is to simply buyout another entity with the necessary regulatory compliance. By buying the company and transferring the necessary rights or legal controls, the parent company can adopt the business model of the child corporation and dodge regulation.
One example of this work-around is Stox, a prediction marketplace where token holders can predict the outcome of any number of events by betting their STX. The company recently announced the buyout of Commologic, a non-Blockchain technology firm that has existing gambling licenses.
Stox hopes that the buyout will allow them to actively use these licenses in the UK and Malta, where they had been previously obtained. Stox recently said:
“Today Stox became the first regulated ICO prediction platform when it announced its first acquisition of a company with a gambling license, CommoLogic… Through the acquisition, Stox will acquire three gambling licenses from CommoLogic: A software license in the UK., an operating license also in the UK.and a Class 4 (B2B) license in Malta.”
Will it work? It seems that it well work, since the Stox distributed platform is close enough to the CommoLogic platform that it can potentially continue on within the same framework and under the same license regimes.
SAFT
Another recent work-around is based on what is called the SAFT agreement. SAFT stands for Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, which essentially limits participants in ICOs to ‘accredited’ or ‘sophisticated’ investors, defined as those with an income of at least $200,000 or net assets above $1 mln.
These investors are, by and large, considered to be above the need for regulation because of their level of financial sophistication. In other words, they should know enough to not invest in junk. The agreement is modeled after SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) which limits participants in investments to those who are sophisticated and promises them future equity in companies. Suleyman Duyar of SaftLaunch said:
“Investors in Blockchain protocol tokens have high demand for a regulated method of participating in token sales. The SAFT provides a a framework which offers answers to many questions surrounding token sales or ICOs. Issuers can use platforms like ours to communicate with our user base and onboard new accredited investors.”
Will it work? The SAFT agreement is considered to be the best overall work-around by some, since it already has a counterpart in the VC world with SAFE, and would likely produce the best and safest results for ICOs within the US regulatory climate. Investors would be accredited by an outside company, which increases the regulatory comfort for the SEC and protects small-scale investors from larger fraudulent schemes.
While regulations continue to abound, these sorts of work-around plans will continue to flourish as well.COLUMBUS, OHIO -- The Columbus Blue Jackets have placed left wing Markus Hannikainen on Injured Reserve, club General Manager Jarmo Kekalainen announced today. He is expected to be sidelined for two months after suffering a shoulder injury during Saturday’s game at the St. Louis Blues.
Hannikainen, 22, recorded two hits while logging 6:15 of ice time in his NHL debut prior to leaving the contest against the Blues. He has tallied five goals and six assists for 11 points with six penalty minutes and a +2 plus/minus rating in 17 games with Cleveland’s Lake Erie Monsters, Columbus’ American Hockey League affiliate, in his first professional season in North America.
The Helsinki, Finland native registered 19-27-46, 51 penalty minutes and a +22 plus/minus rating in 60 games with JYP in his first full season in Liiga, Finland’s top professional league, in 2014-15. He finished second on JYP in goals, third in assists and points and was among Liiga’s leaders in goals (fourth-T), assists (10th-T), points (eighth), plus/minus (first) and games played (first-T). Signed by Columbus to a two-year, entry level contract on April 20, 2015, Hannikainen recorded 22-31-53 with 67 penalty minutes and a +26 plus/minus rating in 117 career Liiga games with Jokerit, HPK and JYP.
The Blue Jackets return to action on Tuesday when they visit the Montreal Canadiens. Game time from the Bell Centre is 7:30 p.m. ET. Live coverage on FOX Sports Ohio begins with the Blue Jackets Live pre-game show at 7 p.m. The game will also be broadcast live on the Scioto Downs Blue Jackets Radio Network, including WWCD 102.5 FM, and online at BlueJackets.com.(AP/ABC7) - A man accused of shooting a security guard inside the downtown Washington headquarters of a conservative Christian lobbying group pleaded guilty Wednesday in connection with the shooting.
Floyd Corkins pleaded guilty to one federal count of crossing state lines with guns and ammunition. He also pleaded guilty to one count of intent to kill while armed and one count of committing an act of terrorism with the intent to kill.
Those last two counts are District charges.
He is scheduled to be sentenced on April 29.
Corkins was charged in August with opening fire inside the lobby of the Family Research Council building. A security guard was wounded but managed to wrestle away the gun. No one else was hurt.
Prosecutors say Corkins, who had been volunteering at a center for gay, lesbian and transgender people, was carrying ammunition and Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his bag. Chick-fil-A was making headlines at the time because of its president's stated opposition to gay marriage.
Corkins intended to smear the sandwiches in the faces of his victims to make a statement about gay rights opponents, he acknowledged during a hearing Wednesday.
According to the plea agreement, he told FBI agents who interviewed him after the shooting that he wanted to use the sandwiches to "make a statement against the people who work in that building... and with their stance against gay rights and Chick-fil-A."
He was tackled during the shooting by an FRC employee, Leo Johnson, who was shout in the arm during the incident.
“Were it not for the heroic guard who tackled Floyd Corkins, he could have succeeded in perpetrating a mass killing spree in the nation’s capital,” said U.S. Attorney Ron Machen. “This case highlights the dangers of access to high-capacity magazines that allow killers to inflict carnage on a mass scale in the blink of an eye. Today’s guilty plea makes clear that using violence to terrorize political opponents will not be tolerated.”
Corkins acknowledged as part of his plea agreement that he had taken a number of steps to plan the shooting. He bought the pistol the week before and practiced firing it.
He also visited the headquarters of the Family Research Council, and he purchased the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches the day before the shooting. The plea agreement said Corkins was filmed picking out the gun by a French television crew doing a piece on the ease with which firearms can be purchased in the United States.
Corkins also acknowledged that he considered making a bomb but didn't have the patience to do it. In his pants pocket, police found a handwritten list of groups that also oppose gay marriage. Lawyers did not include the list of organizations in the plea agreement.
Corkins pleaded guilty to three charges: interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition, assault with intent to kill while armed and act of terrorism while armed, a charge based on the shooting being intended to intimidate anyone who is associated with or supports the Family Research Council and other organizations that oppose gay marriage.
Sentencing guidelines recommend a maximum of ten years on the first count and up to 15 years on the two other counts. The judge in the case, Richard W. Roberts, set sentencing for April 29.
In a statement released after Corkins' plea, the head of the Family Research Council blamed the shooting in part on the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has labeled his organization a hate group.
In his plea agreement, Corkins acknowledged he identified the Council as "an anti-gay organization" by visiting Southern Poverty's website. The head of the Council, Tony Perkins, called on the group to stop labeling his organization and others hate groups because of their stance on gay issues. A spokeswoman for the Alabama-based Law Center did not immediately return a telephone message.
It came out in court Wednesday that last August France 2, the French television channel, videotaped Corkins at the Blue Ridge Arsenal in Chantilly buying the gun he used six days later to try to shoot his way into the Family Research Council building.
"This is what I got.” Corkins tells the television crew. “I guess it's a basic gun for starting out and what not. 229 and I have the 9 mm extension on it, so. I don't know too much about it, but yeah.”
At the Family Research Council Wednesday, staff were praising Johnson, who is back at work and denouncing a liberal group that labeled them antigay.
“He targeted us because we had been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which we think is very reckless,” he says.Millions of giant spiders are set to invade UK homes, experts warned this week.
The warm autumn weather has provided bounteous food supplies for spiders, in the form of flies and bugs. And as the mating season arrives, many will wander into people's homes in search of a partner.
Professor Adam Hart, an entomologist at the University of Gloucestershire, explains: " |
Jared Paventi (@jaredpaventi) November 22, 2014
The Chain Challenge was my gimmick to fundraise for Walk To End Alzheimer’s. It was actually my friend Brian’s idea. He thought that if I could raise a certain amount of money, in this case $1,500, that I should endure a meal at one of the mediocre chain restaurants that attract flocks of people for their mediocre fare and mediocre service. I raised $1,800. Now, we weren’t talking about Bonefish Grill, Carrabba’s, The Cheesecake Factory or P.F. Chang’s. No, I was looking for the mid-range chain: Olive Garden, Outback, or Red Lobster. The restaurant that regular families choose to spend money at over perfectly good private establishments in their city. I don’t mean to demonize chains, as they do provide dining options and jobs to an area. And, let’s face it, not everyone cherishes the dining experience in the same was I do. Some people want to just eat and leave. And more power to them. It’s just not my thing.
***
The @olivegarden house wine (Sangiovese) is the vino equiv of Bud Light. — Jared Paventi (@jaredpaventi) November 22, 2014
As per Olive Garden tradition, Natalie arrived at our table for introductions with a bottle of wine in hand. Prior to her arrival, I was offered a deal. The arrangement had me eating a four-course meal — appetizer, soup/salad, entree, dessert — but Brian and his wife Jen said that I could swap dessert out if I drank the house wine. The Rocca delle Macie SaSyr is a 60/40 blend of Sangiovese and Syrah. It had all the character of Bud Light. No nose, a thin body, no sweetness, no acidity, no fruit, and no legs. Upon tasting it, I made a cringe face. Natalie was surprised when, after sampling and retching, I ordered a 9 oz. pour. The Wife and Jen each ordered a glass of riesling. Brian ordered a short Blue Moon draught, the best option of the non-bottled beers. When Natalie returned with a tall glass, she realized that the bar had screwed up. Rather than leave the glass and letting the error wash, she took it back to the bar for a new drink. Brian was left in the arid wasteland of being drinkless.
***
Should @olivegarden breadsticks clank when they hit the plate? #chainchallenge — Jared Paventi (@jaredpaventi) November 22, 2014
There has been much ado about nothing with the Olive Garden breadsticks. These soft, chewy, butter-slathered sticks are served in their plastic faux-wicker basket as an all-you-can-eat courtesy and guilty pleasure. Earlier in 2014, an investor report admonished Olive Garden for giving away too many breadsticks to diners, deeming them as a needless expense to the restaurant and demanding that the restaurant cutback on the offerings. We went through three baskets of breadsticks, though not necessarily because of their typically addictive nature. It seemed as half of every order was overcooked, leaving three of every five-piece order rock hard. Jen, as she attempted to set her breadstick down, actually made it clank against the green-rimmed stoneware plate. The noise drew a laugh, and then we realized that nearly every breadstick in the order was more stick than bread.
Our opening salvo was the soup and salad course. Each entree at the restaurant comes with the promise of unlimited servings of each. Brian and I each ordered the pasta e fagioli, a muddled blend of tomato and beef stock, mixed with pasta, beans and ground beef. Previously, this soup had been without meat, so the presence of beef confused me. Pasta e fagioli is a largely meatless dish, save for pancetta or bacon that may be used to start the base. Natalie delivered a massive bowl of salad for the women, which would have been fine had the wives planned to both eat salad. The Wife was going for the famously bottomless salad bowl, while Jen had ordered the chicken and gnocchi soup. Natalie went in search of the missing soup. It turned out that the kitchen, apparently unable to keep up with the demand from the nearly full restaurant, was unable to put ladle to bowl. Jen’s soup came out nearly 10 minutes after my appetizer arrived.
***
Angotti’s, Asti Caffe, Francesca’s Cucina, Frankie’s Piccolo Bistro, Pascale’s, Pastabilities, Joey’s, Attilio’s, Basil Leaf, Nestico’s, Rico’s, and Santangelo’s. There, I’ve named 12 Italian restaurants in Syracuse that are owned by individuals or families and each offer their own take on Italian cuisine. A couple of them are good, a couple of them are great, and all of them makeup the fabric of city with a strong Italian-American heritage.
***
And while we’re at it, you can get a really good Italian meal at the Pomodoro and Benucci’s restaurants in the Rochester area. And, if you’re in Buffalo, you have Chef’s. There are probably other, maybe even better, spots in Western New York. What I’m saying is that people have options.
***
Oh, and there’s Lombardo’s in Albany.
***
The lasagna fritta was described by Brian and Jen as the most offensive thing they could think to order for me that wasn’t seafood related. Prepared like fried mozzarella, two pasta squares were stuffed with mozzarella and ricotta, breaded and fried. They were presented with a light coating of marinara sauce over a layer of alfredo sauce. They were rich and flavorless. I’m not sure how one can put so many flavors together on one plate and forget to add flavor, yet here we were. The Wife and Brian planned to share an order of bruschetta. When the fritta arrived, the food server brought out a bowl of steaming hot mozzarella. It turns out we were delivered the smoked mozzarella fonduta. Natalie took this away and went on another journey, searching for the bruschetta.
***
The service is horrendous tonite at the @olivegarden and we think it’s so apropos. #chainchallenge #wheresthatappetizer — Jared Paventi (@jaredpaventi) November 22, 2014
A minute or two after Natalie walked away, another food server arrived with entrees. As Natalie came by, we told her to call off the search party on the bruschetta. Natalie returned about 10 minutes after the entrees were served, bruschetta in hand. She apologized and offered the appetizer for free, courtesy of her manager. It languished on the table.
***
First official heavy sigh from @jaredpaventi and he hasn’t even touched his lasagna yet. #chainchallenge — Brian Moritz (@bpmoritz) November 22, 2014
The current Olive Garden promotion revolves around its Tours of Italy. Each is a trio of Italian dishes inspired by Northern and Southern Italian cuisine. Brian chose the classic tour for me. The presentation of fettuccine alfredo, chicken parmigiana and lasagna filled my platter in the way that I remember from my high school and college days, when we were broke enough to consider the Olive Garden an attainable, nice evening out. I just don’t remember the Tour of Italy being so below average. For instance, I did not realize that one could burn fettuccine, but there were brown, crunchy spots in one region of the fettuccine. The rest of pasta was limp leading me to believe that my platter took a lengthy vacation under a heat lamp and maybe my pasta was too close to the heating element. This also explains the cheese situation on the chicken parmigiana and lasagna. The mozzarella looked lifeless and dry, as if it had been cooked hours ago and held for too long in a heated area. Cheese had pulled away from the edges and the sauce underneath the cheese rendered the chicken cutlet breading soggy.
While the chicken was average at best, the lasagna was barely edible. It is pictured on the Olive Garden website as proud and standing tall, and described as “prepared fresh daily with layers of pasta, Italian cheeses and our homemade meat sauce.” It was depressing; structurally flat and ripe with a phony flavor. An overpowering Italian sausage flavor of oregano and fennel drowned everything else out. I took two bites and decided that I couldn’t finish it. It just wasn’t any good.
“I’m going to leave the lasagna. Yes I’m sure.” #chainchallenge — Jared Paventi (@jaredpaventi) November 22, 2014
***
(For those who don’t know what Pittsburgh style is.) It appeared as if Brian had the only tolerable entree at the table. While we joked about the parmesan drizzle, he described his primavera lasagna as average. Jen ordered the steak gorgonzola alfredo. In theory, four steak medallion were to be presented with gorgonzola cheese over fettuccine alfredo. In practice, Jen received four pieces of undercooked beef — she requested medium well — over a bowl of pasta with a scant serving of creamy alfredo sauce. And, even though she asked that sun-dried tomatoes be withheld, she spent part of the time picking out the offenders that snuck in.
The Wife wanted a bowl of pasta with marinara and the best she could get her hands on was the Cucina Mia section of the menu where you could choose your pasta and sauce. She opted for the giant ravioli with five-cheese marinara. We gave up on guessing what cheeses were involved — I guessed asiago, parmesan, and romano before giving up; turns out it is mozzarella, parmesan, romano, ricotta and fontina — because staring too long at the sauce made us think about our daughters. During their infant days, we would spoonfeed them squash or carrots, only to have them spit it back up on their bib. The Wife’s pasta sauce had the same shade and consistency. Missy ate about one-third of her entree before forfeiting.
***
So, here’s the ultimate problem with the Olive Garden: there’s no value. It would be one thing if the food was good, or if the food was reasonably priced. I could give it a pass if the recipe developers made even the slightest attempt at serving a nutritionally-rich meal (my Tour of Italy had 1,500 calories, 93 grams of fat, 47 grams of saturated fat, 3 grams of trans fat, and 3,210 mg of sodium).
They do none of that. Our pre-tip bill was $113. Our average entree cost was $15. Sure, I had a big plate of whatever, but even Missy’s bowl of vomit pasta was $11.99, on par with a bowl of penne vodka from Asti Caffe.
The Tour of Italy weighed in at $17.99. For $17.90, I could have sat at Angotti’s and ordered a full-size chicken parmigiana with a side of pasta and a full-sized lasagna. And, there would have been so much food that I would have brought at least one whole entree’s worth home.
So, what’s my problem with restaurants like Olive Garden? They are a reflection of who we are as a people. We should want more for our money. We should demand higher quality food. We should expect our $113 plus tip gets us consistent service and better quality from the kitchen. But, we don’t. We settle. We settle for warmed over chicken parmigiana made days before. We sit there and take undercooked steak. We watch as the server discards a 20 oz. beer and orders a 16 oz. because of a mistake.
We settle because driving downtown to a quality family-owned restaurant is too hard or because we believe the neighborhood is unsafe. Instead, we go to the suburban outpost with plentiful parking and burned pasta.
We have been deluded into the belief that mediocre is not only good, but it’s the best we can do.
That is the crime of Olive Garden.
***
Natalie did nothing (or very little) wrong, and there was nothing she could do to make the evening better. She was the perfect ambassador of the Olive Garden in every way that I teach my staff to represent our brand. We tipped 20 percent because how could we do lower? The only person to get hurt in that instance is Natalie because, at the end of the night, she takes our table’s $22 tip and tips out the hostesses, bar staff, runners, and bus team. Our 20 percent shrinks to about 15 percent (her taxable rate) by the time she ends the night. It’s not her fault that the kitchen was inept. She was not the one who was incapable of reading the call slip for Brian’s beer. Tipping her at 20 percent is the only thing that I would do over again in that scenario.
Because it’s the frontline person, the Natalie’s of the restaurant industry, who get hurt in these instances. She makes $3 an hour before gratuities and I could not justifiably punish her for the sins of her employer. So, when I think about what she said to me as we ordered — “It sounds like you lost a good bet. Actually, I think you won.” — I have to disagree.
No Natalie, we all lose.
Olive Garden is located at 3147 Erie Blvd. E. in Syracuse between Thompson Road and Bridge Street. Dinner for four, pre-tip, was $113.The company behind gaming platform Steam, Valve, is recruiting gamers to crack down on fake or bad games.
YouTuber John Bain, or TotalBiscuit, says the firm wants to try to prove that the Steam store "isn't infested with terrible titles".
A new Explorer programme will then highlight games which "probably deserve more exposure than they're getting".
TotalBiscuit uploaded an hour-long video after being invited to the Valve Corporation headquarters in America.
Warning: Third party content might contain ads
If a bad game starts to get a lot of attention in the Steam store, and a user questions why they're being shown that game, Valve says it wants to be able to deal with it by showing the data it's collected.
This includes showing how many visits the game has had and where the visits come from, like video reviews and Reddit posts.
TotalBiscuit calls it a "bit of a crowdsourcing system".
But Valve also wants to discover hidden gems that get buried by allowing users to become explorers.
Users that opt in will be shown a list of games that failed to reach a level of exposure after being released.
They'll then test them and assess their game play.
TotalBiscuit said that Valve "haven't determined exactly what to do with the assessments" but are hoping that it can use them to kill off bad games.
Valve is also taking measures to stop the profitability of "fake games".
It's launched Steam Direct, which is "intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline" by making the process similar to that of a bank account, using a structure that includes tax forms, making it harder for anyone to submit a game to the store.
The previous system saw developers courting users to make their game popular.
Valve and Steam haven't released any information about the updates on the site.
Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeatTomorrow is Bellator's PPV debut, and this post covers today's weigh-ins, which take place at Landers Center in Southaven, Mississippi. Headlining the show is a light heavyweight tournament final between Quinton Jackson and Muhammed Lawal, who were bumped to the top after Eddie Alvarez pulled out of the Michael Chandler trilogy with an injury. Chandler now fights Will Brooks in the co-main for the interim lightweight belt.
There are 14 (!) fights on this card so buckle up for a long night of Bellator action.
Main Card (PPV, 10 PM ET)
Quinton Jackson (205.9) vs. Muhammed Lawal (205.6)
Michael Chandler (154.9) vs. Will Brooks (154.2)
Tito Ortiz (205.5) vs. Alexander Shlemenko (201.9)
Alexander Volkov (236.1) vs. Blagoi Ivanov (249.5)
Michael Page (170.5) vs. Ricky Rainey (170.1)
Preliminary Card (Spike, 8 PM ET)
Cheick Kongo (235) vs. Eric Smith (253.8)
Shahbulat Shamhalaev (145.1) vs. Fabricio Guerreiro (147.9)
Mike Richman (145.5) vs. Goiti Yamauchi (145.5)
Marcin Held (158) vs. Nate Jolly (158)* catchweight 158 pounds
Preliminary Card (Spike.com stream, 6 PM ET)
Zach Underwood (152.3) vs. Austin Lyons (152.4)
Justin Frazier (264.5) vs. Mike Wessel (257.9)
Ben Brewer (170.2) vs. Andy Uhrich (170.5)
Anthony Lemon (170) vs. Codie Shuffield (170)
Cortez Phelia (125.7) vs. Brian Hall (125.6)The ministry added that it had submitted all the information requested by the commission, and that it was cooperating fully with the investigation. “Luxembourg is confident that the allegations of state aid in this case are unsubstantiated,” it said.
The publication of the letter reflects heightened scrutiny of how low-tax nations in the European Union have helped large multinationals reduce their tax bills by billions of dollars, at a time when the budgets of larger countries, like France and Italy, are squeezed. The European Commission is already investigating the tax arrangements of Starbucks in the Netherlands, of Apple in Ireland and of a unit of Fiat in Luxembourg.
It is not illegal in the European Union to try to lure businesses with low tax rates. But offering special deals to companies that are not available to their competitors can amount to what is known as illegal state aid.
The Amazon tax investigation — made public last year — focuses on a deal the company struck with Luxembourg in 2003 to cap the amount of tax it paid through so-called transfer pricing, according to the commission. Luxembourg’s tax authorities took a mere 11 days to approve Amazon’s tax structure in the country, the commission noted.
Under the arrangements, most of the company’s European revenue was sent from one unit in Luxembourg to a separate subsidiary that was not liable to pay corporate tax in the country. That reduced the profit that the company generated from its European operations and cut its tax bill, the commission said.
Europe’s competition authorities have asked Luxembourg for more details on why it was “deviating” from international standards when handling this complex structure between Amazon’s two units.
They also called for more details of how royalty payments made between the units were structured, as the unit that received these payments was not subject to taxation in Luxembourg, according to the European Commission’s documents.Last month developer Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh managed to get an Android Wear-based smartwatch to display notifications from an iPhone, even though Google’s wearable OS doesn’t support Apple’s mobile devices (at least, not yet).
A new video posted by the software dev today shows an Android Wear watch working with the iPhone’s calling function. In the video, an incoming call on the iPhone is answered using the Android watch. Abu-Garbeyyeh says he simulated the gesture to answer to phone call on the watch in software to avoid filling the video frame with his hand, but the functionality works perfectly just as it would with an Android device.
As with the previous pairing of Android Wear and iOS, this implementation doesn’t require a jailbroken device and works with native APIs included in Apple’s operating system. You can see the whole video demonstration below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2pkyHp8HN0&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=MohammadAbu-Garbeyyeh]Then in August, Judge Dolly M. Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California ordered that migrant children could not be held in a locked detention center and had to be released, with their parents, “without unnecessary delay.” But the judge made an exception for an emergency due to an “influx,” for which she permitted children to be held for up to 20 days. Homeland Security officials seized on that exception, arguing that an influx existed even before the recent spike.
By doubling asylum officers and speeding legal procedures since late October, officials have been completing most initial asylum screenings in the two detention centers here in South Texas and releasing families within the 20-day limit.
Rather than shuttering the two centers, officials are adding 500 beds at the center in Karnes City, doubling its capacity. And they won their request for a federal appeals court to swiftly review Judge Gee’s order to release migrants quickly. The order, the Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, said this week, “significantly constrains our ability to respond to an increasing flow of illegal immigration to the United States.”
On Monday, officials sent many of the more than 120 mothers and children who were arrested over the weekend to be deported back to the center in Dilley — set up to screen asylum seekers entering the United States — for final steps before they are sent out of the country.
But in a new legal setback for the administration, officials on Thursday had to halt the deportations of three Salvadoran mothers and their children arrested in the raids, removing them from an airplane at the last minute, after lawyers at the Dilley center won stays from the immigration appeals court. One woman had presented a doctor’s statement saying she had epilepsy and had three seizures since her arrest.Article continues below...
Michael Vick has been back in the NFL for four seasons since the dog-fighting scandal that derailed his life and career.
Apparently, some people have not forgotten.
The Eagles quarterback was supposed to appear at an autograph signing at Buffalo Wild Wings in York, Pa., but it looks like the owner received death threats and was forced to cancel the event.
From the CBS 21 website:
Joe Bartolo told me this afternoon the signing was postponed after he claims death threats were made against him, his wife Jamie — the owners of JJ Cards N Toys — and their family for organizing Vick’s appearance in October at a local Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant.
Those making the threats were upset the Bartolos would bring Vick to the area. Vick served 18 months in federal prison for running an illegal dogfighting ring. Bartolo told me thousands of threats were coming in from all the country. He even had to shut down the store’s Facebook page.
This isn’t the first time Vick has been forced to cancel public appearances because of death threats. In March, he canceled a book signing in Atlanta (where he used to play) and Philadelphia (where he plays now).
Last October, Vick admitted to owning a dog, and got similar backlash about it. Here was his statement at the time:
"I understand the strong emotions by some people about our family’s decision to care for a pet. As a father, it is important to make sure my children develop a healthy relationship with animals. I want to ensure that my children establish a loving bond and treat all of God’s creatures with kindness and respect. Our pet is well cared for and loved as a member of our family. This is an opportunity to break the cycle. To that end, I will continue to honor my commitment to animal welfare and be an instrument of positive change."Harley Quinn has gone through a bit of an identity crisis throughout her years in DC. Since her animated debut, Harley has gone from the sidekick and girlfriend of Joker to her own full-on character, ranging from animated series to comics, video games, and a guest spot in the TV series Arrow–and now she’s on the big screen in Suicide Squad. With her transition from supporting cast member into a full character, I’ve come to the realization that Harley Quinn’s outfits have changed more and more in the past couple of years than anyone else. Even Poison Ivy keeps the same type of outfit, but Harley Quinn is different. The comic book and video game artists seem to give her either one less piece of clothing or one more weapon every time she debuts. What gives? I’ll rate the Harley outfits that have been the most popular so far from the comics to the video games.
12: Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013)
It’s almost hard to imagine that someone thought this was a good idea for a fighting game. Injustice: Gods Among Us is like Mortal Kombat, but with superheroes vs. villains. Sounds cool, right? The one aspect that bothered me was that Harley’s outfit leaves nothing to the imagination. The good thing about her outfit is that it suits well to her gymnastic training, allowing her to move freely and cartwheel whenever she gets the chance. The bad thing about this outfit, however, had me asking a question as I played and watched her. If this was real life… wouldn’t she be shot in the chest immediately? The answer is yes. I know this is just a game, but hear me out. In Injustice: Gods Among Us, Harley Quinn is a Gadget User, and those gadgets almost come out of nowhere in the game. For safety, there is no padding, no bulletproof vest, and no cushion to soften the fall. There is nothing holding Harley’s outfit together but those four straps in the middle. They put in DLC to give her another outfit after a while, but it doesn’t soften the blow of being given this outfit the first go around.
11: Suicide Squad
Girl, are you not cold?! It’s snowing! Suicide Squad Harley Quinn almost baffles me as much as Injustice Harley. The littler the clothes, the deadlier she becomes, I suppose? The New 52s introduced us to a new Harley Quinn that’s forcibly a part of the Suicide Squad, but also a stand alone character with her own series. Harley adopts pale skin and her hair is half black and half red–like her original jester cap. In Suicide Squad, she’s equipped with her signature hammer, which has the slimmer and sleeker design of a mallet instead of her larger hammer design. DC kept her core elements inside of the outfit, such as her bubbly, love starved, psychotic personality. But that’s only the psychological elements of Harley. DC has made Harley Quinn an even more sexualized character in the DC Universe, keeping pace with her increased popularity over the years. They kept her deadly as ever, but this outfit again doesn’t leave you much to the imagination.
10: Arkham Asylum
Even “unrealistic body image” doesn’t cut it with this one. Harley goes back to her doctor days in Arkham Asylum, yet the game depicts her as a nurse type warden, taking over Arkham with the Joker like the BAMF she is. Harley uses her deadly skills to serve the Joker’s needs and wants. This has got to be one of the best games in the Arkham series, in my opinion, but this outfit has got to go. The “skin-tight yet busty” image of Harley Quinn starts to become a routine after a while. We start to see Harley Quinn in tighter corsets and boobs lifted up to her chin. Previous game Arkham City sets out to destroy this image, but Arkham Knight builds this image right back up. This outfit also doesn’t help with her battles because it might be impossible to realistically use your gymnastic skills with those heavy boots. Look at that tiny waist though… Talk about corset training…
9: Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad
This outfit is a cross between the comic design of Suicide Squad (above) and the game design from Injustice Regime (below), which could be an awesome costume if DC really got it together! Margot Robbie seems like she’d be the perfect Harley Quinn. She has those drop dead gorgeous looks that you’ll swoon for. I want to like this outfit so much, but I just can’t. It fails at so many areas where it can be awesome. Harley Quinn is beautiful, we know this, but does she really need to look like an actual doll?
The pigtails are a great touch to already New 52s idea of Harley and she sports easily recognizable signature colors. The pale skin is matched to Margot Robbie’s already sharp features; she resembles a porcelain doll. The problem with this outfit is the oversexualization that’s happening within it. Daddy’s Little Monster? Really? It’s bad enough that her shorts are so short that they probably don’t give her space to breathe properly, but when you bring a Daddy t-shirt into the equation it almost shifts the dynamic of the character. She hardly looks like herself anymore. She’s probably going to be the most oversexualized person in the film, which is slightly upsetting. As much as I want to like it, I just can’t give it the approval it’s seeking. Harley Quinn has become this bubbly, oversexualized creation for the male gaze and it’s really sad to see because she’s so amazing.
8: Arkham Knight
Harley Quinn in a tutu! This is one of the better outfits that Harley has worn throughout the games. This is the outfit that she’s given after Arkham Asylum (1) and Arkham City (2) and she’s wearing a tutu. For all purposes, she does look adorable in the outfit, bringing a lighthearted nature to the game. It slightly makes you remember that she was a gymnast with the ballerina-esque illusion of the outfit, but that’s not enough. She’s equipped with a baseball bat in this round while wearing her corset–that kind of starts becoming a recurring “thing” around now. The one thing I’m very happy about with this outfit is her tights and boots look. They come in her signature diamonds with her colors intact. They also add a bedazzled nature to the style that’s DIY for the character, which brings a much-needed smile to my face.
7: Arkham City
Harley’s look in Arkham City was the best functional, smart and dope addition to the many outfits in her video game collection. This is very close to what Harley should be wearing within the video games, if not what she should be wearing. It’s highly functional with her gymnastic skills and she’s equipped with whatever is at her disposal. The outfit has been one that’s a favorite among cosplayers (although people seem to enjoy the Arkham Knight outfit these days). The outfit has another corset that has been popularized throughout the games and it leaves much to the imagination while being functional and badass at the same time. The hair definitely gets better after Arkham City and I hope we can all agree on that. It looks straw-like and damaged from the dye job at the ends. I am not an expert in hair, but I assume that is very very bad.
6: Injustice Regime
This outfit is kind of cool. Although the thong strap along her hip is a very distracting. You can see that this outfit is a lot more functional for her skills and the function of her gadgets little bit more as well. This outfit comes in the alternative for Injustice: Gods Among Us and I really liked it. There are some amazing touches to this outfit such as: her pigtails in black and red, her great pants which are also her colors and my favorite touch of all is her leather jacket. They bring in her gadget usage, which allows her outfit to actually have them attached to her, rather than them come from out of nowhere. The best touch to this outfit, however, is the t-shirt with a drawing of her puddin’ on it. It gives another bit of that DIY touch realizing that Harley probably did it herself to give a tribute to the Joker, the love of her life.
5: Arkham Origins
I didn’t know that this existed until I wrote this article and almost freaked out. I love seeing Harley Quinn in her early doctor days as Dr. Harleen Quinzel, before and right when she meets the Joker. This outfit is everything. In Arkham Origins, she has pinned up blonde hair, signature red shirt and black skirt and a white lab coat. It updates the original Dr. Quinzel outfit from the original animated television series with a sharper design. Her glasses are what got me excited, because I hardly ever see Harley Quinn in her doctor glasses anymore! She’s not only her doctor self, but fans get to see a little bit of the old Harley, before she falls in love with the Joker and steps into the jester outfit we know today.
4: Joker
Joker is a comic book that not a lot people know about, but very much should be read by those wanting to get behind a little bit about the myth of the Joker. Scripted by Brian Azzarello with art by Lee Bermejo, it’s told through the eyes of one of Joker’s henchman, but it’s a powerful behind-the-scenes look of the Joker as well. Harley Quinn is in it, in a silent role, but her presence is always there, and the art keeps you focused on her as soon as she appears in the panel. She’s the backbone of the Joker. You almost see the need Joker has for Harley, knowing she’ll always be there for him. She’s a dancer at first, but when she snatches on that mask you know shit’s about to go down. Harley’s outfit in this graphic novel goes back to the original outfit, but also has little moments like when Harley is sitting by the bar and her hair is in knots. It’s pretty fantastic. Check it out if you get the chance!
3: Mia Sara in Birds of Prey
I don’t know why this outfit works for me but it does. Birds of Prey was on the WB in 2002 and only lasted for one season, but dear god I loved that season. It was campy, but it was also pretty ahead of its time for featuring Huntress, Oracle, and Black Canary as the top billing female characters. Mia Sara’s portrayal of Harley Quinn was awesome, and her outfit reflected it. Harley’s outfit in this show in particular plays around with the business side of who Harley Quinn can be. The costume designers for Birds of Prey also play around with Harley’s main colors: black, white and red, with her suits and casual clothing. She wants to control New Gotham and it shows the sinister side of her instead of the bubbly side. If you look at the costume closely, the top of the shirt looks like her signature diamonds, but they also look like teeth. Ruthless!
2: Gotham City Sirens
I can go on and on about how much I love this design of Harley’s outfit in Gotham City Sirens, but I’ll keep it short and sweet. Guillem March does an amazing job sharpening Harley’s classic outfit and bringing it to the forefront. In this comic that centers around Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, herself, it’s almost impossible not to love everything about it. It sticks to the original outfit, but it is also slightly sexier than the original. It gives you the outfit full on, but as tight and right that it can possibly be without showing TOO much in return. March keeps Harley in the outfit that made her legendary in the first place. Gotham City Sirens doesn’t show her in a corset trying to gasp for air, and it’s not giving you Daddy’s Little Monster in Suicide Squad. It sticks to the original design and it’s a perfect redesign.
1: Batman: The Animated Series
How can you not love her original outfit? It’s not only perfectly expressive of her bubbly, jester self, but it’s the outfit that we recognize the most for Harley Quinn. Introduced in the animated series Batman, this is the first glimpse we see of Harley Quinn and, like many of us, I’ve been hooked on this outfit ever since. It’s simple, clean and leaves a lot to the imagination without showing anything in the process. It’s functional for her gymnastics training and it’s so funny to see her spin in with the jester hat attached. During Comic Con sessions, I’ve seen girls in this cosplay and they are absolutely GENIUS about it. Cosplayers update this version of her outfit by using everything from leather to velvet in order to get their perfect Harley Quinn cosplay down. The original outfit cannot be beat, and hands down has to be the greatest Harley Quinn outfit ever.Korean rapper PSY’s runaway smash-of-smashes “Gangnam Style” is set to reach a historic one billion YouTube views by Christmas. The continued American attention should buy the man a pretty sweet yacht, but at this point he’s actually flopping around a bit on the charts back in Korea, especially given that he’s been sitting at No. 1 in so many other countries (currently: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Norway). In other words, apparently “Gangnam Style” has long since graduated to such a level of worldwide Internet saturation that Korean pop listeners have decided it’s time to move on.
Son Ga-In, a.k.a “Gain,” is by far Psy’s most exciting successor yet, a bleach-blonde singer who just turned 25 and was previously best known as a member of a popular pop quartet Brown Eyed Girls. These days, she’s currently focusing on a solo career; her eagerly awaited sophomore album Talk About S was released October 5. Billboard’s recent efforts toward tracking K-pop would put her recent peak at No. 2, but her addictive lead single “Bloom” has topped all the real-time ranking charts operated by a number of smaller Korean regional music sites, a phenomenon known as an “All Kill” among K-pop’s most enthusiastic followers. That’s exactly how “Gangnam Style” started, too.
“Bloom” is a very different animal, though — most notably, it takes itself a bit more seriously. GaIn clearly wants you to have fun, but there are no dances that frat boys will be doing on Halloween, and no shots of anyone rapping on the toilet. Instead, “Bloom” opens with in-your-face retro production that sounds a bit reminiscent of Like a Prayer-era Madonna with a tinge of New Jack Swing. At first, its mostly minor-key funk gears grind into position, then drum-machine rolls and jangly little triads slip around way up on the highest guitar strings. Those cards are played masterfully, and they wrap you up in the song’s sound so quickly, that it seems impossible they’d be able to pull off a typically exultant, major-key K-pop explosion, especially one where the lyrics switch to English. But there it |
and choice, there have to be some conflicts in play. That is, the party must find themselves forced to choose between different desirable things. Or between different undesirable things. Remember, when we talk about conflict here, we’re talking about GOALS in conflict. MOTIVATIONS in conflict. INCENTIVES in conflict. And RISKS in conflict. For example, imagine the choice between a long, safe path and a short, dangerous path. That creates a conflict. Do you risk the dangerous path to save time? What’s more important? Time or safety? If you’re traveling to a dungeon with no time pressure, you might be willing to dawdle to make sure you arrive safe and healthy and able to tackle the dungeon. If you’re delivering medicine, you might not be able to afford the extra time. But, you might risk having the medicine stolen by brigands. See? Conflict.
In order to understand how to create conflict in travel, we need to talk about the forces and motivations in play when the party travels from Point A to Point B as well as the risks, rewards, and consequences. So, let’s look at them.
Time
The first travel factor is time: how long it takes to get from point A to point B. Now, it might seem like time is only a factor when it’s important, such as when there is a deadline or a pursuit or an evasion going on. But if you handle travel right, time is a factor all of the time. See, the wilderness is dangerous. That’s the first thing. The more time you spend in the wilderness, the more likely you are to get killed by monsters or blunder into dangerous hazards. This, by the way, is the pressure that random encounters are SUPPOSED TO supply. We’ll come back to that.
But time also weighs on the heroes in another way. See, humans and human-like creatures need food and water to survive. Surprise! And, in the wilderness, there are no taverns or bakeries or fruit vendors. So, in general, the more time the party spends in the wilderness, the more supplies they need. And it may not be possible to carry enough supplies for long trips or to find food and water wherever you go. This is the factor that rations, encumbrance, and foraging and survival rules are SUPPOSED TO drive. We’ll come back to that too.
In point of fact, thanks to both the danger of random encounters and the need for supplies, time is the biggest factor driving choices in the wilderness. In general, all else being equal, the shortest possible trip is the best trip. It minimizes the danger and the need for supplies.
Any other time pressure simply ADDS to the weight of time.
So what affects the time that it takes to travel? Well, first and foremost, there’s the distance traveled. The farther the distance, the longer the time. That’s pretty straightforward, right? But some routes are more direct than others. Roads tend to take circuitous routes, following the easiest terrain. And there are some barriers that most PCs just can’t handle. Rivers can be difficult to cross except at bridges, ferries, or fords unless the party wants to build a raft or carry a boat. High mountains can be all but insurmountable except by following winding passes through them. Fortunately, as circuitous as they are, roads present ways around barriers, winding along cliffs, through passes, over bridges, and across fords.
So the distance along the route is a big factor. But the terrain also plays an important role in how much time it takes to travel. Roads, meadows, and cultivated lands are easiest to traverse. Trackless plains and flatlands aren’t too much worse. But forests and woodlands with any sort of undergrowth can slow travelers down. Hills and badlands force the party to take meandering routes to avoid too much climbing. Wetlands and marshes slow the party down by forcing them to wander around trying to avoid deep water or by forcing them to wade through thick mud and standing water. Sandy deserts drag at travelers’ feet almost as much as thick mud does. And mountains can be all but insurmountable.
Indirectly, the party controls the travel time simply by choosing their route. They can follow roads or stick to easy-to-traverse terrain or choose to travel across more difficult terrain. Often, there’s a tradeoff: the harder route is usually shorter, the longer route is usually easier. In terms of terrain.
Factoring in both terrain and distance, the choice can come down to a simple numbers game. If the long, easy route is 20 miles and the short, hard route is only 8 miles but cuts the party speed in half, the harder route is the answer. It’s equivalent to 16 miles at a normal pace. And a numbers game is NOT a choice. It’s a puzzle. A math problem.
But before we launch into the other factors that can shift the choice, let me mention something that is pretty specific to 5th Edition D&D that is actually a really great idea. In 5E, the party can choose their travel pace. That is, they can travel at a fast pace, a normal pace, or a slow pace. Thus, they can choose three speeds. And there are some specific tradeoffs. At a Fast pace, the party’s Perception is penalized – they are more likely to blunder into trouble before they see it coming – and they are unable to forage for food while they travel. At a Slow pace, the party is able to travel stealthily to try and get the drop on (or avoid) any potential trouble. In addition, navigators receive a bonus at a Slow pace and a penalty at a Fast pace. That’s actually a really nice feature, though I will talk about some tweaks at the end of this article. Being able to choose a pace and to dynamically adjust your pace while traveling adds some much needed control to the travel experience.
Danger
The second factor is danger: the chance of encountering a hazard or monster and having to deal with it. I noted above that spending time in the wilderness is dangerous. But the danger factor can vary. It’s just that most GMs don’t vary it nearly enough and, when they do, they don’t let the players know about it.
Civilized regions are the safest. Those are the regions around towns and villages and cities and farms and along the roads, assuming that the roads are even occasionally patrolled by the local authorities. And they usually are in civilized reaches. Contrast that with forests, flatlands, hills, and wetlands. Those areas tend to be the most dangerous because they all offer ample resources for creatures – intelligent and unintelligent – to live off of. Barren and treacherous regions tend to actually be a little safer because it’s harder for living things to survive there to begin with.
But that, again, is just a function of the terrain. And there’s another to factor to consider. Lots of creatures claim territory. Most intelligent, sentient creatures claim lands for themselves, from savage orcs and wily goblins to xenophobic wood elves. And traveling through their terrain can increase the danger. Likewise, the effects of the fantasy world can change the danger of a location. A forest under the magical protection of the fey is less dangerous because most of the creatures there are peaceful. A tangled and gnarled ancient forest filled with vengeful tree spirits who despise humanity is quite dangerous.
Players CAN control the danger of their route, but only if they know about the danger. And, honestly, they SHOULD know about MANY of the dangers. Partly because it empowers them to make informed decisions but partly because people WOULD know the dangers of traveling. The locals can tell the party all about how Goblin Wood is filled with goblins and their spider pets and how no one who goes in comes out alive except that one guy who came out with a mess of spider eggs in his belly and he keeled over in his soup one night and spiders came spilling out of his mouth and I mean it because my second cousin swears she saw it happen. The haunted hills filled with ancient barbarian tombs are probably pretty lousy with undead.
Navigation
The third factor that drives choices in travel is navigation. See, without magical means, navigating is actually a lot harder than people realize. Suppose, for example, you set out traveling north on foot. You have a really good sense of direction and you’re pretty close to true north. So, let’s say after traveling 10 feet to what you think is true north, you’re actually just 1 itty bitty little foot off. After one day, assuming you travel 24 miles, you’ll be 3 miles left of your destination. Three days on foot and you’re 8 miles off your target. And if that target isn’t big and visible, 8 miles is a lot of distance to be off by. Once you can’t see where you’re going, any distance off is lost.
The thing is, most wilderness navigation is done by landmarks until you can see your destination. Travel north until you hit the river. Travel upriver until you come to the old crumbly tower. Follow the remains of the old road from there until you find the dungeon. Climb a tree or a hill so you can spot it.
If you’re following a road or another terrain feature, navigation is a non-issue. But after that, you’re relying on landmarks and direction sense and you need a good navigator. Fortunately, most parties take along someone who is pretty skilled at navigation, either the party ranger or a hired guide. But that person still runs the risk of getting lost.
Navigation relies heavily on line of sight. The farther you can see, the easier it is to orient yourself based on distant landmarks and determine your direction based on the sun, moon, and stars. But there’s another side to that. If there’s nothing to see except the sky, no distant landmarks, it’s pretty hopeless. Because then you end up in that “if you’re even one foot off in ten feet, you’re going to miss your mark by miles” problem. The end result is this, in open terrain where distant landmarks are visible, navigating is easiest. In terrain with bad lines of sight, like forests, marshes, and very varied terrain like rugged hills, navigation is more difficult. And when all you can see is the horizon, like out on the open sea or in the middle of a tundra or desert, navigation is extremely difficult.
But what does navigation actually mean? This is the tricky bit. Navigation is only partly about finding your destination. Assuming you have very good directions or a very accurate map (and that second thing is extremely unlikely), navigation helps you follow the directions and hopefully arrive near enough to your goal to spot it from a distance. But some goals are easier to miss than others. For example, if you’re traveling to a town on the river, all you have to do is hit the river and then follow it. A river is a hard thing to miss even if you’re traveling vaguely in the right direction. In the end, it’s the quality of the directions and the landmarks that will determine whether you find your place or not more than navigation. Though navigation does play a role. If you’re supposed to travel west until you find a particular lake and you’re miles off the target, you might not be able to spot the lake and find yourself lost in the wilderness.
What navigation really does for you is tell you where you are and how to get back where you came from. And when you get lost, it isn’t just about not being to find where you are going. It’s about not being able to find your way back either.
So what does getting lost mean? What happens? Well, in general, getting lost means the party has been traveling in the wrong direction for some period of time. And, depending on the nature of their directions, they might not be able to hit their goal. Again, if they are going for a river, that’s hard to miss as long as they start moving in the right direction again. But a particular tower in a hilly badland or a small lake in rolling hills? The party could end up wandering for ages.
But getting lost also means the party can’t find their way back. Simply put, they have to guess at the way back. They have to try to retrace their steps. A good survivalist can follow the party’s trail behind them for a little while and that might be all it takes to get back on track, but its at that point that even an inaccurate map can help. If there’s a road south of the forest you’re lost in, well, all you have to do is head south and you’ll hit that road. Somewhere along it. And since roads lead somewhere, you’ll find civilization eventually.
Resources
The fourth factor that drives travel is the availability of resources. In wilderness terrain, resources generally represent food and water, the staples for survival. Lush wilderness, including meadows, forests, flatlands, and hills provide a bounty for travelers. Everything from berries, nuts, fruit, and roots to small game like rabbits and game birds. Realistically speaking, in such terrain, its conceivable that a party can forage enough water to keep their skins and bellies full and enough food to survive on a day to day basis. But it is by no means assured. Barren wilderness can be a bit crueler. Rough hills, badlands, and tundra can make foraging much harder. And, obviously, deserts and wastelands yield almost nothing.
But there are other factors to consider as well. Resources are a bit more complicated. First of all, while civilized lands tend to actually yield less game as animals tend to avoid populated areas and the mere act of building roads can disrupt and divert game trails, most traveled roads provide other resources for travelers. Roadside inns and farming homesteads can provide food, water, and shelter in return for some coin. Or a few hours of chores. However, we’ll talk about how to implement that at the end of this article.
However, the fantasy element can also effect the resources available in a terrain. See, the savage goblin forest is still effectively a civilized region. It’s just civilized by evil goblins. And they and their spider friends might have suppressed the game and driven a lot of other creatures out of the forest. Orcs might have overhunted their barrens to the point where game is scarce. Animals might avoid the haunted barrows because they are smart enough to avoid areas that have “haunted” right in the name. And the water in such a region might be spoiled. A fey forest might be rich and abundant, offering up ample fruit and roots and berries for hungry traveler.
Obviously, all of this is supplemental to what the players can carry themselves. The D&D 5E DMG, for example, indicates that a person needs about one pound of food and one gallon of water every day. Given that a waterskin weighs 5 lbs. when its full, it probably holds about half a gallon (a gallon of water weighs almost 9 lbs.) The smart traveler carries two full skins (10 lbs) and refills them whenever they can in the wild. So, they are always carrying 10 lbs. of water. That means for every day of travel, a PC has to carry a pound of food. This is something encumbrance rules SHOULD use to create a tradeoff between carrying extra food or relying on the bounty of the land. We’ll come back to that too. Because D&D 5E especially s$&%s the bed here.
Discoveries
The final factor is a very interesting factor. This is the reason that I brought up Dragon Quest VIII above. And it’s one you might be familiar with if you’ve played any of the sprawling, choking, sandbox games by Bethesda like Skyrim or Fallout. This is the pull-you-off-the-road-by-your-own-curiosity factor of being able to spot interesting things that you want to check out. See, the world fantasy world of D&D is an old world and many empires have risen and fallen on its sprawling surface. And that means that there’s always some random little half-collapsed tower or old gate house or ancient foundation or henge or mausoleum or something waiting just over the next rise. And it is also a world of magic, which means there’s always some stand of enchanted trees with purple leaves or magical waterfall coming out of a portal in thin air or something to be found as well.
The thing that NEVER happens along the road – and a thing that SHOULD happen – is that the party should spot something weird in the distance and debate checking it out. I’m not talking about discovering entire goddamned dungeons, but that’s certainly possible too. I’m talking about spotting the ruined foundation of some old castle that has a small treasure in it. Or a nasty monster. Or both. Or a plaque with a weird point of interest about the world. Or a shrine whose offering bowl is still intact and has a couple dozen ancient coins in it. There should be curiosities to pull the party off the road. There should be something enticing the players to ignore all the other factors and waste extra time in the wilderness.
How to Actually Handle Travel
So, Time, Danger, Navigation, Resources, and Discoveries, those are the factors to consider. How the f$&% do you actually handle travel in your D&D game? How do you make it interesting? How do you keep track of everything? How do you make travel PART of the adventure? Here’s how.
To Map Or Not to Map
First of all, lets talk about mapping. It might seem that I’m about to tell you to use detailed overland maps with exact distances mapped out so that you can figure out exactly how much time travel will take and track the players getting lost and all that crap. Well, you can. I won’t stop you. But you don’t need to. You can use blobby little vague maps. Or none at all. The key isn’t to get hung up on the map itself, but rather on the choices the map creates.
Take this map for example. Sorry for the crappy quality. But, hey, I’m trying to make a point about not sweating the quality anyway.
Let’s say the adventure is all about getting from Onett to Twoson. I COULD measure this all out to scale and figure out how the terrain slows travel and all of that crap. Or I can just fudge it. The map offers three basic routes: directly through the Goblin Woods, along the Road, or through the Hills of Ancient Ruins. And those represent the choices the party can make. It’s just like choosing three doors. In fact, the party could also choose to shave some time off the Road by leaving the road and traveling north of the lake. And I can figure out roughly how long each route will take. The Road might take ten days. The path through the Goblin Woods might take four days (accounting for the slowdown of the terrain). The Hills might take seven days. That’s just the baseline.
I don’t even have to show the party the map. I could just explain that they can travel directly through the Goblin Woods and get there in four days, but they will have to manage a river crossing. They can follow a long, winding road which will take ten days. Or they can follow an old road into the Hills of Ancient Ruins and then cut north once the old road gives out until they hit the river ford. That whole trek will take seven days. That gives them enough information to choose their route. At least based on time.
Once you start tracking the party’s movement, you can just eyeball it as best you can based on the fraction of time traveled. Or just narrate the trip. Mapping – and mapping accurately – is NOT super important.
Designing Routes or Designing the Map
Before you can run an interesting travel game, the first thing you have to do is create the wilderness through which the party will be traveling. And you can do this in one of two ways. You can either design a few different routes for the party to choose from. Or you can draw a map. As noted above, the map doesn’t have to be accurate by any stretch. It just have to show the relative distances and where the different types of terrain are.
Either way, you’re looking to figure out five things. How long is each route? How dangerous is each route (or each section)? How easy is each route to navigate (or each section)? What’s the available of resources along each route (or each section)? And how likely is the party to get sidetracked by an interesting discovery on each route?
Before I launch into specific mechanics, let me explain that I like to grade each one of those things on a five point scale.
First of all, Danger is measured from 1 to 5. 1 is a relatively safe, civilized region or a barren, desolate region. 2 is a dangerous frontier. 3 is enemy territory. 4 is regularly patrolled, extremely hostile territory. And 5 is reserved for the sort of terrain which is filled with monsters that are actively trying to destroy all intruders and can detect the intruders with supernatural means. For example, Hell or The Land of the Dead. Seriously, 4 and 5 are pretty ridiculously dangerous. You’ll see why.
Navigation and Resources are both measured in terms of a DC. But either can be moot. For example, following a road or river makes Navigation moot. And traveling through civilized, friendly farmland makes Resources moot. Otherwise, you want to set a DC of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, etc. in D&D 5E or a DC of 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, etc. in D&D 3E, 4E, and Pathfinder. Verdant forests and lush meadows have a Resource DC of 5 or 10. Deserts have a Resource DC of 25 or 30. Gently rolling flatlands have a Navigation DC of 5 or 10. A Desert has a Navigation DC of 25 or 30. If you want to add a Fantasy Factor like confounding fair curses or the blessings of the Land Spirits, you can adjust the DCs by 5 either way.
Got it?
Now, let’s talk about how all of this plays out.
Choosing a Route
Obviously, the first step in traveling is to choose a route. The players need to somehow find out what the lay of the land is and learn any interesting details about the routes in question. They should have a rough idea about how long each route is, how dangerous, how difficult it is to navigate, and how difficult it is to forage. Because they are going to need to plan their food supplies accordingly. Presumably, they will have access to a map or local knowledge or research. As the GM, it’s your job to find ways to get this information in front of your players. As far as discoveries, you can use that as a way to entice the players along a particular route or just vaguely hint at it or leave it as a surprise. Discoveries mainly come up as a way to drive choices along the way.
Now, the party doesn’t have to know everything. Partway through a trip through a forest, they can encounter signs that are passing into goblin territory or cursed land or something and they can make a decision then and there about whether to press through the new territory or whether to try to go around or even retreat and try a different route. Those sorts of surprises can help add decisions to a longer trip.
At this point, it is important for you, the GM, to know how long the route should take in days. That’s how you’ll be tracking things. Not in miles. In days.
The Travel Day
Once the party sets out, it’s time to resolve each day of travel. At the beginning of the day, the party decides what kind of pace to set: Slow, Medium, or Fast.
At a Slow Pace, the party is moving carefully and quietly. They gain Advantage or a +4 Bonus to all checks to perceive danger and all hostile creatures suffer Disadvantage or a -4 Penalty to detect the party, thus allowing the party to surprise enemies. In addition, the party can forage for food normally if they maintain a slow pace for the entire day. Finally, navigation checks enjoy Advantage or a +4 Bonus when moving at a Slow pace. The party’s speed, however, is reduced by a third. So every three days of travel count as only two days of travel.
At a Medium pace, the party travels normally. They may forage for food with Disadvantage or a -4 Penalty.
At a Fast pace, the party travels more quickly. Their speed is increased by a third. So every three days of travel count as four days. While traveling at a Fast Pace, the party cannot forage for food at all. They suffer Disadvantage or a -4 Penalty on all checks to perceive dangers and on navigation checks. Hostile creatures enjoy Advantage or a +4 Bonus on checks to detect or track the party.
Once the party has set the pace for the day, they CAN change the pace based on what happens to them during the day. Don’t worry, you’ll resolve all of that stuff at the end of the day.
Now, pick up six 6-sided dice. Each one represents a time-period of the day. Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Dusk, Midnight, Predawn. Roll them all. For each one that shows the Danger number or less, an encounter MIGHT happen. We’ll talk about random encounters. For example, if the Danger is 3, and your six dice show 5, 2, 3, 4, 1, 6; the party will have three encounters that day. One in the evening, one at dusk, and one at predawn. Notice that the danger number is actually the number of encounters you will expect to happen in one day.
Finally, roll one more d6. If that shows the Discovery number or less, you need to tantalize the party with something interesting off the road for them to check out. A ruined tower, a sign of magic, an old tomb, an ancient henge, a shrine, or whatever. The key is that it has to be far enough off the path that the party has to choose whether to waste a few hours investigating it or to ignore it.
Now, you play out the daytime encounters as they happen. After each encounter, the party might spend some time resting, recovering, or whatever. Don’t worry about that. They might also decide to change their pace. That’s fine too. When playing out the encounters, its important to remember that surprise is a definite possibility. If the party is moving slowly and quietly and the enemy doesn’t detect them, they should be able to plan an ambush or bypass the encounter. If the party is rushing, they might very well be surprised and ambushed themselves. In fact, it is entirely possible that neither party detects the other and the encounter never happens. That’s totally fine. Sometimes, that’s just how it goes. That’s why we roll dice.
If no encounters or discoveries happen, the day passes uneventfully and the PCs find a place to make camp for the night.
Making Camp
It’s time for some bookkeeping at this point. First of all, you have to find out if the party is lost. To do this, have the best navigator make a navigation roll against the Navigation DC of the terrain. If the party traveled at a Fast pace at any point during the day, apply Disadvantage or a -4 penalty. Make this roll in secret. If they fail, the party has gotten lost at some point during the day. They just don’t know it yet.
Now, you have to figure out how many days of travel the party logged during the day. If the party isn’t lost, this is determined by their pace. They either log 2/3, 1, or 1 1/3 days depending on the slowest pace they moved at during the day. If the party has now logged enough days to finish their route, they will reach their destination tomorrow. If the party stopped to investigate a discovery, subtract 1/3 from their progress unless they spent the whole day on the discovery. In which case, they make no progress. Use your best judgment. Likewise, use your best judgment if the party does something weird like stopping halfway through the day.
Finally, you have to figure out how much food and water the party has consumed. If the party moved at a slow pace all day, allow each of them to make a check against the Forage DC. If the party didn’t move slowly all day but never moved at a fast pace at all, have each make a Forage check with Disadvantage or a -4 penalty. If anyone fails, that means the party didn’t find enough food to feed themselves. Each failure requires someone to consume one pound of food from their supply (one day worth of rations). You can generally assume that, as long as anyone succeeds at foraging, the party turned up enough water to refill their waterskins and drink their fill. But if they are traveling through a desert, you can modify that. If everyone fails to forage, however, they drain their waterskins and are now out of water. If their waterskins were already drained and they don’t have a backup supply, they are now dehydrating.
That whole process should be pretty quick. You roll for Navigation and determine if they are lost and then mark off the progress if they aren’t. Then, everyone rolls a forage checks and marks off food. Done and done. Now, it’s time for the night.
The Night
Some groups get absolutely bogged down in details about who is taking what watch shift and when. This is completely ludicrous. It really doesn’t matter. There are enough hours in the night that a party of any size can all get a good night sleep and still have a watch rotation with each character taking a shift. If the party really wants to fight about it or someone refuses to take watch or someone takes extra shifts because they are an elf and require less sleep, fine. So be it. But otherwise, just assume that everyone takes a watch sometime.
Now, you play out the nighttime encounters. Remember the possibilities for detection and ambush. Roll randomly to determine who is awake on watch for each encounter. Play them out. If no encounters happen, the night passes uneventfully. Hooray.
When the party wakes up, you do it all again.
Being Lost
So, what happens when the party is lost? Well, you can handle it a few ways. The easy way is to assume that each day of travel doesn’t count as any progress. When the party makes camp, log zero progress. However, you should still have the navigator roll a check. Well, you should roll secretly. If this check succeeds, the navigator will recognize that the party has become lost the next morning as the party is starting to set out. Otherwise, the party will just continue to make no progress every day.
However, you can handle it a few other ways. First of all, if the party travels in one direction long enough, they are going to discover an unexpected feature. They will hit a river, a new type of terrain, a lake, a road. If you drew a map, determine randomly what they will hit and where they will hit it or just pick something. Assume they travel in a straight line in a random direction from the middle of whatever terrain or route they were in. Again, use your best judgment.
Likewise, if the party knows the trip should have taken three to five days, and they hit day seven, they are going to realize they are lost.
Alternatively, each day that they travel while lost, roll a d6 when logging their progress. On a 1, they managed to travel in the right direction and log progress normally. On a 5 or 6, they are losing ground and subtract however much progress they would have made based on their route. For anything else, add no progress.
Once the party realizes they are lost, either because they hit a feature they shouldn’t have or because they realized they have been traveling too long or because the navigator figured out they got lost somewhere, they need to figure out a new plan. They might pick a direction they know will lead them to something (“we’ll head north until we find the river” or “we’ll keep traveling in this direction until we find the edge of the forest”), they might try to find a landmark to make toward (“we know that mountain peak is to the southeast, if we keep toward it, we should be able to find our way back to the road” or “can I climb a tree and see if I can spot the lake from here”), or they might try to backtrack (“can we follow our own trail back home?”). You can resolve each of those simply by assuming the party starts a new route and figuring it out accordingly. At this point, the party is no longer lost on the new route. The important thing is that the party can’t just get unlost. They need to have an alternative plan once they are lost. Otherwise, they will just keep wandering.
Random Encounters
When designing random encounters, it’s important to note a few things.
First of all, random encounters represent all of the potential dangers and hazards an area might present to travelers. It is not just a list of combat encounters. In fact, even when it is a list of encounters, it is a list of potential encounters. Remember, the party might evade an encounter. Or the encounter might evade the party. And you don’t even have to assume every encounter is hostile although I advise against using random encounters for friendly encounters. Bandits might be willing to let the party go for a price, especially if the party looks powerful and they aren’t sure of the odds. Some monsters might ignore the party if the party throws some food at them before retreating. Orcs might trade threats and insults with the party in social interACTION!, with each side trying to get the other to back down and go away. Some animals might merely threaten the party and try to frighten them away from their nest or other territory. Random encounters can also represent hazards. Quicksand in swamps, flash floods in hills and badlands, booby traps in kobold territory. They can also be obstacles like rockfalls across a road or a washed out bridge.
In general, the party should deal to one to two of them a day unless they start wandering through very dangerous territory. And that means that three days of travel is roughly equivalent to a short dungeon adventure. Keep that in mind as you plan. Your encounters should be interesting, but not complicated. Focus on single creatures or small groups of identical creatures. And, honestly, instead of a list of encounters, you can just have a small bestiary of creatures you can mix and match easily to get the results you want. In goblin territory, you can get a lot of mileage by mixing and matching goblin skirmishers, goblin archers, and giant spider pets in different combinations.
The one thing to keep in mind though is that the party will have the opportunity to rest and recover more frequently in the wild and will probably encounter fewer encounters than a typical dungeon day. To compensate, it’s important to skew your combat encounters toward the hard end of the difficulty curve. Use the guidelines in your particular edition of D&D or Pathfinder to up the difficulty. Hard should be the baseline difficulty for wilderness encounters to keep them meaningful.
Discoveries
It can be tough to come up with discoveries on the fly. But, the party should only encounter one or two during an entire trip unless they are wandering through an ancient kingdom lousy with ruins. Discoveries are basically just encounters that somehow bait the party into checking them out. But most of them should offer some kind of reward. Either something interesting or something valuable or both. An old ruined tower with an intact cellar, for example, might have a strongbox in the basement with some money and other trinkets, but it might be protected by a booby trap. Or something living in the cellar. An ancient shrine might reward an offering with a minor blessing or boon and might punish anyone taking from the offering bowl. These discoveries are your chance to give the players something to interact with if they are willing to waste time. Remember, if the rat survives the trap, he ends up with some free cheese for his trouble. You’ll need one or two discoveries for every three days of travel, more than likely. But it’s always good to have a pile of them in case you ever need one on the fly.
A Few Tweaks for 5E
As a final note, I need to point out that D&D 5E does a few things that absolutely f$&% up any chance of having good, engaging wilderness travel fun. First of all, the basic encumbrance rules that assume you can carry 15 times your Strength without breaking a sweat completely removes any difficulty in carrying food and supplies. I suggest you use the variant rules for encumbrance on PHB 176. Second of all, drop all that activity while traveling bulls$&%. It disguises nonchoices as choices and drags out the process of setting out. Assume the party will always forage if moving slow enough and that everyone is always paying attention. My system is streamlined to skip a lot of bookkeeping until the end of the day. Likewise, D&D 5E is VERY generous with foraging. F$&% that too. And, while we’re on the subject, some classes and backgrounds have features that also completely ruin any engagement to be gotten from travel. The Outlander background in particular offers the Wanderer feature that amounts to never getting lost and always foraging for an entire party. Replace that with a mechanical bonus to Navigation and Foraging. Like, the Ranger class feature Natural Explorer trivializes absolutely every aspect of wilderness travel, virtually guaranteeing that it becomes a Final Fantasy game of just plodding through random encounters and not sweating anything else. And much of it is tied to the specific, boring rules of overland travel baked into 5E. Instead, change it to having Advantage on Navigation (so that if the party moves at a fast pace, that cancels the Disadvantage), having Advantage on Perception while traveling (so that if the party moves at a fast pace, yaddah yaddah yaddah), and foraging yielding enough food for a second person (basically covering one other party member’s failure).Entrepreneurs Pledge to Safeguard Freedoms; Advance New Economy Jobs in America
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, carbon monoxide. You wouldn’t see or smell anything. Nor would your anti-science nonsense be heard of again. How very refreshing.
Her mind is OPEN to wishing for the deaths of those who disagree with her ignorant presumptions. All in good fun of course! But this totalitarian closed-mindedness really does seem to strike her as a kind of open mindedness. She finds the thought “refreshing.”
Maybe its just an Aussie thing, like the forced tattooing of political opponents. And Singer does make a serious charge. She accuses Aussie business leader David Murray of a very unscientific leap:
Murray states there’s no link between global warming and carbon dioxide emissions because carbon dioxide is necessary for life, colourless and odourless – and therefore can’t be considered a pollutant.
If Murray actually said that because CO2 is necessary for life it cannot cause warming then flamboyant gibes would be merited and the rest of us could only drop our faces into our own palms. We would never hear the end of it, sigh. But the charge is false. David Murray and his interviewer both clearly distinguished the pollution question from the warming question:
DM: [Carbon dioxide] has got nothing to do with pollution.Financial Review interviewer Colleen Ryan: What do you mean? DM: Well, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is colourless, odourless. It is not a pollutant. FR: Yes, but it is still bad for greenhouse gases. DM: No it isn’t. It is a tiny proportion of greenhouse gases. FR: So, if you believe in the warming of the planet, it is a tiny proportion of that? DM: There is no correlation between warming and carbon dioxide. FR: So if you accept the warming of the planet, what should you do? DM: Take measures to stop the effects of it. FR: What about the melting of the glaciers? DM: They’re not. The amount of ice in the world is slightly increasing. It’s not decreasing. It’s just staggering. Staggering. So you call something a pollutant, which it is not. It is actually necessary for life. And then the people who disagree with you, you call skeptics or scumbags or doubters or something.
Murray gave a perfectly logical reason for dismissing the greenhouse effects of CO2 as dangerous and it has nothing to do with CO2 not being a pollutant. CO2’s greenhouse effects can be dismissed because they are so tiny!
Exactly right. The only way CO2 warming could be dangerous is if it were dramatically amplified by water vapor feedback effects, in which case our climate would be radically unstable and sneezing would be dangerous. In other words, the only way CO2 is dangerous is if EVERYTHING is dangerous, and there is no evidence for such instability.
Singer is really just lying when she says that Murray denies a link between global warming and carbon dioxide “because carbon dioxide is necessary for life.” After reading his remarks on a conservative Aussie site she accuses Murray of an unscientific leap that he absolutely did not make, then she uses this deception to justify her happy death wish for everyone who doesn’t toe the party line.
If casual death wishes really were just an Australian mannerism they would appear on both sides, but Murray, for example, is the opposite of Singer. He appeals to Singer et al. to stop calling their opponents dirty names and she responds by dreaming of his annihilation. Nope, it’s a believer thing, as believers in authoritarian religions have always wanted to expunge heretics.
The only twist on this old story is how today’s eco-religious believers are able to imagine themselves on the side of science even as they do things like knowingly deceive their readers about what their opponents are saying. What does science mean to them if it doesn’t require truth? And if they don’t care about the truth, how can they possibly think they are right?
Because their religious authorities tell them so. Facepalm.
As the heat continues to go missing, expect to see a lot more of this:
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RedditAlec Baldwin, Taylor Schilling and Jena Malone to lead ensemble cast
CINCINNATI (December 9, 2016) – A new Emilio Estevez film starring Alec Baldwin, Taylor Schilling, Jena Malone and Che "Rhymefest" Smith will begin filming in Cincinnati in January 2017, announced Kristen Schlotman, executive director of Film Cincinnati today.
Baldwin, Schilling, Malone, Estevez and Smith will co-star in the socially conscious ensemble dramedy "the public," based on a screenplay written by Estevez, which he will also direct. Lisa Niedenthal, Estevez’s longtime producing partner, Alex Lebovici, and Steve Ponce of Oriah Entertainment are producing the film. Michael Bien of Cedarvale Pictures will serve as Executive Producer. Mary Vernieu and Michelle Wade Byrd are casting.
The indie is currently in pre-production in Cincinnati and principal photography will commence in mid-January 2017.
“Over the past few years, Emilio Estevez has been a tireless ambassador for Film Cincinnati. With our unique architecture, hospitality, home-grown talent and state tax credits, our region has become a frequent resource for the film industry, and Emilio has helped us tell this story.”
"the public" centers around a standoff with police and library officials when library patrons, many of whom are homeless and mentally ill, stage an Occupy sit-in, turning the Cincinnati Public Library into an impromptu homeless shelter for one night during a brutal, life-threatening cold snap. The story begs the question "Who will care for those who are unable to care for themselves?" In "the public," both sides are given equal voice at this inflection moment for America where we are sharply divided on social justice issues.
Baldwin ("The Departed," "Still Alice") is set to play a crisis negotiator who tries to deescalate the standoff. Estevez and Malone ("The Hunger Games") will play librarians caught up in the crisis. Schilling ("Orange Is The New Black") will play a character who helps expose the truth while a corrupt media spins the story for ratings, and Smith ("Selma") will play one of the homeless Occupy patrons.
Previously, Estevez directed, wrote and co-starred in the Golden Globe and SAG nominated (Best Picture, Ensemble) socio-political drama "Bobby" in addition to the critically acclaimed indie drama "The Way."
Lebovici and Ponce's recent credits include "The Billionaire Boys Club" with Kevin Spacey and Emma Roberts and "The Clapper" starring Ed Helms, Tracy Morgan and Amanda Seyfried."Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment," Donald Trump said at a campaign rally on Tuesday. "By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know."
Trump’s remarks were a bit garbled, but it sure seemed like he was making a dark offhand joke that gun owners could use their weaponry to stop either Clinton or liberal judges from instituting gun control.
But the Trump campaign has released a statement claiming that this is not so — a statement that, in many ways, exemplifies the campaign and its complex relationship to its candidate:
In just these brief two sentences and a subject line, there’s so much that sums up the Trump campaign.
First off, let’s be clear, this is bogus spin. There’s a bit of wiggle room in Trump’s comments, but they were very clearly referring to what Clinton will do with her appointment powers after the election — not the possibility of stopping her beforehand. Here’s the original comment again:
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know."
Second, much like various GOP elites have been trying to do over the past few months, this campaign statement makes an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that the frequently offensive, unscripted Trump is an ordinary, generic politician. There are many politicians who would mouth banalities about "the power of unification" off the cuff. Trump is much more likely to make a provocative joke. That’s who he is.
Third, as is practice for the Trump campaign, there’s no apology here. A traditional candidate in this situation would likely say that he misspoke or his statement came out wrong or that he made a joke in poor taste, as Byron York points out. But Trump can hardly ever manage to admit that he’s done anything wrong. So rather than apologize, the campaign must deny reality instead.
And fourth, this statement comes just one day after Trump attempted to "pivot" to respectability yet again by giving a major speech on the economy. And because it so crudely denies reality, it will do little to quell a raging controversy set to dominate headlines for another day at a time when Trump needs good news more desperately than ever.
Watch: This election is about normal vs. abnormalby Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton
Ellen Datlow, Guest Editor
Once upon a time, women not only dominated horror, but invented it. How can this be, you might wonder—it’s obvious that horror has been men’s domain forever! Well, no. Ghost tales and the gothic were written by women for decades before the horror boom of the 1980s. Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s essay, reprinted here from her ground-breaking anthology What Did Miss Darrington See? provides a useful overview of the historical participation and importance of women in horror.
For almost fifty years, hundreds of stories by women in the early years of horror, and their authors, were mostly forgotten. If not for the heroic efforts of Salmonson and such small presses as Ghost Story Press, Strange Company, and Ash-Tree Press, their names might have died out. I’ve been reading horror since I was a kid, and I knew nothing of these women and their writings as I grew up. All I knew of were Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft.
Women and children have traditionally been the victims of horrific events in fiction because of their vulnerability. But everyone is vulnerable in the right (or wrong) situation, and reading about a big burly man threatened by the supernatural or by human monsters has been proven to be just as potent a premise, if not more. And whichever gender is in peril, both male and female authors can and do deliver the scares. I get tired of hearing that women write a certain type of story while men write another. Having read hundreds of horror stories during my career, I don’t find this true.
Are there fewer women than men writing horror? From my unscientific perspective of a professional reader of horror short fiction for almost thirty years I’d say yes. Are there fewer women editing horror? Yes, but that’s been changing since I’ve been in the field.
Some of the most influential writers of horror have historically been women: Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, and Anne Rice.
Several writers featured within write in more than one subgenre of the fantastic and grotesque, so are often not “counted” as women who write horror.
Pat Cadigan has won the Hugo and the Arthur C. Clarke awards for her science fiction and has been nominated for multiple awards in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
Joyce Carol Oates writes on everything from boxing (in her nonfiction) and literary fiction to mystery and horror and has won awards in all those fields.
Tanith Lee might be best known for her lush fantasy fiction, but she also writes science fiction, and her horror packs a wallop.
A.R. Morlan has written science fiction, fantasy, erotic fiction, and horror throughout her thirty year career.
After the rousing success of the Kickstarter for Women Destroy Science Fiction!, I was approached by John Joseph Adams, publisher/editor of Nightmare Magazine, about editing a “Women Destroy Horror!” issue. Unlike the never-ending brouhaha about women destroying science fiction, there have been few overt complaints about women destroying horror. Aside from the occasional testosterone-fueled diatribe from those who seem to think that one-third of a table of contents of stories by women equals a majority by them. Or by those who have gotten negative reviews of their fiction by women. But how could I refuse this opportunity to showcase horror writers whose work I love and who happen to be women?
There’s a totally unexpected commonality to three of the eight stories I’ve acquired for this issue that I won’t give away. But the tones, characters, and modes of storytelling are so different that I suspect you readers won’t mind. In any case, I hope you’ll enjoy all the stories and will seek out more fiction by their authors.
A big thank you to John Joseph Adams and to all the fiction contributors. Also to Lisa Morton, who in editing the nonfiction has brought together a group of powerful female voices expressing their diverse experiences of working in horror. And a final shout out to Wendy Wagner for her herding skills and her advice.
• • • •
Lisa Morton, Nonfiction Editor
When John Joseph Adams invited me to be the nonfiction editor for the special “Women Destroy Horror!” edition of Nightmare, I (of course) accepted, and immediately thought about what I wanted. At the top of my wish list were interviews with Joyce Carol Oates and American Horror Story’s Jessica Sharzer, and I remain flabbergasted that both accepted (and grateful, especially given the wonderful and revealing answers they provided).
But I also had a list of things I didn’t want. Well, okay, not a list, exactly, because there was only one item on it: I didn’t want any sort of overview of contemporary female horror authors. My reasons for this:
There were an awful lot of these lists floating around in February, now apparently known forever as “Women in Horror Month.” There are always a lot of these lists floating around, especially whenever the question of women writing horror arises. There are so many talented female authors currently working in the genre that it would be virtually impossible to provide any sort of comprehensive list. There’s not much to learn from a name on a list.
However, I had one reason sitting firmly atop all the others for why I didn’t want to include one of these lists: They always smack to me of desperation.
If that sounds harsh, let me explain: First, these lists usually come in response to either another list of “All-Time Greatest Horror Writers” that fails to include a single female name, or they’re an answer to yet one more shortsighted all-caps-using cave-dweller shrieking into the cyber-ether, “BUT WOMEN CAN’T WRITE HORROR.”
Now, I certainly understand the intention to school these fools; heck, I’ve probably done it a time or two myself. But—and I can say this as a woman horror author who has appeared on a few of these lists—at some point it becomes tiresome. Yes, the ego boost is nice... yes, anything that brings attention to these voices is great... but how long do we have to keep doing this? I’m willing to bet every woman writer in the genre would prefer to be discussed alongside her male peers, not in some segregated list stuck off by itself somewhere. I’m sure Mary Author would rather see a thoughtful review of her work or a comparison to Joe Writer than another catch-all list that will probably mean nothing to anyone who is not one of the authors named in the list.
Yes, I know women are under-reviewed in all genres, including mainstream fiction. Yes, I know these are idealistic dreams that are still off in some perfect future. But I hope this helps to explain why I chose not to include that “there are lots of great women writing horror right now” list.
I did, however, believe it was important to talk about contemporary female writers, as long as it was done with some depth and wasn’t attempting to be in any way comprehensive. Hence, you’ll find a roundtable interview herein with four intriguing writers: Linda Addison, Kate Jonez, Helen Marshall, and Rena Mason. Beyond the fact that I love their work, I did have particular reasons for choosing these four writers: I knew Linda would provide insight as both an author and poet, and also as an African American writer; Rena fascinated me because she seems to have gone from zero to sixty (winning the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel for her superb The Evolutionist) in mere seconds; and I knew that both Kate and Helen were not only acclaimed authors but also had experience with two of the best genre publishers out there (Omnium Gatherum and Chizine, respectively). I think this interview accomplished what it set out to do: Provide an eye-opening look into the experience of being a female horror author.
For the articles, I wanted to look at women in horror from three different perspectives. First, Lucy A. Snyder contributed a wonderful historical overview of women writers in the genre—this is no mere list, but a thoughtful and informative work that ingeniously segues into a discussion of just how we should define the term “classic.”
To cover female characters (as compared to their creators), I approached Maria Alexander, who I know as not just a splendid writer, but also a genuine asskicker in her own right (Maria is an accomplished swordswoman). I asked Maria to write something about the portrayal of horror’s action heroines in film, and I couldn’t be happier with the resulting piece, which deftly dissects the ways in which filmmakers and writers rightly (and wrongly) approach the creation of protagonists.
And lastly, I hoped to provide a more personal look at the special trials a woman writer might face in the genre, and Chesya Burke sent back an extraordinary piece that had me squirming and flinching in both horror and (unfortunately) recognition.
I’d just like to offer a final word of thanks to John, to Wendy Wagner, and to all the fantastic talents I’ve mentioned above who agreed to take part in this special issue of Nightmare. Now, if you really want to support women writers in horror, finish reading the rest of this magazine and then go out and buy some of their books. Unless you’re that Neanderthal screaming into the internet wind who just isn’t interested in hearing another point of view, I’m betting you won’t be disappointed.Here's the steps you will need to go through if you are applying for a US visa online. Courtesy: YouTube/IIP State
A BRITISH newlywed couple arriving in the United States for their dream honeymoon claim they spent 26 hours in airport detention before being put on a plane back to London “because the groom is Muslim”.
Natasha Politakis, 29, and Ali Gul, 32, forked out $15,000 for a two-week trip to Los Angeles, Hawaii and Las Vegas, The Sun reports.
But the newlyweds of Enfield, North London, claim they were locked up inside an immigration detention at Los Angeles’ LAX airport for 26 hours upon touchdown in the US.
The couple, who said they were treated “like criminals”, say they were never told why they were refused entry but suspect it is because of Ali’s Turkish origin.
When they arrived in Los Angeles for the first day of their trip, which included later stops in Hawaii and Las Vegas, they were told they would need to be interviewed for five minutes — but were detained for more than a day before being flown back to England.
“I am in utter shock that this has happened,” Natasha said.
“We had just got married, we were on our way to our honeymoon as excited as anything and never expected that we would be deported.
“We were treated like criminals and we had all the relevant documentation and answered all their questions.
“It’s not okay to treat people like that.
“As far as we knew before we left everything was fine, but as soon as we got there they wouldn’t let us in.
“We believe since Trump was elected, they took one look at his name, thought he was Muslim and didn’t let him in.”
The couple claim they were refused a shower and had their possessions confiscated for the entire period of their detention and were only given their phones back once they were on UK soil.
They allege that when they tried to find out why they were detained, authorities handcuffed them before escorting them onto a flight back to London.
“As we were going through immigration in LA, they looked at our passports and asked us to go into a side room to answer some questions,” Natasha said.
“They stuck us in this detention centre in the airport, stripped us of all our possessions and didn’t let us shower, get a coffee or change our clothes for 26 hours.
“We had absolutely no idea what was going on. When I tried to find out they put handcuffs on us.
“After 26 hours they refused us entry into the country and escorted us onto the next flight home.
“They even told the air stewardess we weren’t allowed our phones back until we landed in the UK.
“Finally when we landed back in the UK on the May 24 we were allowed to speak to our families and they were in absolute hysterics having not heard from us in two days.”
The couple had two weddings earlier this year, a registrar wedding in April for Ali’s Turkish family and then a big church wedding with a reception at the Marriott on May 6.
Two weeks later they jetted off on their honeymoon and now have stamps in their visa stating they were “refused in accordance with INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] section 217”.
Ali, an estate agent, holds a British passport but his business partner attempted to apply for eight ESTAs — American tourist visas — for his bucks’ trip but all were rejected.
The pair have been left £7000 ($15,000) out of pocket for a honeymoon they were never allowed on and were told if they wanted to complain they would have to contact the US Embassy, but have struggled to get an appointment.
Natasha, who managed to book a last minute holiday to Mexico, said: “We’re trying to get the money back through our insurance but it never should have happened in the first place.
“All we want is answers as to why our entire trip was ruined.”
A US embassy spokesman told Sun Online: “US Customs and Border Protection welcomes more than a million passengers arriving to the United States every day.
“The religion, faith, or spiritual beliefs of an international traveller are not determining factors about his/her admissibility into the US.
“Under US immigration law applicants for admission bear the burden of proof to establish that they are clearly eligible to enter the United States.
“In order to demonstrate that they are admissible, the applicant must overcome ALL grounds of inadmissibility.
“Specific grounds of inadmissibility can be found in INA section 212(a) and list more than 60 grounds of inadmissibility divided into several major categories, including health-related, prior criminal convictions, security reasons, public charge, labour certification, illegal entrants and immigration violations, documentation requirements, and miscellaneous grounds.”
This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.by Anne Helen Petersen
Theodosia Goodman grew up in Cincinnati, the child of middle-class Jewish immigrants. Her father was a tailor; her mother kept house. She went to high school, she went to two years of college. She was a middling actress with middling looks, age 30, stuck in the Yiddish theater circuit, with a bit role in the occasional film. She was wholly unremarkable — one of hundreds of women working toward the same end.
And then, in 1915, totally out of nowhere, she became THE BIGGEST SEX SYMBOL IN THE WORLD. As the star of A Fool There Was, she embodied the cinematic “vamp” — the evil, predatory woman who seduces men with her dark ways, sucks him dry, and leaves him for ruin. Her name was no longer Theodosia Goodman, but Theda Bara — an anagram, naturally, for “ARAB DEATH.” Her mother was a French actress, her father was an Italian sculptor, yet she had been born “in the shadow of the Sphinx.” She dabbled in the Occult; she communed with dark spirits. She had been reincarnated several times and lunched on lettuce and raw beef. Girl even became her own verb: to pull a “ThedaBara” was to “seduce and destroy.” Offscreen, Bara was her cinematic character made flesh: an alluring, vampish creature, occupying the liminal space between this world and the next. Put differently, Bara was the most blatantly absurd and exquisite of the silent0-era studios’ creations.
Bara’s extravagant image was the source of her fame, but it likewise shackled her to a very specific set of behaviors — and ways of appearing in public and on the screen. And like all star images, its potency, and its particular social resonance, faded with time. By 1920, Bara’s career was effectively over, and today, only one of her major films remains intact. But for a brief moment in cinematic history, her image functioned as a volatile conduit for displaced female desire. Bara’s image was the immaculate conflation of sex and evil, and in an era still governed by rigid codes of moral, spiritual, and social behavior, it was absolutely irresistible.
But let’s be clear: This image was unlike any publicity concoction we’ve ever seen. Sure, Hollywood regularly erased stars’ histories, but rarely as boldly, and with such little concern for credibility, as it did with Bara’s. Fox didn’t just give Bara a new name or a new ethnicity, it made her a creature of the underworld. Sure, part of this was just good, old-fashioned publicity playfulness, with the majority of the American public in on the joke. But part of it — namely, the conflation of ethnicity with sexuality and “otherness” — was a manifestation of the Western obsession with “Orientalism,” sometimes known as “white people fetishizing Eastern cultures to reaffirm their own whiteness.” Her success, in other words, was part of a large-scale desire to look at otherness while simultaneously disavowing it in oneself — a complicated psychic process not unlike that of watching most reality television.
Today, Bara’s image seems crazy-weird. But she was just one in a long line of othered sexual figures — a line that extends, albeit in slightly different manifestations, to the present day. And while Bara was neither the first nor the last of her type, I can guarantee she’s all you’ll think of the next time you see nipple tassels.
The details of Bara’s “discovery” are murky. What’s clear is that she was working as an actress in New York for some time, and at 30 years old, was considered washed-up — which, of course, was probably part of the reason that she and others shaved five years off her age. As Fox prepared to cast A Fool There Was, director Frank Powell suggested Bara, who was then going by the stage name “Theodosia De Coppet” to elide her Jewish surname. Whether Powell “discovered” her during a casting a call or simply noticed her turn as an extra in The Stain (1914) has been the matter of intense fan debate but ultimately matters little. There she was, there he was; henceforth, there Theda Bara was.
Of course, Powell and Fox had a financial impetus for casting an unknown: Over the course of the ’10s, the “players” of the screen had become bonafide stars and, as such, could and did demand higher and higher salaries. Fox was cash-strapped — in fact, it wasn’t (yet) even a real studio. By casting an unknown, it made a wager: Maybe the name behind the film was nothing, but then again, maybe the role of the man-eating vamp would make anyone who played that role a star. It’s like Twilight, minus the chastity and bourgeois values.
Like Twilight, A Fool There Was was pure derivative. It was based on the play of the same name by Porter Emerson Browne, which was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire” …
A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you or I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair —
(Even as you or I!)
… which was in turn inspired by Philip Burne-Jones’ painting of a vampire:
I think you can guess the general curves of the plot, but here goes:
1. Married man is married.
2. Unmarried woman is sexual. Also wears too much velvet, fur, and satin — the 1910s version of dressing slutty.
3. Unmarried woman beguiles married man using her dark, sexual ways; takes all he has; leaves him in ruin.
4. And A Fool That Married Man Was Indeed.
Those are the explicit plot points, but the implicit suggestions are even more scandalous, namely: 1) Men secretly like domination — even seek it out! 2) Women are capable of this type of sexual and psychological domination; 3) Women pleasure in this type of domination.
Imagine the disgust when people realized that male AND female audiences were flocking to this film — think of the incensed Huffington Post editorials and explanatory Slate pieces manically proliferating in its wake!
Bara is commonly cited as the first sex symbol and the first vamp. In truth, her image was just the first to combine and codify “vampish” sexuality on the big screen, and she had clearly been modeled after Sarah Bernhardt, who’d been beguiling Western audiences for decades.
Bernhardt was French, the child of an illegitimate union, and “othered” via her Jewishness — all characteristics that Fox’s publicists attempted to recreate in Bara’s image. Bernhardt’s greatest roles — as Cleopatra, as Phèdre, as Theodora the Empress of Byzantium — invoked and sparked public fascination with the Orient. Her most famous role was, in fact, one she never played: The lead in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, seducing the crap out of John the Baptist, was so scandalous that even Bernhardt turned it down (Bara did not). But Salome and what she represented would nevertheless remain yoked to Bernhardt, fundamental to the wanton, Orientalized, overarchingly sinful sexuality she represented.
Off-stage, Bernhardt acted the part. She wore “Oriental” clothing (read: Chinese-inspired robes and hats) in public and lived in what sounds a lot like the place where Jasmine hung out in the first third of Aladdin. If that sounds offensive, that’s partly the point — these weren’t real approximations of Eastern culture, but Western appropriations of it. Bernhardt was also a bit of a man-eater: She married only once, but spent much of her time in liaisons with powerful, beautiful, and artistic men and, according to rumor, several women.
Yet Bernhardt was always a white woman playing the exoticized other. Granted, her Jewish heritage was well-known, but she was nevertheless marked as European rather than an actual product of the Orient. This distinction was crucial: It was one thing to play-act and quite another to embody, a point driven home by the continued success of men and women who “play” at fatness, unruliness, generalized abjection, queerness, and ethnicity … and the enduring barriers for those who live those identities.
Bernhardt was “The Divine Sarah”; Bara became “The Divine Theda.” In interviews, Bara claimed that she, too, was a veteran of the French stage, and had even been “trained” by Bernhardt when she was in Paris, where Isadora Duncan also taught her how to walk in the “serpentine fashion.” In reality, Bara had never been to France, let alone met Bernhardt — but the association was complete. As film scholar Gaylyn Studlar points out, “Bernhardt’s performances, like Bara’s, violated the dearly held Victorian belief that women were primarily spiritual rather than sexual or physical beings.” In other words, TOO BAD, STUFFY VICTORIANS: VAGINAS > SPIRITS.
Both stars had exotic sexuality at the heart of their images — and while Bernhardt had managed to deftly wield that exoticism over the course of a decades-long stage and screen career, Bara’s image was less elegant, in part because studio press agents have never been particularly adept at subtlety.
Case in point: When Fox released A Fool There Was, press agents hosted an event in Chicago to “introduce” Bara to stardom. They explained her name, her heritage, her dabblings in the Occult, her history in France, the “birth in the shadow of the Sphnix,” etc. etc. A press conference! It’s like LeBron’s “The Decision”: both forsook the state of Ohio in favor of bombast.
And just as LeBron has gone on to weirdly endearing Samsung commercials and National Championships, A Fool There Was became a huge, mind-blowing success. Some historians argue that its success allowed Fox to become a full-fledged studio — which, nearly a century later, now fuels Rupert Murdoch, News Corp., and Fox News, all of whom obviously love the Orient. Point is, Fox wasn’t selling subtlety. They were selling sex. And as a Columbia instructor who was obviously my spiritual academic grandmother once told Motion Picture Magazine, “most girls are good, but good girls do not want to see other good girls on the screen … through the medium of Theda Bara they can do her deeds and live her life.”
And for about three years, they did. Between 1915 and 1918, she appeared in thirty-three films. The Galley Slave, Sin, Destruction, The Serpent, The Tiger Woman, The Rose of Blood, The Forbidden Path, When a Woman Sins — you get the jist. The fan magazines called her “The Arch-Torpedo of Domesticity,” “The Queen of Vampires,” “The Wickedest Woman in the World,” “Pugatory’s Ivory Angel,” “The Devil’s Handmaiden,” “The Priestess of Sin,” and — my personal favorite — “The Ishmaeline of Domesticity.” Fox paid a famous illustrator to offer “expert” analysis, claiming “in her dark eyes lurks the lure of the Vamp; in her every sinuous movement there is a pantherish suggestion that is wonderfully evil.” The lunch of raw beef and lettuce, the dabblings in the occult, the faux-French-accent — it was all the product of the press agents, the gossip press, and Bara herself. So, too, were the pictures like the one below — one of at least three existing photos of Bara just hanging out with skeletons.
And then there was the amazing stuff attributed to Bara:
You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soul — you wish to know if it is reflected in my face.
I mean, that is some great copy. And it arrived at a crucial point in Hollywood history, during the transition from “picture personalities” — whose off-screen images were exact mirrors of their on-screen images — and “stars,” whose off-screen images complemented and extended, but did not necessarily replicate the images onscreen. It was a weird, transitional time, kind of like the beginning of Twitter: Stars and their people didn’t quite know how to wield it, and next thing you know there’s a picture of Demi Moore’s ass in white cotton panties for all to see.
When Bara first became a public figure, her image had to reflect, even exaggerate, her onscreen character. But as time passed, it became less necessary for Bara to be, well, an actual vampire and more important that she resemble a creature of consumption, an object of potential romance: less supernatural, more department store. In other words, the sort of figure the fan magazines craved.
Thus, in the midst of the vamping and skeleton-posing, the publicity department started to mobilize a second, competing valence of Bara’s star image. A 1917 article in Motion Picture Magazine reaffirmed her as “The Divine Theda,” claiming that ancient Egyptian inscriptions prophesized her arrival as a woman “who shall seem a snake to most men.” Yet this woman “shall be good and virtuous.” I call bullshit! That’s some tacked on nonsense right there! Still, in “Theda, Misunderstood Vampire,” the authors claimed that Bara’s greatest wish was to “play the part of a sweet, essentially feminine woman,” while a “Peek Into Their Boudoirs” showed Bara living in what amounted to an old grandma house filled with antiques — certainly no den of iniquity.
In essence, Fox wanted fans to undergo their own weird process of belief and denial: they should watch Bara onscreen and subsume themselves in the belief that she was, in fact, her character … but simultaneously understand that she was not, in fact, a blood-sucking, man-eating, whore-monster. The obvious conflict between these images, however, bordered on the ridiculous, even at the time. The Los Angeles Times took up this ridiculousness, satirizing how she and her sister, also an actress, simply spent their days at home, reading Little Women and feeding the chicks in their backyard.
Pausing between chapters of Little Women.
So Bara was a good girl? Maybe? But what about her past? How could you reconcile the Sphnix/Raw Beef with this new narrative without admitting to publicity manipulation? I mean, you just couldn’t. Photoplay had been in on the joke from the very beginning — in 1915, just after Bara’s rise to fame, a tongue-in-cheek columnist proclaimed “I wish to believe, I am going to believe, I do believe that Allah is Allah, and that Bara is Bara; that the ivory angel of purgatory is an Eastern star, born under the shadow of the sphinx,” dismissing “those stupid people who insist that Theda Bara’s right name is Theodosia Goodman and that she is, by, of, and from Cincinnati.” The New York Times reported that Bara’s family had filed to legally change their last name to “Bara.” And in 1918, Photoplay made its doubts official, asking “Does Theda Bara Believe Her Own Press Agent?”
In other words, people got it. And not just people within the movie business: For every story of a woman not allowing her children to go near Bara on the street lest they succumb to her ways, there’s evidence, like the story above, that shows fans were in the joke. |
,000 fee raised $70 to $80 million annually for the U.S.
The 2010 legislation was effective for five years and lapsed on Oct. 1, the start of the new federal fiscal year. The spending bill fee approved early today is good for 10 years, through Sept. 30, 2025. The initial $2,000 fee has had no apparent impact on the demand for visas, which has been rising.
Republican presidential contenders Donald Trump and, more recently, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) both want major changes in the H-1B program.
Cruz wants a minimum wage of $110,000 for H-1B workers, and Trump is offering a formula for increasing the prevailing wage scales. Among Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a critic of the visa.
Lawmakers, including Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), want to prioritize H-1B distribution by wages, among other things, favoring firms that offer the highest salaries. Several reform bills, including one from Cruz and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), are pending in the Senate.
The L-1 fee for companies with 50% of their workers on a visa is $4,500, according to the bill.“I’ve often thought it unfair that women are expected to stay at home when there’s a fight to be won. If a woman has the strength to bear a child, she can swing a sword as well as any man.” ~ Karen Hawkins
Fierce women do exist. In fact, they outnumber the fierce men! Spooky Mistwallow just came out with this dress for her RP line, Mirage, and I put it on and felt my woman warrior emerge. Yeah, I know a warrior needs to be shielded and covered but this one is so lithe and fast she can fly through the air and get out without damage. The textures on the dress are so lush, especially the gold embroidery at the hem and bodice and the shape is sexy and my girl can be sexy and strong all at once.
Knee-high tie-up gladiator heels from Harry Hyx make the look even fiercer and sexier especially with serpent arm bracelets from Sissy Pessoa. I ran to the I Love Role Play gachas get gorgeous eyes from Filomena Quinnell and a raid horn from Thord Karu. I lucked out on my first try with both! And yes, fierce women can wear nail polish on their fingernails and toes—this one of Zozicon’s latest with beautiful spring textures and colors from the Pre-Release Gacha Garden.
My skin is PeachieMuah’s latest for her doll series. I can imagine this skin could be a perfect doll-like skin on a different shape but on mine it turns out to be a little more sophisticated, despite the dimples. I love the liner around the eyes and their shape with well-groomed brows and a slight blush. My hair is a two-piece mesh beauty from Morphine Janick. I love the blonde texture and having it in two pieces allows the option to not wear the braid and just have the wind blown look.
“I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.” ~ Margaret Mead
Hair: [monso] My Hair – Elsa/ Light Blonde by Morphine Janick for [monso]
Skin: (FreshFace) Belle Natural _ Smaller breasts by PeachieMuah for Fresh Face *
Eyes:!Musa! Agate Eyes Wheat by Filomena Quinnell for Musa, available at We Love Roleplay
Dress: =Mirage= Ashwari Dress – Dark – Passion by Spooky Mistwallow for =Mirage= Arabian Treasure Company *
Sword: [HOT] Medieval Sword (In Right Hand) by Reynevan3
Hands: Slink Mesh Hands (av) Bag Right and Slink Mesh Hands (av) Casual Left by Siddean Munro for Slink
Nail appliers: -{ZOZ}- Magenta Purple – Fingernail Hud Single by Zozicon for ZOZ, available at the Pre-Release Gacha Garden *
Bracelets: Baiastice_Snake Bracelet-red gold by Sissy Pessoa for Baiastice
Horn: Primus.X Raid Horn 1.2 (female) (silver) by Thord Karu for Primus Weapons, available at We Love Roleplay
Feet: Slink Female Feet (AvEnhance) – Mid by Siddean Munro for Slink
Shoes: ISON – lace-up gladiator sandals (plum) by Harry Hyx for Ison
Poses by Rogan Diesel for DieselWorks Animations *The Permata child enrichment programme helmed by prime minister's wife Rosmah Mansor now has an unlikely defender in the form of a Selangor DAP assemblyperson.
Damansara Utama representative Yeo Bee Yin said the government’s investment in early childhood care and education (ECCE) has statistically proven to benefit tax payers by lowering social welfare costs, decreasing crime, raising tax revenue and having the highest return of investment for human capital development.
"Therefore, any government initiative to develop ECCE, including Permata, should not be brushed off immediately just because the person who advocates it is not likable," Yeo said in a statement today.
"Whether Permata gets international recognition or not does not matter. What matters is that Putrajaya makes and executes a comprehensive and holistic plan to ensure that good quality childcare is available at an affordable price.
"(This is) so that all our children will have equal opportunity to learn and develop in the early age, regardless of the income levels of the familes," she added.
In a Twitter post later, she added that supporting early childhood education and care is not the same as supporting Rosmah.
@malaysiakini read my full statement. defending investment in early childhood care & education (ECCE) is not d same as defending Rosmah. https://t.co/vsrKWOb2T3 — Yeo Bee Yin (@yeobeeyin) September 29, 2016
Yeo was responding to all the buzz surrounding Permata after Rosmah was supposed to receive the 'Lead by Example' award, from the Antiquities Coalition, for the programme's accomplishments.
However, Permata was removed from the list of honourees after the Antiquities Coalition was quizzed by the media about Permata's sources of funding, a spokesperson from the organisation said on Monday.
The award was deferred to next year, but the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said in a statement on Tuesday that Rosmah and Permata had declined it.
The PMO said Rosmah made the decision to avoid further distraction from the important work for the children of Malaysia.
Lack of strategic direction by Putrajaya
Despite defending the Permata initiative, Yeo lamented that despite the generous annual funding, there was a general "lack of strategic direction by Putrajaya in ECCE development".
"There is no plan to ensure there is good quality childcare and pre-school education at an affordable price for all Malaysian children," she added.
She said childcare expenses, especially in the Klang Valley where it can be as high as RM2,000 a month, are a burden for young families.
This, Yeo said, results in women having to leave the workforce to take care of their children, which has a negative impact on household income.
This was also an economic loss for Malaysia, as there are now more women with tertiary education qualifications than men.
Yeo proposed that the government remedies the situation by following the example of Singapore, Australia, Finland other Scandinavian countries, where childcare is subsidised.Federal regulators sued Bank of America Corp. on Tuesday, accusing the company of failing to disclose “staggering financial losses” at Merrill Lynch before shareholders approved a combination of the companies.
The lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in U.S. District Court in Manhattan sought an order requiring Bank of America to pay a civil penalty for not telling shareholders it was losing $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Bank of America spokesman Robert Stickler called the charges “totally without merit.”
He said the company believes it provided sufficient and appropriate disclosure to shareholders prior to their vote approving the combination.
“We look forward to presenting the facts in court,” Stickler said. “What we would note is that there were no charges against individuals and no charges of fraud. We were pleased with that.”
The SEC said the information about the losses should have been announced when it was learned after the companies publicly announced their deal in September 2008. They did not obtain shareholder approval until three months later.
Federal laws governing such transactions require that losses be revealed if they were not already reflected in Merrill’s quarterly reports or other filings.
The SEC and Bank of America, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., are already scheduled to go to trial March 1 after the SEC previously accused the bank of failing to disclose billions of dollars in bonuses paid at Merrill Lynch after the acquisition was completed a year ago.
In the new lawsuit, the SEC said Bank of America “learned of staggering losses at Merrill” in October and November of 2008.
The agency said the bank consulted its lawyers who “erroneously and negligently concluded that no disclosure was necessary because the projected quarterly loss was within the range of losses that Merrill had sustained in the preceding five quarters.”
Those losses included a $4.5 billion loss by Merrill in October 2008. The deal was approved by shareholders at a Dec. 5, 2008 meeting. Several days later, Bank of America received an updated report reflecting a forecasted net loss of more than $12 billion at Merrill, the SEC said.
It said the full fourth quarter 2008 results at Merrill were announced on Jan. 16, 2009, nearly six weeks after the shareholder vote and two weeks after the deal had closed.
A day after net loss of $15.3 billion for the quarter was reported, Bank of America stock dropped by nearly 30 percent, the SEC noted.
Bank of America shares fell 72 cents, or 4.3 percent, to $16.21 in afternoon trading.Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump's choice for attorney general, faces a Senate confirmation hearing in January. Already, Democrats have revived 30-year-old allegations of racism against the Alabama senator. But in making those accusations anew, they have also shed light on an extraordinary backstory in which Joe Biden, now vice president but three decades ago the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, distorted Sessions' record, and his views on race, in ways that resonate to this day.
In 1986, Sessions was the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Alabama. Nominated for a federal judgeship by Ronald Reagan, he encountered bitter resistance, led by Biden, in the Judiciary Committee. After extended hearings, the committee, in an extremely rare occurrence at the time, rejected Sessions' nomination on the grounds that he was "insensitive" on issues of race.
A key witness at the hearings was a Justice Department lawyer named Gerald Hebert, an initially reluctant participant who was pushed onto the hearings' center stage by Biden's staff. Hebert accused Sessions of making racially biased remarks during their conversations while working together on civil rights cases in Alabama. Now, with Sessions facing confirmation again, Hebert has spoken out against the nomination — he says the prospect of an Attorney General Sessions "should make every American shudder" — and could once again be a crucial voice as Democrats try to deal a damaging blow to the new Trump team.
But what did Hebert actually tell the Senate Judiciary Committee 30 years ago? A look at the testimony — the transcript from the several days of hearings stretches to 565 pages — shows that Hebert repeatedly heaped praise on Sessions, not just for Sessions' honesty, forthrightness and friendship, but also for the help and cooperation Sessions offered to Justice Department civil rights lawyers who sometimes felt that other law enforcement officials were indifferent or hostile to their cause.
Other career attorneys from the Department's Civil Rights Division told the committee much the same thing, in equally positive terms.
Together, their testimony, in a dusty old volume of Judiciary Committee proceedings, creates a far more positive and nuanced picture of Sessions than Biden, other Democrats, and some press accounts have suggested. It will be something to remember when the inevitable attacks on Sessions escalate in coming weeks.
Hebert today is director of the voting rights and redistricting program at an organization called the Campaign Legal Center. In 1986, he was a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, working in the Voting Section. The Sessions nomination was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Biden was leading the effort to stop it.
Hebert, based in Washington, worked on a number of cases with Sessions, beginning in 1981, when Sessions had just become U.S. attorney. The southern district of Alabama was one of the busiest, if not the busiest, site for Justice Department litigation under the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. Hebert traveled to Mobile, where Sessions was based, on several occasions to work on cases.
The two got along well. "I consider him a friend of mine, more than just a U.S. attorney in the southern district," Hebert told the Judiciary Committee at the 1986 hearings. "I call him when I go into Mobile even if I am not there necessarily on departmental business."
Sessions was an engaging, opinionated man who liked to talk politics and government, Hebert said. Sessions was also prone to "pop off" on occasion — a phrase used both by Hebert and by Sessions to describe himself. The two spent a good deal of time talking. "He enjoys discourse in his office so you can just sort of roll your sleeves up and say…let's talk one lawyer to another or from one person to the other," Hebert told an investigator working for Biden.
In one of their early conversations, in 1981, Hebert told the committee, Sessions said something startling. "Mr. Sessions and I were in his office, and we were talking about different judges' handling of cases," Hebert testified. "I mentioned to him that one of the judges had reportedly said…that a lawyer who handled civil rights cases in Mobile was either a traitor to his race or a disgrace to his race."
"And what is your recollection of Mr. Sessions' response or comment to your statement?" asked Biden.
"As I recall, he said, well, he probably is," Hebert answered. (At other times, Hebert has said that Sessions' response was, "Well, maybe he is.")
Hebert also told Reginald Govan, the investigator for Biden, that he had heard Sessions refer to the NAACP and ACLU as "un-American." "He said that he thought they did more harm than good when they were trying to force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them," Hebert said of Sessions.
Senators questioned Sessions at length about both accusations. On the "traitor to his race" question, Sessions said he recalled the conversation with Hebert, and did not deny Hebert's account, but did not know exactly what was said. "I have wrestled with that to try to recall that instance, because I respect the lawyer referred to a great deal," Sessions testified. "I do not know why I would have said that, and I certainly do not believe that."
On the second matter, Sessions explained that he was referring to NAACP and ACLU positions on the Sandinistas and the conflict in Nicaragua — positions that strayed far beyond the organizations' core missions — and his opinion that those foreign policy stances were un-American.
The two statements became the core of the case against Sessions, mentioned every time an adversary accused him of racism or racial insensitivity.
At the time, though, Hebert said he did not intend either anecdote to become a part of the public debate. In a confidential interview months earlier, Hebert told the "traitor" and "un-American" stories to a lawyer for the American Bar Association as that group did its routine evaluation of judicial nominees. Sometime in the first week of March, Hebert was in his office at the Justice Department when he was surprised to receive a call from Govan, the Biden investigator, who was preparing for Sessions' hearing, scheduled to begin March 13. In the call, Hebert did not relate the stories about Sessions, on the grounds that what he had told the ABA had been in confidence. (Hebert later testified that at the time he spoke to the ABA, "My impression was that they were going to be confidential remarks and that they would go no further than that.")
But they went a lot further than that. On March 12, the day before Sessions' hearing, Govan called Hebert to say that a car would pick him up in 30 minutes to come give a deposition, and that he would testify publicly at Sessions' hearing the next day.
So Hebert talked to Govan on the 12th. The morning of the 13th, hearing day, Hebert said, he heard his "confidential" remarks about Sessions broadcast on National Public Radio. "I felt bad about that," Hebert later recalled. Hebert, as well as Sessions himself, was quickly learning how Biden and other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee operated.
When Hebert finally sat in the witness chair, he confirmed what he had told Govan earlier, but he also described a much different Jeff Sessions than the one Democrats wanted to portray.
"I have very mixed feelings about my testimony today," Hebert said. "In conversations over the last couple of years — many of which, I understand, have been read into the record in these proceedings — Mr. Sessions and I have engaged in a number of conversations on subjects that touched racial issues and civil rights issues."
"Those comments are now a matter of public record here, and I stand by those as having been made," Hebert continued. "But by the same token, I have prosecuted cases that are highly sensitive and very controversial and, quite frankly, unpopular in the southern district [of Alabama]. And yet I have needed Mr. Sessions' help in those cases and he has provided that help every step of the way."
Hebert said he considered Sessions a friend, more than just a colleague, and more than that, a person he could trust.
"I believe that when Jeff Sessions says he's going to do something, he is a man of his word and he will do it," Hebert said. "And so if his testimony before the committee is that he would follow the law faithfully, I personally would believe him."
Hebert said not all U.S. attorneys in states covered by the Voting Rights Act were entirely cooperative with Justice Department litigation. "We have had considerable difficulty with several U.S. attorneys in cases we have wanted to bring," Hebert told the committee. "We have not experienced that difficulty in the cases that I have handled with Mr. Sessions. In fact, quite the contrary."
The day before, when Biden's investigator, Govan, asked if Hebert had ever had any trouble with Sessions' office, Hebert answered, "No, no. In fact, I've been able to call up on the phone and ask Jeff if I could dictate a paper to his secretary that needed to be filed within the hour and he's been willing to help me out. That just happened within the last two months."
Hebert was not the only Justice Department official to testify to Sessions' active role in civil rights cases. For example, Daniel Bell, deputy chief of the criminal section in the Civil Rights Division who first met Sessions when Sessions was an assistant U.S. attorney in the late 1970s, called Sessions "quite helpful" in civil rights prosecutions.
Questioned by Govan, Bell described a notorious case that rocked the Mobile area. "The particular case I tried, the government had indicted the sheriff of Mobile County and eight of his deputies for deliberately setting up an ambush and murdering a black inmate, an extremely unpopular case in Mobile, and there were a number of people, even in the United States Attorney's office, who were not too eager to be that friendly to the prosecution, especially a couple of Washington-based lawyers. And Mr. Sessions [was] very helpful to the prosecution." Sessions, Bell said, was willing to discuss "in great detail tactical questions and other questions concerning the case."
Bell mentioned that he had worked with Sessions in some way or another on about 10 cases. "I never got the slightest impression that he wanted to do anything less than a full investigation of each."
Govan did not seem as interested in Sessions' zeal for civil rights enforcement as he was in allegations Sessions might have said something that betrayed racial bias.
"Have you ever heard Mr. Sessions make remarks that you considered racially insensitive?" Govan asked Bell.
"Not at all," Bell answered. "Not at all. As a matter of fact, my impression of Mr. Sessions is that he is very eager to pursue criminal civil rights cases, and he certainly was at the beginning of my acquaintance with him."
Govan persisted. "During the time that you interacted with Mr. Sessions, have you ever heard him make a remark that in any way, shape, or form you considered to be insensitive on racial matters, even though the remark was said in jest?"
"No, absolutely not," Bell said.
"Did you ever hear him make any remarks in jest that concerned racial issues?"
"No, I have not," Bell answered.
Another Justice Department lawyer, Barry Kowalski, who was deputy chief of the Civil Rights Division's criminal section, described working with Sessions in the prosecution of two Klansmen who lynched a young black man. "During the course of this case I became convinced that [Sessions] was dedicated to this criminal civil rights prosecution, that he was eager to see that justice was done in the area of criminal civil rights prosecutions, and I have no reservations at all whatsoever about his dedication to that proposition based on my experience with him."
Yet another Justice Department lawyer, trial attorney Albert Glenn, who worked on the lynching case, called Sessions "fully cooperative and fully supportive in everything that we have done in this investigation, from the beginning to the end."
The picture was pretty clear: U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions was a vigorous enforcer of civil rights law who worked with Justice Department lawyers on prosecutions even when they were unpopular with the public or his own colleagues. And yet the remarks that Gerald Hebert testified about, the "traitor to his race" and "un-American" allegations, continued to shape the image of Sessions presented at the hearing and in the media.
At one point near the end of Hebert's testimony, Republican Sen. Jeremiah Denton asked Hebert, "Do you think Mr. Sessions is a racist?"
"No, I do not," Hebert answered.
At another point, Hebert said, "I am troubled by the fact that there is an image based on statements that I have made that Mr. Sessions is a racist. I do not really know whether he is or he is not. I probably ought to know, but I do not. I really cannot say. He has made some comments that show racial insensitivity, but by the same token he has not let whatever philosophy he might have or the comments that he has made affect his ability to do the job as U.S. attorney and to help the Civil Rights Division."
"I do know, though, that he is somebody who has been there when we have needed him."
At the end of Hebert's appearance, Denton had a simple wrap-up question. "If Mr. Sessions says he will be fair as a judge, would you believe him?"
"I guess in the courtroom we would say this question has been asked and answered," Hebert responded. "He is a man of his word and when he says something, I believe him. And if he says that — and I think I said in response to you, Sen. Denton, that if he says he is going to enforce the law, and that he may disagree with the law but he is going to enforce it, I would believe him."
Whatever else Hebert said, that was certainly a strong testament to Sessions' character. In the end, though, it didn't matter. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, eager to stop a Reagan nominee, voted to kill the Sessions nomination. They were joined by two Republicans, Arlen Specter and Charles Matthias.
Sessions stayed in his job as U.S. attorney, and later became Attorney General of Alabama, and then, in 1997, a U.S. senator. In one of those turns that can make life so amazing, the newly elected Sen. Sessions took a seat on the Judiciary Committee alongside Biden and Ted Kennedy and the other Democrats who had tried not only to defeat his nomination but to destroy his reputation.
For his part, Hebert has indicated he's ready to try to stop Sessions again, writing a recent op-ed in the Washington Post in which he said Americans should "shudder" at the possibility of Sessions running the Justice Department. "So once again, I am adding my personal encounters with Sessions to the public record," Hebert wrote.
In the 30 years since the nomination fight, the memory of the accusations — shortened by history to "Sessions is a racist" — has never gone away. Now, it is back with Sessions' nomination as attorney general. But that was never what the hearings showed. Read what was said, and the testimony shows a Jeff Sessions who is much different from the image created in 1986.0
In the second episode of HBO’s new drama epic Westworld, a crass guest (played amusingly by Ben Barnes) tells his straight-laced companion (Jimmi Simpson), “I know you think you have a handle on what this is: guns and tits. But you have no idea.” It’s a perfect description of the series, which gained a fascinated following after reports of extreme violence and nudity, not to mention a comfort with genital touching being a requirement for extras. Westworld is set up as a place of pure fantasy, but typically it plays to humanity’s darker nature. People drink, kill, and fornicate with joyful abandon. The more depraved the storylines in the park, the more people feel thrilled by it. As another character declares early in the series: “Hell is empty. All the devils are here.”
Westworld has been touted as HBO’s next Game of Thrones, something the premium network is surely hoping is the case after a crop of lackluster dramas in what used to be marquee spots on its schedule. The series was plagued by delays which naturally led to speculation and uncertainty, but whatever issues it had aren’t noticeable now. The premiere is sweepingly seductive before letting the story slow down in its third and fourth hours to deeply consider the philosophy of such a place, and the show is better for it.
For those who are unfamiliar with the setup, Westworld (based on one of the parks in Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name) is a place where — for a mere $40k a day — you can live out your dreams. The park is populated by lifelike androids, called hosts, who wake up each day in a narrative loop, one which allows for improvisation based on the needs of the guests (also called “newcomers”). The stories are vast and interconnected; characters don’t just come to life when you are nearby, but instead, guests are part of a living story. Hosts cannot kill guests, although they can kill each other, and guests can also kill hosts. One of the story writers laments that everything works as it should, “unless a guest decides they want to kill or fuck something.”
The “thing” part of that statement is key, and one of Westworld’s most major themes, like the series Humans or the film Ex Machina, is what makes a “thing” become a human? What is the nature of consciousness, and is it possible for robots to have it?
What helps make that truly come to life, pun partially intended, is the calibre of the cast. Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, and Angela Sarafyan are three hosts who imbue their characters with soul while still teetering on the edge of the Uncanny Valley. The repetitions and the lifelike, but not fully human motions and reactions make us feel uneasy yet empathetic towards them. Simpson’s cautious, curious character struggles to figure out who is real and who is isn’t, and a host replies, “if you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?”
That question can land two ways — either you dehumanize everyone, or you give everyone a soul. Though Westworld seemed marketed for titillation (and there is a fair amount of nudity), it’s rarely sexy. Bodies are simply flesh, some of which is manipulated by others, some of which does the manipulating. It’s only in the quiet moments, like when AI programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) or the park’s creative director (Anthony Hopkins) question their creations and try to get into their minds to uncover what is programmed and what is something beyond that we start to see humanity, and often more so from the hosts than anyone else.
In a telling scene, Hopkins (who is exceptional, as always, as is Wright) explains to one of the story creators that the guests don’t come to find themselves, but to see who they want to be. At the beginning of the experience guests are given a choice of a white hat or a black hat, even though of course nothing is that simple inside Westworld or outside of it. (Although Ed Harris’ Man in Black seems pretty unabashedly evil. His quest to find the game’s central maze is also one that doesn’t yet feel as compelling as the rest of the story yet, but will surely equal another tantalizing layer soon).
The series — with a solid logical foundation and world-building — is lovingly crafted, marrying its Wild West aesthetic with cold sci-fi elements of the labs that run the park in a way that feels believably connected. The hosts brawl in a saloon at one point in the day, and at night, they are powered down and thrown into a glass chamber to have the blood hosed off and their wounds repaired. The series even broaches philosophical musings, a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as to whether it would be better to live a safe life where our pain is erased, or a life of free will with all of its mistakes and hurt. The choice is not always clear.
Like Game of Thrones, Westworld is a sprawling story, but it’s never as disparate as the world of Westeros and what lies beyond the Narrow Sea. What matters here is the notion that everything is contained, intimate, and carefully crafted, and fans of Crichton will immediately feel the familiarity with his most famous stories’ themes: where what we overly-confident Homo sapiens create and try and control quickly spirals out beyond our abilities. We are not gods, only tinkerers, and the characters of Westworld are starting to learn that trying to control what we don’t understand can lead to catastrophic effects. Thus, a rebellion must now be faced. “These violent delights have violent ends.”
Rating: ★★★★ Very good
Westworld premieres Sunday, October 2nd on HBOA version of this post originally appeared at eGrollman.
Over thirty years ago, Black feminist scholars and activists began emphasizing the importance of recognizing every identity and status of which each individual is comprised. The crux of the perspective known as intersectionality is that we must account for the intersecting nature of our identities and statuses, as well as the intersecting and mutually-reinforcing relationships among systems of oppression, especially racism, sexism, classism, and heteronormativity. For example, a full understanding of the lives of Black women cannot come from considering their lives as Black people only, as women only, nor as the sum of these two sets of experiences.
There is solid evidence demonstrating that one’s experiences with discrimination are consequential for one’s mental and physical health; however, these studies generally have not examined whether the relationship between discrimination and health depends upon the number of forms of discrimination individuals experience. Could it be the case that individuals who face sexist and racist discrimination fare worse in terms of health than those who experience sexist discrimination or racist discrimination only?
In an article I published in the June 2012 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, I find that the answer is yes, at least among youth. Using a sample of 1,052 Black, Latina/o, and White youth aged 15-25 from the Black Youth Culture Survey of the Black Youth Project, I looked at patterns in discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and class.
First, disadvantaged youth report more frequent exposure to their status-specific form of discrimination. That is, Black and Latina/o youth report more frequent race discrimination than White youth, girls and young women report more frequent gender discrimination than boys and young men, and so on:
Generally, more frequent exposure to each form of discrimination is associated with worse self-rated physical health and more depressive symptoms in the past month.
Youth who are disadvantaged due to multiple statuses (e.g., Black working-class boys, Latina lesbian and bisexual girls) report facing more forms of discrimination and more frequent discrimination overall:
Youth who face multiple forms of discrimination and more frequent discrimination report worse self-rated physical health and more depressive symptoms than youth who face fewer forms and less frequent discrimination:
These findings reiterate the importance of examining the intersections among systems of oppression. Only examining racial or gender discrimination, for example, would miss the fact that youth who are disadvantaged in more than one way face the greatest amount of discrimination. Unfortunately, scholarship and popular discussions of forms of disadvantage in isolation from one another continue to gloss over the experiences of individuals whose lives are constrained by multiple systems of oppression.
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Eric Anthony Grollman is a PhD candidate in sociology at Indiana University. His research focuses on the consequences of prejudice and discrimination on the health, well-being, and worldviews of marginalized groups. He blogs for the Kinsey Institute at Kinsey Confidential, and maintains a personal blog.The banned chemical weapon VX nerve agent was used to kill Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean ruler's outcast half brother who was poisoned last week at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, police said Friday. The announcement raised serious questions about public safety in a building that authorities went 11 days without decontaminating.
The substance, deadly even in minute amounts, was detected on Kim's eyes and face, Malaysia's inspector general of police said in a written statement, citing a preliminary analysis from the country's Chemistry Department.
"Our preliminary finding of the chemical that caused the death of Kim Chol was VX nerve," said Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar. Kim Chol is the name on the passport found on the victim, but a Malaysian official previously confirmed he is North Korea leader Kim Jong-un's older half brother.
Khalid told reporters that one of the two women accused of wiping the toxin on Kim's face was later sickened and suffered from vomiting. He declined to say which of the women — one Indonesian and one Vietnamese — had gotten sick.
Khalid said police were still investigating how the lethal agent entered Malaysia.
Police previously said the airport had not been decontaminated. Asked Friday in a text message whether that was still the case, Khalid said, "We are doing it now." Details were not immediately clear.
Malaysian police also previously said no one besides Kim Jong-nam had been sickened.
If VX was used, it could have contaminated not only the airport but anyplace else Kim had been, including medical facilities and the ambulance he was transported in. The nerve agent, which has the consistency of motor oil, can take days or even weeks to evaporate.
The death of Kim Jong-nam, whose daylight assassination in a crowded airport terminal seems straight out of a spy novel, has unleashed a diplomatic crisis that escalates by the day. With each new twist in the case, international speculation has grown that Pyongyang dispatched a hit squad to Malaysia to kill the exiled older sibling of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Fuji-TV obtained released images purporting to be from Feb. 13, 2017, footage from Kuala Lumpur airport security cameras. (Fuji TV/Associated Press)
North Korea has denounced Malaysia's investigation as full of "holes and contradictions" and accused the authorities here of being in cahoots with Pyongyang's enemies.
According to Malaysian investigators, the two female suspects coated their hands with chemicals and wiped them on Kim's face on Feb. 13 as he waited for a flight home to Macau, where he lived with his family.
He sought help from airport staff but he fell into convulsions and died on the way to the hospital within two hours of the attack, police said.
The case has perplexed toxicologists, who question how the two women could have walked away unscathed after handling a powerful poison, even if — as Malaysian police say — the women were instructed to wash their hands right after the attack.
Dr. Bruce Goldberger, a leading toxicologist who heads the forensic medicine division at the University of Florida, said even a tiny amount of VX nerve agent — equal to a few grains of salt — is capable of killing. It can be administered through the skin, and there is an antidote that can be administered by injection. U.S. medics and military personnel carried kits with them on the battlefield during the Iraq war in case they were exposed to the chemical weapon.
Members of the youth wing of the National Front, Malaysia's ruling coalition hold placards during a protest at the North Korea embassy, in the wake of the murder of Kim Jong-nam, in Kuala Lumpur on Friday. (Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)
"It's a very toxic nerve agent. Very, very toxic," he said. "I'm intrigued that these two alleged assassins suffered no ill effect from exposure to VX. It is possible that both of these women were given the antidote."
He said symptoms from VX would generally occur within seconds or minutes and could last for hours starting with confusion, possible drowsiness, headache, nausea, vomiting, runny nose and watery eyes. Prior to death, there would likely be convulsions, seizures, loss of consciousness and paralysis.
VX is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which North Korea never signed. The country is believed by outside experts to have the capacity to produce up to 4,500 metric tonnes of chemical weapons during a typical year, which it could increase to 12,000 tonnes per year during a period of crisis.
It is suspected of being particularly focused on mustard, phosgene, sarin and V-type chemical agents — substances including VX that are designed to poison through contact and remain lethal for long periods of time. The North's development of such agents has been of special concern because of fears it might try to put them in artillery shells for an attack on South Korea's capital, potentially threatening the lives of millions.
Joseph Bermudez, a well-known North Korea analyst, wrote an article for the respected 38 North website in 2013 that said the North is capable of not only employing "significant quantities and varieties of chemical weapons" across the Korean Peninsula but also using those weapons worldwide "using unconventional methods of delivery."
He also said there is a "growing body of evidence" indicating the North has shared chemical weapons capabilities with |
van alone must surely have been arguable as sufficient evidence for dangerous driving, because a collision was clearly inevitable beyond reasonable doubt.
It must be noted that if Squire was never on the pavement then only two possibilities appear to exist: One is that Sinden failed to observe Squire and made a catastrophic error of inattention; the other—which one would hope is absurd—is that Sinden did observe him and the collision was intentional.
Distraction by the mobile phone becomes a moot point here: the only conceivable way in which this could have been anything other than fatally poor driving by Sinden would have been if Squire had launched off of the pavement at a point at which Sinden would have been unable to respond: something which the physical evidence appears does not support. Thus the case is, at this point, surely a matter of res ipsa loquitur provided it can be “proven beyond reasonable doubt” that Squire was not on the pavement. And since there was neither forensic nor witness evidence to suggest he was on the pavement, while there was a strong logical argument against it, and the forensic evidence showed Squire to be cycling in the carriageway parallel to the kerb, and Sinden’s original statements entirely omitted it, it is astonishing that this claim could be considered truthful.
In light of all these points, a not guilty verdict for all counts seems quite incredible.
Claim 23. That Squire “swerved out in front of him, apparently to avoid a drain cover”. (Source C and Source D.)
It would appear from Street View and other sources that there is no such drain cover. This claim seems patently false.
Claim 24. That he “just did not see the cyclist”. (Source A.)
This directly contradicts a vast number of Sinden’s claims, though explains much. It is noted by Source C that Sinden made this claim when giving statements to the police but changed his claims at trial. Numerous other sources state the same: Sinden’s whole case shifted markedly from not having seen Squire to having seen him well in advance of the collision.
At trial, it was accepted by the defence and Sinden himself that the lighting at the time presented no difficulty in seeing anything (Source D).
Claim 25 That “he later stopped his vehicle and ran back to the scene and sat down on the verge” (Source A.)
As with most claims, we have only Sinden’s word for this.
There is an as-yet unsubstantiated rumour that “he only stopped after being flagged down by another motorist”, but this should be viewed as low-grade information at this stage; it is currently unknown whether it was brought up in court and I have as yet seen no information that such a motorist exists (it may be the driver who called 999, but neither have I seen a transcript of that call nor the details of this witness’s account).
Claim 26. That after the collision “he did not know where [his mobile phone] was”. (Source A.)
Clearly, this seems unlikely. A text message was received a matter of seconds before the collision, and (assuming the phone wasn’t in silent mode, which would have been checked with a cursory inspection) it would have made a sound advertising its presence in the cab. Someone who, by their own admission, texts while driving would surely have a text notification that is audible while driving.
One might take Sinden’s claims at face value: that the phone’s location was a mystery, that its screen or keypad was activated during the journey and that inanimate objects had typed a message into it, that he had ascertained its battery level without looking at it, that it both did and didn’t have any remaining battery life, that he had then thrown it onto the seat and in so doing managed to land it underneath a bag onto which the aforementioned inanimate objects had fallen, and had then within a matter of seconds forgotten that it was actually in his van at all. Or one might be somewhat sceptical of this quite dazzling collection of claims.
Witnesses
There were, according to multiple sources, no witnesses to the collision itself other than Sinden.
It is reported by Source A that three people, travelling in at least two cars, stopped at the scene to give medical assistance. It is also reported that a driver called 999.
Source F and Source D report that the 999 caller was in a car travelling in the opposite direction, which stopped at the collision location and is believed to be the first vehicle to stop at the scene.
Source D further reports that the caller was the male passenger, and the call was made subsequent to the female driver (who was a witness in court) stopping at the scene, getting out to assess the situation, returning to the car and only then instructing the passenger to dial 999.
We know that there were no witnesses to the collision (and Source D reports explicitly that neither of the occupants of the first vehicle on the scene witnessed it), so one might reasonably infer that the vehicle was out of sight of the collision location at the time at which the collision occurred. Checking sight lines on Street View, this places it at least here along the A258 towards Deal, 280m from the collision site.
If we assume the vehicle’s speed to be 40mph (the speed limit at this point), and ignore any additional time accounted for by deceleration, we find that it would take them a little over 15 seconds to reach the collision location.
We can then draw an envelope of possible collision times, shown here in blue. (Again, please note the earlier remarks about reduced confidence in the position of point T; this analysis makes reference to the reported time of 08:40:44.)
The crucial implication here would be that the collision would have occurred prior to V. Thus, on the basis of the information available, the window for the possible collision time can be reduced from 55 to 40 seconds.
However, we know that deceleration is not instantaneous, and that the call was made after the driver got out of the car and assessed the situation. We can add in estimates for the minimum times that these factors would add. I’ve estimated them at 2 seconds and 3 seconds respectively, but it would not be hard to reconstruct the sequence of events to establish an accurate minimum figure.
Note that we can, of course, do the same for the minimum time required to read and respond to the received text message, pushing the earliest possible time of the collision forward and narrowing the collision window further.
One important aspect of the timeline (subject to the accuracy of the estimates) becomes clear: this already places the latest possible time of the collision at pretty much the point of Sinden saving the text message. To occur at this time, the collision would have to have occurred immediately prior to the 999 caller’s vehicle rounding the bend ahead. It is clearly likely that the collision occurred earlier than this.
The positioning of point V depends on four timings:
the time between the collision and the witnesses’ car rounding the bend (which could, in the absence of further evidence and with very low statistical probability, be as little as zero; but with further witness evidence—notably the position of Sinden’s van when first seen by the witnesses—could be established as being a least a certain number of seconds)
the time taken for the witnesses’ vehicle to reach the collision location and be brought to a stop (a minimum of which could be established for any given speed by simple off-site reconstruction)
the time taken to exit the car and assess the situation (a minimum for which could, again, be established from reconstruction using the witness accounts)
the time taken to dial 999 and gain a connection (as above)
Importantly, if the sum total of these is greater than 21 seconds (and note that the second alone is, at the speed limit, in excess of 15 seconds, leaving less than 6 seconds for all the others), an important inference would emerge from being able to establish such a timeline: namely, that Sinden would have exited the messaging application after the collision.
This would be, to put it mildly, quite important.
If, as Sinden claimed, he had not been using the phone at the time of the collision, why would he do that? Why would anyone, having knowingly struck someone at such speed that their windscreen was shattered “as if by a sledgehammer” (witness quote via Source F), respond to the collision by picking up a phone that they had not been using and exiting the app they had last used, before then putting the phone back down?
I can conceive of no plausible explanation for exiting the messaging application in the seconds following a collision—and, if the timing estimates above are representative, then this must surely have been the case—other than to crudely attempt to hide the fact that the messaging app had been in use.
I have not heard any report of the prosecution having tried to construct a timeline. Nor any report of the evidence then being assessed so as to narrow the known events into ever smaller ranges, so as to be ever more confident in the theory that Sinden was using his phone at the time of, or immediately before, the collision. Nor any report that it was implied through the rather more easily proven theory that he responded to the collision by attempting to hide his use of the messaging application.
With better access to information and only a little diligence, this is surely the most compelling route to secure a conviction based on mobile phone use. So why did the CPS apparently not take this approach?
(It is also worth noting the case of R v Foster, the deletion of text messages from a phone immediately after a collision constituted a perversion of the course of justice, even though the defendant was not found guilty of having caused death; it seems feasible that exiting a messaging app immediately after a collision could be argued to constitute the same offence. There was no such charge in Sinden’s case; but then, the required inference only shows up after diligent time analysis.)
Implications
It is quite apparent that most if not all of Sinden’s statements are contradictory, implausible or—at best—unsupported by any other evidence.
The aim of the prosecution was to establish that Sinden’s driving was dangerous (or at the very least careless, pursuant to the definitions in the Road Traffic Act 1988) and that this standard of driving was the cause of Daniel Squire’s death. For this, it would seem that two success scenarios (for the prosecution) are available:
To prove beyond reasonable doubt that Sinden was using his phone at, or immediately before, the time of the collision. This would clearly demonstrate that Sinden’s driving was of a sufficiently low standard at the critical moment. To disprove beyond reasonable doubt that Squire was on the pavement at any point. This would mean that Squire was on the carriageway, was there to be seen, and was struck from behind when the collision was perfectly avoidable. (This is perhaps less robust than the former scenario, because cases too numerous to list demonstrate that it is by no means a given that a jury will convict for driving into the back of someone on a bicycle who is riding legally and responsibly.)
The bewildering aspect to this case is that there is only one piece of evidence that suggests Squire was ever on the pavement, and that is Sinden’s allegation. Clearly, and tragically, a dead man cannot talk. This would have been evident when the defence team was constructing Sinden’s case, of course.
It is not impossible that Squire was on the pavement. It is, however, unlikely. It’s more than just unlikely. Squire was a competitive triathlete; he would have been fit and fast, and such riders almost always stick to the carriageway even when half-decent cycle tracks are available. I would wager that you could survey every triathlete in the country and ask them if they would mount that pavement at the entry to Ringwould, and if there are more “yes” replies than can be counted on one hand, I would raise an eyebrow at the very least. Which isn’t to say that Squire didn’t do it, but—to any “cyclist” at least—it is surely beyond reasonable doubt.
The fact that there was no forensic evidence whatsoever to back up Sinden’s claim should surely have cemented this point. Even if one was inclined to take the defendant’s word for it, Sinden appears to have blazed a trail of contradictory, far-fetched claims. The trustworthiness of any given claim must surely be rock-bottom. Not least when one considers that reportedly none of Sinden’s statements prior to the trial implied that Squire was on the pavement (Source E, Source G, etc.)
When the trial pivots around a single claim that contradicts all claims made prior to trial; a claim in a stack of self-contradicting and implausible claims; a claim for which no forensic evidence, no witness evidence, nor any reasonable explanation exists; then surely—surely—the defence case must be in tatters?
When the forensic evidence on the road is reported to indicate that Sinden did not steer prior to impact, surely those tatters are vaporised?
Yet, apparently not. Sinden was cleared of causing death by dangerous driving, and of the lesser charge of causing death by careless driving. Sinden also escaped convictions for dangerous driving and careless driving, despite both being available to the court. It is truly baffling that this could have ended up this way.
So what do we know about the trial?
Trial notes
Here are some (mostly qualitative) remarks about the trial from, variously, Sources D, F and G:
“There was a huge amount of time-wasting and confusion over mobile phone event timings. I suspect the jury were as flummoxed as I and the judge were.”
“[The defence expert witness] had not taken light meter readings, thus allowing the defence to introduce the idea that there was a major reduction in visibility under the trees…much argument over adverbs like “very reduced”, significantly reduced”, etc, which was of no scientific value but which may have helped to introduce that idea into the jurors’ minds; there was also adverbial debate over how steep (very? slightly? moderately?—all ridiculous) the road is. Sinden was very keen to suggest that the gradient up to the ‘brow’ of the hill meant the cyclist was beyond and below his line of sight. None of this had been analysed scientifically.”
“Major inconsistencies in Sinden’s evidence; much evidence of lying. Not explored enough.”
“Much more should have been made of the fact that no cycle tyre tracks were found on the pavement.”
“Why was the mythical drain not pursued? How difficult could it have been to mark the drain on the map and, presumably, show it to be not at the site of the collision, and/or not in evidence on the photographs of the collision site?”
“There was no evidence of any mobile phone analysis for Daniel.”
“Much more should have been made of the fact that the van was closer to the kerb than the bicycle; much too close in any situation, let alone the present one.”
“As the force of impact was so strong, one might expect Daniel’s wristwatch/mobile/Garmin etc to have been damaged. Evidence from such items could possibly have helped to fix the time of the collision.”
“The other party in the text conversation was not called to the witness stand. Or a statement from her given in court. Or her phone logs presented as evidence.”
“The speed of the vehicle at the time of collision, and leading up to it, was never mentioned. No reason was given for the omission of this evidence.”
“The judge did not qualify to the jury, with regard to their deliberations, any of the accused’s statements which could not be corroborated by witnesses or forensic evidence. Even after he had been shown to be an extremely unreliable witness, with blatant lies and numerous contradictory statements.”
“The visit to the site by the juror, as apparently agreed at the start of the trial, did not go ahead because of issues with cost and organization.”
“There was the shambolic (and invalid?) criteria for selecting and/or excluding jurors. This was seemingly conducted with no proper investigation into their background.”
“[The defence] simply presented several ‘what ifs’ to the jury, and then sat back. They knew what couldn’t be proved, and so threw as much mud around as possible to confuse the jury. The defence lawyer was spoken to by the judge several times because of his behaviour.”
It wasn’t all bad…
“[The judge in her summing up] spent over an hour and a half explaining in great detail and speaking rapidly covering the salient evidence of the trial and the points of law that the jury had to bear in mind. At all times she seemed careful not to lead or persuade the jury into making a particular decision, rather that they must be sure to base their deliberations on the evidence that was presented and should not speculate where none existed.”
Indeed, the general impression (though it is not unequivocal) from multiple sources is that the judge largely performed well. I confess that as soon as the verdict was published, when I read her statement that “I appreciate that is not the verdict you were expecting” I read between the lines.
How did the prosecution fail?
Needless to say, even before the publication of Spokes East Kent’s notes, there are hints of the usual excuse-driven line of enquiry in the trial: discussion of Squire wearing dark clothing (though with exposed pale limbs) despite the collision occurring in daylight conditions that were accepted as perfectly unremarkable. The implication, as we’ve seen so many times, that drivers should be excused any ability to inadequately assess the region of space into which they send a rapidly-moving couple of thousand kilos of mass.
But even overlooking this, whether one considers such an approach to be reasonable thoroughness or skewed perspectives (hint: it’s the latter, it really is), how did the prosecution fail to drive a bus through the gaping holes in the defence case?
It seems, from what information and qualitative comment I have seen, that the prosecution case may have been undermined by the following potential flaws.
A lack of general understanding and explanation of safe, correct, and nationally trained cycling techniques. There is no mention of the prosecution calling a cycling expert witness. Without the jury being able to understand why Squire was so very unlikely to have been on the pavement, or that his position at the time of impact was quite feasibly him trying to swerve away from the path of the van from a perfectly correct initial position, the prosecution’s case is practically doomed from the start. This seems to be a pandemic issue affecting trials of motor vehicle vs pedal cycle collisions, as far as I can tell. A lack of forensic investigation, including seemingly basic phone analysis and allegedly no analysis of Squire’s electronic devices (if he had any), nor the phone used to dial 999. It is unclear whether attempts to obtain this information were too weak, or whether all avenues were pursued and it was simply unavailable. The fact that attendees to the trial are currently attempting to ascertain whether devices exist that would potentially supply this information is concerning. A lack of basic research: it is a trivial process to determine required speeds and the locations of various items in order to validate the defendant’s claims. The previous post on this case took under three hours to research and write up, yet multiple sources have remarked that this basic level of rigour was lacking from the CPS’s case. This is somewhat shocking to say the least. A lack of field analysis: certain tests are quite conceivable, to determine at what points Squire would have been visible and how clearly his position could have been identified; how long certain actions take to perform; or how a laptop behaves when tumbling around inside a Vivaro. Jurors were not taken to the collision location. Even in the absence of field investigation, there appears to be no information to suggest that videos of the road or Street View images were used in court to help visualise the crucial timings and locations; instead, it seems that the focus was on inane and tortuous discussions of qualitative adjectives. Basic timeline analysis is the crux of this case, yet I have heard no report of it having been performed, let alone presented to the court using clear visualisations. A lack of focus on clear communication: multiple accounts suggest that jurors were confused and baffled by unnecessary complexities from expert witnesses and the like. The subtleties of mobile phone network timestamps may be complex, but all that truly needs to be explained is that a given timestamp represents the earliest possible time for an event; it is surely not necessary to dissect the potential delays subsequent to that unless other timing data is sufficiently accurate that these additional details would edge the argument into near-proof of guilt. Again, it should be noted that data visualisation is an incredibly useful communication tool: if timeline visualisations were not presented in court, why not? A lack of doggedness: the defence case, it would appear, ought to be easily demolished. It is accepted that Sinden changed his story prior to the trial and it is clear that few if any of his claims are reliable alongside the others. The measurements and experiments suggested above surely would have helped skittle every last one of the claims, thus piling as much doubt as possible on the critical claim that Squire was on the pavement. The available information gives little impression that this thorough demolition of Sinden’s credibility, and thus the credibility of his key claim, was a specific objective.
I may be wrong about all these things; I may have been given a totally false impression. I want to be wrong about all these things. I would love someone from the prosecution to say, “actually, we did do X,” or “actually, we couldn’t do X, because Y.” But read below the online articles and you’ll find numerous comments mentioning a disappointing lack of rigour in the CPS’s case.
I would love to be proven wrong; I’d love to hear a compelling reason as to why the CPS was genuinely unable to secure a conviction despite best efforts. It’s just that, from what I’ve read, I’m not expecting it.
I can’t imagine I’m the only one staring at this case, as I’ve stared at others before it, completely failing to understand why certain avenues were apparently not explored, or how the jury can be led to believe that someone who in all probability was riding legally and responsibly (remember: there appears to have been not a single piece of evidence to suggest otherwise; solely the apparently highly unreliable word of the defendant) can end up in the morgue and again—again!—the law decrees that no-one has caused this.
Trials that involve the deaths of “minority mode” road users—people on pedal cycles, on horseback, on foot, on mobility scooters, but all simply people, who for any number of reasons happen not to be inside a motor vehicle at that time—are frequently shocking. This particular example is staggering in its inability to convict, but it is part of a long-term pattern. Plus ça change.
There can be few who can read all the details of this particular case and feel that justice was done. There should, as a result, be few who can read those details and not want to address those points above.
It really is a pattern that has to stop, otherwise more families will suffer the agony of losing their loved ones, and more families will suffer the agony of never seeing justice for it. With no effective enforcement of the most basic aspects of safe driving, things can only get worse.
There is little doubt in my mind—as if there ever has been—that the statute, the court process, and the systemic bias all combine to gradually legalise the vehicular homicide of anyone not in a motor vehicle. They all need fixing.
Something’s seriously wrong here, and that something is pretty much everything
Those of us who dare to venture onto the roads can be as confident or as meek as we like, but we all fear one thing. One thing more than any other.
And that is being struck from behind.
We fear it more than anything else on the roads for two reasons.
One is that we can do nothing about it. Nothing. No behaviour, no experience, no equipment, no courtesy, no phoney “respect” makes any difference when someone drives a van into you because they weren’t looking at you.
And the other reason we fear this is that we know—we know because it is proven time and time again—that if we die in this way our families will get nothing. No justice, no closure, just the agony of a clumsy trial in front of a jury of drivers. The system will find everything in its arsenal to discredit us while it exonerates the driver who ploughed into us.
The death of someone struck from behind serves only to fuel the attitudes that led to their death in the first place. With every failed prosecution we take a step closer to legalising homicide.
There is every possibility that Daniel Squire’s death was our greatest fear: killed on the tarmac, maligned in court, never truly defended by anyone, with no means of avoiding death nor any means of ensuring that anyone is held responsible for it.
His death is not the first to epitomise this catastrophe of everyday life and nor will it be the last, but if this case opens people’s eyes to a legal outcome that is actually much less unusual than you might think; if it opens people’s minds to the idea that this really should be more unusual than you might think; then maybe there can be some thin silver lining to yet another deep, black cloud.
The dead can’t talk.
So we’d damn well better start talking right now.
Advertisements(CNN) Several powerful lobbying groups are lining up to oppose the latest Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.
The influential American Medical Association, AARP and two major hospital groups all came out against a new amendment unveiled this week that would let states to weaken some of Obamacare's key protections for those with pre-existing conditions and for older enrollees.
Obamacare's protections for those with pre-existing conditions are among the law's most popular measures. Republicans say they are not eroding those provisions, but health care experts and lobbyists beg to differ.
"Although the MacArthur amendment states that the ban on pre-existing conditions remains intact, this assurance may be illusory as health status underwriting could effectively make coverage completely unaffordable to people with preexisting conditions," the AMA wrote in a letter Thursday to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
AARP slammed the amendment, saying it would put in place "backdoor cuts" to the protections and would create an "age tax."
"This harmful legislation still puts an Age Tax on older Americans and puts vulnerable populations at risk through a series of backdoor deals that attempts to shift responsibility to states," the influential lobbying group said in a statement Wednesday. "Older Americans need affordable health care services and prescriptions. This legislation still goes in the opposite direction, increasing insurance premiums for older Americans and not doing anything to lower drug costs."
AARP has been one of the most vocal opponents of the House GOP bill and has been particularly dismayed at the changes the House Freedom Caucus has gotten into the legislation. The group reiterated its promise to let its 38 million members know how their representatives voted on the legislation.
The hospital groups -- the American Hospital Association and America's Essential Hospitals -- both voiced concerns that the amendment would not lessen the number of people expected to be left uninsured under the Republican bill. The Congressional Budget Office analysis of the original legislation found that 24 million more people could be left without coverage by 2026.
"This latest version of the AHCA is not an improvement. It's simply bad policy that will cut a lifeline of health care for millions of Americans," said Bruce Siegel, CEO of America's Essential Hospitals, which represents safety net hospitals. "The amendment now being considered would threaten basic health care benefits and important consumer protections. Worse, these changes are expected to add to the already staggering total of 24 million additional uninsured people under the AHCA."Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money has been siphoned through charities linked to Hillary Clinton, it emerged last night.
British politicians – including Gordon Brown – stand accused of diverting huge amounts of cash through the organisations after falling under the spell of the US presidential candidate and her husband Bill.
At least £50 million of taxpayer-funded foreign aid money has gone to Clinton charities, which are at the centre of allegations in the US that foreign governments used donations to buy influence.
The UK is one of the biggest donors, handing over more than £20 million last year alone to the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), an organisation chaired by former President Bill, 68, and whose board includes the couple's daughter Chelsea, 35. Since 2011, a total of £48.9 million has gone into the coffers of this charity alone.
Controversy: At least £50 million of taxpayer-funded foreign aid money has gone to Clinton charities, which are at the centre of allegations in the US that foreign governments used donations to buy influence
Tory backbenchers say the revelation is symptomatic of the fact that the Department for International Development has so much money to spend that large amounts have to be simply handed to global charities, often leading to huge amounts of waste.
The Clinton charities are involved in running projects receiving some £107 million from DfID since 2009 – although not all of this money went to their organisations.
But critics are concerned that waste at CHAI is so high that British taxpayers may end up paying millions of pounds of management charges – money which they say would be much better spent on front-line disaster relief.
Britain spends £12 billion a year on overseas aid, thanks to a new law which commits the Government to spending 0.7 per cent of national income on international development.
CHAI spends its funds on improving the treatment of HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis in the developing world, mainly in Africa.
But a new book claimed that foreign governments and individuals received favourable treatment from the US government in return for donations to Clinton family charities. The revelations have proved an embarrassment for Mrs Clinton, 67, who has moved to distance herself from the charities.
DAVE'S LAST-MINUTE £415MILLION HANDOUT JUST TO MEET 0.7% FOREIGN AID SPENDING TARGET Aid officials wrote a cheque for nearly half a billion pounds to an international charity in a desperate effort to meet David Cameron's spending target, it emerged last night. The extraordinary sum was rushed to the Swiss-based Global Fund with only days left to go to ensure the Government met its controversial pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on aid. It meant Britain ended up providing more than a fifth of the organisation's total budget – twice the planned scale of donation, it was claimed last night. The Global Fund pays its 600 staff an average salary package of almost £130,000, and has also recently commissioned an expensive new lakeside headquarters in Geneva. The body was set up by the G8 to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. Details of the enormous pledge in December 2013 were made public in a National Audit Office report. Last night a Department for International Development spokesman said the report concluded the timing of the donation'made no impact on the scale of our investment'. He added: 'With our support, the Global Fund will save a life every three minutes.'
In 2008, Mr Brown addressed a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. The Clinton Foundation, the main family charity, revealed that the UK Government had been making donations since the following year – when Mrs Clinton took office as US Secretary of State.
The UK's donations to the Clinton charities took off after then International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell met Mrs Clinton at a UN summit in New York in 2010.
An examination of published payments over £500 made by DfID in 2014 reveals that CHAI received £20.2 million, with £4.8million spent up to the end of May this year. In 2013, £13.1 million was handed over, with £9.6 million going to CHAI in 2012 and £1.1 million in 2011.
Before this date there are no published figures. It is not known how much went to the Clinton Foundation.
Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, said: 'The fact we are spending more and more on aid when we are massively in debt is bad enough, but when it is being tossed away for vanity reasons to ingratiate UK politicians with the rich and powerful in the US … I think most people would find that distasteful and unacceptable.'
Jonathan Isaby, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'The ludicrous aid target means all too often DfID officials are desperate to spend money in any way they can, which is nothing more than irresponsible. We need DfID to provide far more transparency.'
A DFID spokesman said: 'The Department for International Development does not fund the Clinton Foundation. DFID does fund the Clinton Health Access Initiative, an independent NGO founded in 2010.'TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The NEO Exchange (“NEO”) is pleased to announce that Cannabis Strategies Acquisition Corp. (“Cannabis Strategies”) received final approval to list its shares on NEO and will begin trading today under the symbol CSA.UN. Cannabis Strategies, a newly organized special purpose acquisition corporation, completed its initial public offering of USD $125,000,000. The corporation intends to make an acquisition of one or more businesses or assets that focus on marijuana manufacturing and/or distribution.
“In the coming months, Cannabis Strategies intends to complete one or more acquisitions in the cannabis sector,” stated Jonathan Sandelman, CEO, Cannabis Strategies Corp. “We raised capital to do so and chose NEO as our listing venue first and foremost because of their streamlined, disclosure-based approach to listings. It was important for us to select an exchange partner with whom we know exactly where we stand as a company looking to enter the cannabis sector. We get that from NEO. We both represent something new and different in the market and we are very pleased to have found a partner who has an exceptional focus on understanding and helping companies seeking to go public. Their service has been impeccable and we look forward to strengthening our relationship in the future.”
“We are very happy today to welcome Cannabis Strategies on NEO,” stated Jos Schmitt, President and CEO, NEO Exchange. “This is the first ever special purpose acquisition corporation focused on the cannabis sector. By listing with us, they can leverage many of the benefits that make our exchange a better choice. Our investor communication services and our streamlined disclosure-based listing model exemplify our unwavering dedication to meeting the needs of public companies and investors. We look forward to watching Cannabis Strategies flourish in the coming months and years as they utilize the capital raised on NEO for strategic acquisitions. The cannabis sector is expected to be one of Canada’s growth sectors for 2018 and we are excited to be on the frontlines of this development.”
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Join us on social media: twitter | linkedin | facebookSometimes we want to ignore values returned from a method, especially those out arguments, a typical example is to check whether a string can be parsed to another type:
bool parsedValue;
if ( bool.TryParse( "TRUE", out parsedValue)) { /* Do your stuff */ }
Here we want to ignore parsedValue. We also want to make this variable inaccessible so developers cannot reference it.
The C# 7.0 has a new feature called discards, which can be used to achieve our goal for this scenario.
Discards
Discards are local variables which you can assign but cannot read from. i.e. they are “write-only” local variables. They don’t have names, instead, they are represented as a _ (underscore.) _ is a contextual keyword, it is very similar to var, and _ cannot be read (i.e. cannot appear on the right side of an assignment.)
If we apply the discard to above code, it will look like this:
if ( bool.TryParse( "TRUE", out bool _ )) { /* Do your stuff */ }
Because _ is unreadable, it will not appear in IntelliSense nor compile the code.
Places Discards Are Applicable
A declaration expression with an out modifier, for example: bool.TryParse(“string”, out _)
modifier, for example: Pattern matching clauses, such as case int _ or if (x is string _)
or Deconstructions:
In declaration: such as var (a, _, c) = myObj
In assignment: such as var a, b; (a, b) = myObj
Value Tuple deconstructions: such as var (a, _, _) = (1, 2, 3)
The _ Keyword
Please always remember that the _ is a contextual keyword, like var, that means if you have already declared a local variable _ in the current context and it is in scope, the _ will not be a discard and will refer to that local variable in scope.
More interestingly, look the following code:
bool _ = false, v = false ;
if ( bool.TryParse( "TRUE", out var _ )) {
/* Do your stuff */
v = _; }
What is the value of v?
The answer is false. The if test is true, and string “TRUE” can parse as a Boolean value true, but we have out var _, this overrides the scope of the previously declared variable _, and it is a discard. Then the assignment v = _ inside if statement just reads the value of previously declared local variable _ (which is false,) and assigns to v, hence the value of v is false. If we remove the var to change the code to out _, the value of v will be true because _ is on longer a discard and it holds the value of the parsed Boolean.
Conclusion
The discards in C# enables a way to ignore some local variables, it is a design time feature, the local variable may still be required at runtime and compiler may also generate a name for it. Since the _ keyword is a contextual keyword, you need to set a code policy to avoid declaring local variables with the name _ to reduce confusions. This feature is compatible with previous versions of.NET platforms as it does not require a CLR change.Bill Maher said the obsession Democrats have about Halloween costumes, the name Washington Redskins and Elizabeth Warren being called 'Pocahontas' is part of the problem. In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Maher acknowledged the term Pocahontas is derogatory but said Democrats needs to worry less about that and focus more on "I'm going to get your job back."
From Tuesday's broadcast of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper:
JAKE TAPPER: You said on your show that liberals need to stop trying to win over Trump voters with facts. So what should Democrats do to win over Trump voters?
BILL MAHER: Well, I was just going to say, a bit of it should ease up on the identity politics. They pulled off quite a neat trick in 2016. They made white people who are still the majority in this country feel like a minority or at least enough of them to swing the election. So, I think that's important. Make sure you look like you represent everybody, including the majority.
TAPPER: You interviewed Senator Elizabeth Warren last week. I want to show |
Christ's sake. Put yourself in starving, hacked-off Mr Ratty's skin: what's the first thing he sees as light floods his sunless prison cell? Juicy eyeballs and gristly nose: dinner. Think American Psycho. Hey-ho. Have your solicitor, whomsoever you appoint, phone me ace-app so we can get the ball rolling. You'll want to change your wills, too, right? I'd rather be dragged over burning coals than smear any colleagues, but the McWhinney woman over Superdrug is a Pollyanna Coke-Head; and I'd not trust Mr Timothy Finn and Associates with a stapler, let alone access to my only son. Cheery-bye for now."
Lorna was slicing tomato and basil – we never eat together – but she came to the living room, to avert charges of Not-My-Problemism. "Getting the rat out from the fireplace is one thing," I told her, unpacking my box of gear, "but getting it out of the house is another."
Lorna said, "We should make a rat-run, leading to the front door."
I said, "Obviously. Obviously."
Two rolled-up hallway carpets made a single-lane highway to the propped-open front door. Lorna made a canyon out of the sofa and armchairs leading from the fireplace to the hallway. I remembered decorating the house with warm, funny, pregnant Lorna.
I opened the window as wide as it would go.
Lorna asked, "What's that in aid of?"
The truthful answer would have been, "To postpone a rat-bite for about 10 more seconds." I replied, "A mature black rat can leap as high as you. There's a chance it'll see the window and just go for it." Classic Nick Briar bullshit: Lorna provokes it out of me, like a laxative.
The blade slid through the sealant. Lorna was watching from across the room, gripping a tennis racket like a vampire-huntress gripping her wooden stake. Upon hearing the knife, the rat flung itself around like a madman. Around then, I realised that the exercise was pointless: the sealant wasn't glue, but just sealant to stop smoke. The frame of the box-stove was probably bolted to the floor through its feet, and the surround was immovable unless we ripped out the entire fireplace. Not yet wanting to admit this to Lorna, I carried on until the middle of the top edge. Words were embossed on a raised flap. "TO OPEN FRONTAGE, CLASP AND PULL."
I carried on with my knife around the entire frame.
"Right. That ought to do it."
I put on my goggles, clasped the raised flap and squeezed.
Lorna asked, "There's an opening mechanism?"
There was resistance, but a spring-loaded latch clunked.
The rat responded with a cold-blooded rat-a-tat-tat.
"Of course," I said. "But I had to unseal the silicone surround first." I put on my resin gloves. "Well... nice knowing you, Lorna." I pulled. The box section of the stove tipped forwards, which opened a gap of three inches along the top edge. It wouldn't open any further.
My pulse twanged fast and rubbery.
Cautious taps, without backslides, climbed up a shallower incline.
I moved back, gripping the other tennis racket.
A blurred brown paw, as big as a dog's, half-appeared.
Jesus on the Crapper, I thought, it must be massive...
The paw probed forwards, drawn by the light. It had one sharp claw, as sharp as a bird's beak: because this is what it was.
A dazed wren was perched on the top edge of the stove.
Perhaps it tried to understand the room and its wrongnesses.
But then it launched itself straight at the window...
...where it would brain itself on the glass and snap its neck.
But through the open window and on, it plunged into the afternoon...
...into the crisscrossing, traffic-drowsy, leaf-shushed afternoon.
Looking at my wife's face, I wished that time would stop.President Donald Trump’s surprise firing of FBI Director James Comey late on Tuesday took Washington and the whole country by storm. The White House cashiering the man in charge of investigating the president’s connections to the Kremlin hardly constitutes a normal turn of events in our nation’s capital, and Trump’s high-stakes gamble brought inevitable comparisons to President Richard Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre in late October 1973.
Where this all ends now is anyone’s guess, though Trump’s firing his secret police chief unavoidably will bring scrutiny to issues—above all his links to Russia—which the president is desperate to make disappear. Indeed, it was Comey’s refusal to ignore Team Trump’s Russia problem that led to his brusque dismissal by Trump’s bodyguard-turned-factotum. In Los Angeles when he got the news from television, the FBI director was so stunned that at first he thought it was a prank.
However, the White House was deadly earnest about defenestrating Comey, whose refusal to toe the Trump line on the Kremlin proved his undoing. In particular, his unwillingness to say three magic words—“There’re no ties”—and thereby take the heat off the president regarding Russia drove Trump to distraction. Press reports portray a White House in crisis over Kremlingate. Politico captured the administration’s panic with this insider depiction of the president:
He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.
The latest reports demonstrate that Trump grew furious with Comey over the FBI’s director’s unwillingness to accept and publicly push a series of obfuscations that are dear to the president and his retinue. In particular, Trump was angry that Comey refused to advocate for the president’s fact-free belief that his predecessor “wiretapped” him. That particular Fake News, which is of Kremlin origin, has been thoroughly debunked by genuine experts and intelligence bosses in Washington, yet inexplicably remains an idée fixe to our commander-in-chief.
It’s difficult to see how this can end well for Team Trump since, even with Comey gone, the FBI will continue its counterintelligence investigation of the White House and the 2016 election, looking for links to Vladimir Putin—and so will Congress. The president may have to worry about the latter as much as the former, particularly in light of the revelation that the Senate Intelligence Committee has turned to the Treasury Department for help in getting to the bottom of Trump’s murky finances.
Significantly, Congress is getting support in its investigation from Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known to insiders as FinCEN. These are the Intelligence Community’s experts in tracking shady financial deals.
Then there’s the fact that one or more grand juries are busy assessing which members of Team Trump may be facing criminal charges—and for what, exactly? We now have confirmation, after weeks of rumors, that a Federal grand jury in Virginia has issued subpoenas for inquiry into possible illegalities committed by Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general who briefly served as Trump’s National Security Advisor before he was booted for lying about his connections to Moscow.
This grand jury is part of the Justice Department’s broader investigation of KremlinGate, and there are persistent rumors of a second grand jury in New York examining Team Trump. The same sources which reported the Virginia grand jury, weeks before the mainstream media confirmed the story, speak of one in New York—and that indictments are coming.
Regardless, if the White House expected that by firing Director Comey they could make their Russia problems go away, they were sorely mistaken. FBI employees were flabbergasted and outraged by the rude manner in which their boss got fired, while people across the Intelligence Community were befuddled by this latest Trumpian tactic. Since the president has repeatedly insulted and demeaned our nation’s spies during his few short months in office, we should now expect a barrage of embarrassing leaks from the IC in response. That’s how the DC game is played.
The views of the IC were expressed unofficially by retired General Mike Hayden, a career spook who headed both CIA and NSA, and a level-headed fellow not prone to verbal overreach. In an interview about Comey’s firing, Hayden stated he was “very surprised and stunned as anyone” by Trump’s move, adding piquantly, “I’m trying to avoid the conclusion that we’ve become Nicaragua.”
It certainly didn’t help matters that the day after firing Comey, the White House had a special visitor—Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s cagey foreign minister. True to form, Lavrov made an on-camera joke about the FBI director’s dismissal, and for reasons that cannot easily be understood, all American media was kept away from the president’s meeting with Russia’s top diplomat, but Russian state media was not. To make matters worse, a Russian photographer arranged a photo op with President Trump, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, who’s been at the center of several scandals involving Team Trump.
In the aftermath of that unforced public relations debacle, which reopened cans of worms that the administration wants to close tightly, the White House is reported to be livid with Moscow. According to CNN, an administration official admitted Team Trump had been conned by the Russians: “They tricked us,” the official stated, “They lie.”
Anybody not previously aware that the Kremlin employs lies to further its diplomacy the way normal countries host cocktail parties is someone unfit to handle serious matters of statecraft. It seems Moscow wanted to send the message that it can manipulate President Trump and his administration whenever they feel like it. As I recently noted, Putin doesn’t care that we know he’s calling the shots here. That’s not something getting rid of Director Comey will change in the slightest.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.Today NVIDIA announces its new Pascal graphics card — GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
The GTX 1070 Ti is basically a cut-down GTX 1080 with GDDR5 memory. Board partners decided to use their GTX 1080 coolers and PCB designs for GTX 1070 Ti rather than GTX 1070’s. That’s probably because GTX 1070 Ti has the same TDP as GTX 1080, which is 180W.
The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti has one CUDA cluster disabled. That said, the new card is equipped with 2432 CUDA cores.
While GTX 1070 Ti has the same memory size as GTX 1080, the memory subsystem is not using GDDR5X technology. Instead, GDDR5 was used. This means that the theoretical memory bandwidth is 96 GB/s lower than GTX 1080’s and the same for both GTX 1070 cards.
GeForce GTX 1070 Ti will officially launch on November 2nd. Today board partners are allowed to show their designs and reviewers are allowed to post unboxing videos/articles. You need to wait till November 2nd for full reviews.
Official MSRP for GTX 1070 Ti is 449 USD. You can preorder Founders Edition directly from NVIDIA.
Or buy custom cards from AMAZON:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Specifications 26th Oct, 2017 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GeForce GTX 1080 11Gbps GeForce GTX 1070 Ti GeForce GTX 1070 GPU 16nm FF GP102 16nm FF GP104 16nm FF GP104 16nm FF GP104 CUDA Cores 3584 2560 2432 1920 TMUs 224 160 152 120 ROPs 88 64 64 64 Compute 10.6 TFLOPS 8.2 TFLOPS 7.8 TFLOPS 5.8 TFLOPS Base Clock 1480 MHz 1607 MHz 1607 MHz 1506 MHz Boost Clock 1582 MHz 1733 MHz 1683 MHz 1683 MHz Memory Clock 11 Gbps 11 Gbps 8 Gbps 8 Gbps Memory 11 GB GDDR5X 8 GB GDDR5X 8 GB GDDR5 8 GB GDDR5 Memory Bus 352-bit 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit Bandwidth 484 GB/s 352 GB/s 256 GB/s 256 GB/s TDP 250 W 180 W 180 W 150 W
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition
Custom GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics cards
At the time of writing, 30 models were known. The list is updated automatically.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Here, BBC reporters give a snapshot of the extent of surveillance across Europe.
GERMANY - PAUL KIRBY
Germans have an historic fear of state intrusion, dating back to the Stasi secret police in the East and the Nazi-era Gestapo. But the threat of terrorism has forced the German government to take stricter measures.
During the 1970s, the West German authorities tightened legislation after a series of attacks by the left-wing Red Army Faction. The German government went further following revelations about Mohammed Atta, the head of the Hamburg cell involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York.
The most controversial changes have come since 2006, when police found explosives in a pair of suitcases left on two passenger trains in Koblenz and Dortmund in western Germany.
The bombs did not go off and, after surveillance camera video was posted on the internet, arrests were made.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said the use of video surveillance was clearly important and rail operator Deutsche Bahn stepped up its use of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras.
When a laptop was found apparently containing plans, sketches and maps, the authorities then considered how to monitor suspects' computers so that plots could be prevented at an earlier stage.
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) already had the ability to monitor suspects' emails and the websites and chat rooms they visited.
They could also tap phones with the consent of a judge.
Now they wanted to send emails that would infect a recipient's computer with spy software and relay information to police computers.
The threat was compounded by the discovery of 12 vats of hydrogen peroxide in September 2007 and an alleged plot to bomb US civil and military targets.
Three hundred police had been involved in a nine-month surveillance operation but had not been able to access the suspects' computers.
The Constitutional Court has now decided that the practice of cyber spying violates the right to privacy but would be acceptable in exceptional cases, under the auspices of a judge.
Faced with warnings from Germany's privacy commissioner of ever more sweeping surveillance - and protesters' T-shirts bearing the slogan "Stasi 2.0" - the government will have to tread carefully.
The police believe they will need to use spy software in perhaps 10 cases a year.
UNITED KINGDOM - DOMINIC CASCIANI
There is a big-budget sci-fi thriller running on BBC TV at the moment called The Last Enemy.
The hero is advising ministers on plans for a crime-fighting database to link all databases. And, unwittingly, he becomes a victim of the computer's all-seeing eyes.
So is it silly drama or the shape of things to come?
Privacy campaigners say the UK has some of the world's leading surveillance systems - and they argue there is now a real failure of sufficient oversight.
Take the millions of CCTV cameras, for example. They were rolled out to deter city centre crime.
But thanks to the internet and new software that can read number plates, text and, in certain circumstances, isolate specific human behaviour, their importance is increasing ten-fold.
The question in the UK is what would happen if you took camera data and married it to other sources, such as information on the location of mobile phones, swipe cards for urban transport and static databases about you, your family and life history. That would be a pretty effective surveillance system, say critics.
Ministers say this is completely fanciful - for a start there are no plans for a supercomputer to gather this information.
Secondly they argue two important laws govern the use of personal information and how the security services can use surveillance technology.
But the reality is they are now struggling politically to make reassurances stick.
The two main opposition parties oppose plans for full biometric identity cards on grounds of cost, oversight and, increasingly, fears of incompetence. The cards are almost certain to become a big issue at the next general election.
A string of controversies have buffeted ministers including the loss of a laptop containing information on armed services personnel and the disappearance of CDs holding family records. There has also been a row over the bugging of an MP.
While none of these rows seamlessly fit together, the jigsaw pieces are enough to make some people nervous.
So while the police-led DNA database - the largest in the world - has clear crime-fighting successes under its belt, no political party will back the calls of one highly respected judge to place everyone on it.
The Roman satirist Juvenal famously asked "Who watches the watchmen?" and that question is very much alive in British politics today.
FRANCE - EMMA JANE KIRBY
When you remember that the word "Liberty" is one of just three words enshrined in the French Republic's motto, you can guess that on the whole, the French are not big fans of surveillance equipment.
Too bad then that last year, the French Interior Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, announced that the number of CCTV cameras in France would triple by 2009 in a bid to crack down on street crime and to fight terrorism.
Official estimates suggest there are already about 340,000 authorised surveillance cameras in France and this new move would see the number of cameras on Paris's public transport network hit 6,500 in the next two years - compared with a projected 9,000 on the London Underground in the same period.
Plans to deploy 4ft-long spy drones across French skies in an attempt to tackle the country's growing problem of gang violence were also unveiled.
The drones, with day-night vision, will be used to track suspects and should begin full operational testing this year. The plan has annoyed many local officials who doubt spy cameras are the answer - they would rather see neighbourhood police officers brought back.
The children who have this device will think of their parents as Big Brother - I think that scares me
Jean Claude Guillemard
Psychologist
Surveillance cameras are not just kept for the streets. Last year a company which manufactures GPS systems for cars launched Kiditel, a child-tracking device.
The games console-sized device slips into a child's pocket and allows parents to keep track of their child's movements via satellite images sent to their computers.
Many parents welcomed a product they believed would help their children keep safe, but psychologists like Jean Claude Guillemard were not so welcoming:
"The children who have this device will think of their parents as Big Brother" he said. "I think that scares me. I think it's dangerous for their mental health."
Similarly a French childminder caused a row last year when she became the first nanny to install an internet webcam in her creche so that parents could still look in on their children - and see that she was taking good care of them - even though they were at work.
The parents loved it, but local authorities and the National Federation of Maternal Assistants denounced the idea as undermining the relationship of trust between the parents and the child minder.
The eye in the sky may be keeping an ever closer watch on France - but the French are determined to keep their liberty.
ITALY - DAVID WILLEY
Italians are among the most spied upon people in the world. That's the conclusion of the authoritative German scientific think-tank, the Max Planck Institute, which reports that Italy leads the world with 76 intercepts per 100,000 people each year.
Although the Italian constitution guarantees privacy of information, and a national data protection authority was set up in 2003 with a communications ombudsman at its head, wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping are widely used not only by the secret services, but also by the judiciary, particularly in the fight against organised crime.
Telecom Italia was involved in an alleged wiretapping scandal
Prosecutors routinely order wiretaps as a result of police investigations, and the cost to the Italian state has become a heavy burden on the taxpayer.
Wiretaps are carried out with the help of the now privatised Italian Telecom, which has been frequently criticised in the media for working hand in glove with the secret services.
A former director of security at Telecom, Giuliano Tavaroli, who had close links with the secret services, was sent to prison together with his friend Marco Mancini, a former anti-terrorism chief, as a result of a wiretapping scandal.
Several recent high profile political scandals have revealed the extent to which the private conversations of politicians and public figures are being taped.
Although the bugging of MPs' phones is forbidden without the specific permission of parliament, prosecutors and judges routinely leak to journalists details of compromising conversations.
The former governor of the Bank of Italy, Antonio Fazio, was forced to resign as a result of a scandal which came to light in this way.
The outgoing government of Romano Prodi announced last year that it was going to introduce a law making it an offence punishable by up to three years imprisonment for journalists to publish information obtained through judicially authorised wiretapping leaks. But no such law was ever passed.
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GREECE - MALCOLM BRABANT
In the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics, I met a man who was furious about the appearance of 350 cameras in the capital as part of a $1.5bn security programme to protect athletes and spectators.
"If I choose to have an affair with a woman who is not my wife, that is my fundamental human right, and I should be protected from being caught on camera," he said.
Costas Karamanlis and other ministers were tapped
The man was walking in the suburb of Nikaia, where the local left-wing mayor, who disapproved of surveillance, had ordered workmen to daub black paint over the lenses.
That cameo encapsulates the desire of most Greeks to resist state attempts to spy on them and helps explain why Greece leads the European Union and the rest of the world in privacy protection for its citizens.
The other important contributory factor is the strength and moral independence of the nation's Data Protection Authority, which is resolute in its determination to uphold the following principles enshrined in the Greek constitution:
Every person's home is a sanctuary
The private and family life of the individual is inviolable
Secrecy of letters and all other forms of free correspondence or communication shall be absolutely inviolable
The authority has real teeth. In December 2006 it fined mobile phone company Vodafone 76m euros for bugging more than 100 top Greek officials, including Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, around the time of the Olympics.
Vodafone's network planning manager in Greece, Costas Tsalikides, was found hanged not long after he informed his superiors he had discovered that spying software had been secretly installed in the company's system.
Mr Tsalikides family has always suspected he was murdered.
So many years after the dictatorship, Greece is very sensitive in the area of freedoms
Panos Garganos
Greek protester
Since January 18, 2008, the case has been officially closed. Vodafone Greece will appeal against the fine and says it has co-operated fully with all relevant authorities since the beginning of the case.
The Data Protection Authority has also frustrated the efforts of the Conservative government to extract some value from the Olympic security system.
When a left-wing group called Revolutionary Struggle fired a rocket into the office of the US ambassador in Athens, there was no video record because the security cameras were switched off.
The authority refused to allow the cameras to be used for anything other than traffic control.
In November 2007, a state prosecutor told the police that they would be allowed to use footage from the surveillance system to prosecute demonstrators who turned violent.
The new rules were first applied during the annual 17 November march to commemorate the dozens of students killed in 1973 when tanks of the right wing colonels' junta crushed an uprising at Athens Polytechnic.
"So many years after the dictatorship, Greece is very sensitive in the area of freedoms," said Panos Garganos, who was marching for the 33rd year in succession.
The use of the cameras to monitor the demonstration led to the resignation of the head of the Data Protection Authority.
Despite the fact that Greece has such strong constitutional protection against state-sponsored spying, some of my contacts refuse to have sensitive conversations on either land lines or mobile phones, because they assume that someone is listening.
DENMARK - JULIAN ISHERWOOD
In keeping with other European countries, Denmark has introduced anti-terrorist legislation that has provided the country's domestic security service PET with a raft of monitoring tools with which to carry out its counter-terrorism activities.
With the discovery over the past five years of terrorist cells, and particularly groups using Denmark as preparatory ground for activities elsewhere in Europe, Danish parliamentarians have been relatively unanimous in adopting counter-terrorism measures, with the broad support of the general public.
These have included the availability to the domestic security service of quite extensive monitoring measures, particularly in the areas of communication interception, data retention and the ability to monitor and geographically locate mobile and other telephone conversations.
Safeguards on CCTV monitoring in Denmark are strict
While previous legislation required the security service to substantiate and obtain a court order for each telephone number it wished to monitor, the new law provides for application for a court order to monitor a person's full communication activities - telephones and cyber-communication - but only in connection with cases falling under counter-terrorism legislation.
CCTV monitoring, while extensive in other parts of Europe, is not widespread in Denmark, although there are currently plans, and a public demand, to introduce monitoring in some crime-prone urban areas following several murders and disturbances in defined areas at night.
However, safeguards against general CCTV monitoring are strict, preventing the installation of CCTV cameras in public areas that would allow the identification of individuals or groups.
A Copenhagen kindergarten that recently suggested it would like to install CCTV monitoring around its premises gave up the idea following a public outcry.
Similarly, workplace monitoring is under strict control, preventing camera surveillance of employees, although the installation of CCTV in public areas of shops in particular is permitted.1 of 10
Scorpion's Tail
Noah's Ark Family Park, Wisconsin Dells, Wis.
Background: The Scorpion's Tail, designed by WhiteWater West of Canada, opened this Memorial Day and is the first capsule slide in America. It's 10 stories high and 400 feet long, with a near-vertical drop that takes riders plummeting at a rate of 50 feet per second.
Why It Stands Above the Rest: Instead of sitting down and pushing off down a steep slide, riders stand in a capsule for 3 seconds until the floor drops out beneath their feet. "You literally have no control," says Joe Heflin, senior vice president for News and Park Sales at WhiteWater West. "It's like falling down an elevator shaft."
The only thing to break the free-fall is the loop after the drop, which slows down the gravitational force of 2.6 g's. The control system for the ride, according to Heflin, is unique to water slides because it requires pumping water faster than gravity in order to lubricate the flume as the bodies slide down. In order to make a smooth (but no less-frightening) ride, water nozzles spraying mist are located every 3 to 4 feet from the top of the slide.
The capsule was also engineered using translucent fiberglass, providing optimal viewing of the thrill ride from the ground level.Calgarians sure love beaches a lot for a people deprived of the natural presence of any. Think about it: there is simply no distance we will not drive or fly if there is even a remote promise of a beach holiday at the other end. We travel because we must. When it comes to local swimming holes, Calgary definitely lost the lottery. For most of its life, the city was 90 minutes from the nearest swimmable public beach at Sylvan Lake. Sure, there was Chestermere, the slightly fattened irrigation ditch where as a kid I learned to dive off an old wooden raft on those three hot days a year when my parents would take us there. By 1970, however, Chestermere had gotten too weedy even for the desperate, which Calgarians definitely qualify as when it comes to aquatic refreshment. Yet desperate swim times call for desperate measures. In 1967, the Keith Construction Company sweetened its new-home offer by gouging out a lake in the middle of what was formerly nothing but flat prairie. Lake Bonavista thus became Canada’s first residential development to be centred around an artificial lake, and it set the terms for all of the others to come in one significant way: they were fenced, gated, fully private facilities for the exclusive use of community members. The rest of us could only look enviously through the chain link. Yes, in mushrooming 1970s Calgary, if the great unwashed wanted to get wet, they had to do it in their bathtubs. Fish Creek Provincial Park was, and remains, a bizarre anomaly: an urban park—now fully surrounded by city lands—managed not by its host city, but by an Alberta government considerably removed. Calgary planners first thought about turning the area into parkland in the 1960s. In 1973, former alderman and future Alberta Solicitor-General Roy Farran introduced a private resolution in the legislature to give the province the mandate to create and fund parks within cities. To secure all the land for what would be one of the world’s largest urban parks, the government had to expropriate prime ranchlands formerly occupied by area pioneers Pat Burns and William Roper Hull. When Premier Peter Lougheed opened Fish Creek Provincial Park (FCPP) 38 years ago, there were but a few picnic tables and 100 parking spaces, and there were still landowner holdouts. (One can only presume that the wealthy Mannix and Shaw families eventually did okay.) Community groups had urged leaders, unsuccessfully, to name the park with a local designation used by the Blackfoot, who have a long history in the valley: “Siokame,” meaning “black fish.” In response to a questionnaire asking them what they wanted in the park, enough Calgarians responded “someplace to swim outdoors” that the government actually listened, and plans were launched for Calgary’s first purpose-built, public swimming beach. (As the Herald reported, one of the suggestions was from a little girl who requested that the park allow “no hippies, snowmobilers or Liberals,” and she appears to have gotten her wish.)
It couldn’t have come at a more urgent time. Not long before, Calgary’s municipal brain trust had decreed that no more outdoor pools would be built. That was also when the City began curtailing the operational period of the dwindling few we did have, which, when I was a kid, used to open on Victoria Day. The City had also been considering developing lagoons along our occasionally benign rivers—which wouldn’t have taken much given that, historically, there were numerous popular swimming holes along both the Bow and Elbow rivers. But what was anglicized to become Sikome Lake derailed that. In August of 1978, sundry officials, including Mayor Ross Alger, gathered and, once a torrential rainstorm had concluded, cut the ribbon on a little over four football fields’ worth of family fun just waiting to be dove into. Lougheed declared that Fish Creek would be a “park for all people.” Little could he have known that on many sunny days to come, that’s exactly how many of them it seemed had already showed up at Sikome by the time you got there. Jim Stomp, a 37-year veteran of Alberta Parks, is the guy who’s been in charge of FCPP and, by extension, Sikome Lake for the past 16 years. He is as aware as anyone of the amount of science and effort that it takes to operate a safe, clean public facility like Sikome. “On a hot day in summer—and it doesn’t have to be a weekend, it can be a Tuesday—we’ll see 20,000 users,” he says. There may be a lot of kids wearing Huggies out in that water, but Stomp is proud to say that there hasn’t been a negative water-quality reading for at least five seasons. In the early years, however, Sikome was plagued by periodic closures due to either a bacteria called pseudomonas, or else schistosome—swimmer’s itch—a parasitic flatworm usually attached to waterfowl. Fecal coliform has only rarely triggered a closure, and then it was said to be primarily related to gull droppings. At one point, leeches had somehow invaded, though authorities were quick to specify that they were of the “non-bloodsucking variety.” In 1988 the facility closed so that a new water plant could be built and a plastic membrane installed under the sand to mitigate these problems. When Sikome relaunched the following summer, reporters praised the “high-tech swimming hole.” The water still came from wells, but an upgraded treatment plant now refreshed the full volume of water every eight days instead of 20. “You have to understand,” says Stomp, “that Sikome has a water-treatment plant big enough for a community the size of Airdrie. The water is chlorinated and copper sulfate is added as an algaecide.” None of the private lakes goes to all of those lengths, says Stomp, and he knows of only two other public swim facilities with similar technology: one at Echo Dale Regional Park in Medicine Hat and the other at Birds Hill Provincial Park near Winnipeg. Not all of Sikome’s challenges—and there have been many—involved technology. Disruptions have included the usual suspects, says Stomp: “Domestic disputes, drugs and alcohol.” Conservation officers are the front line of security—screening bags for alcohol and glass, for instance—though city police regularly attend as necessary. In 2008 the province decided to build a fence around the lake, citing crowd control, late-night drinking and strangers taking photos of children. That season, too, a hot economy made it difficult to find lifeguards—aquatic safety personnel, they’d prefer you to call them—a process that is still not easy since shift scheduling is entirely weather-dependent. Adverse weather events like wind-fallen trees occasionally interrupt the park’s scheduled 80-day season. Sikome lost several weeks of operation due to the “flood” of 2005. (Has any catastrophe been downgraded to mild irritation any more abruptly?) As for the human toll, there has only been one drowning, a seven-year-old in 1996, and a man once became paralyzed when he dove into shallow water.
Otherwise, Sikome’s greatest irritant is those five or six times a season when it must turn away hot, cranky crowds due to parking reaching its capacity. Never mind that this is exactly when the lake is not at its best; when the time and temperature align, it’s as if a lifeguard has blown a whistle that can be heard citywide, and shouted, “Okay! Everybody into the pool!” Although I seldom discuss this with anyone, I have a long, personal relationship with Sikome. I used to go all the time, maybe 20 visits a summer, almost always by myself. I’m not going to lie to you: sometimes it felt weird to be the only goggles-and-Speedo guy in the water. Check that, it always felt weird. Where, I often wondered, were all the other Calgarians who were looking for a break from the chlorine and crowds of indoor lane swimming? I could only conclude that I was considerably more sanguine than others about the water quality. Still, I found it an interesting Zen exercise. You merely had to strap on your goggles, thrust your face into the water, and direct your concentration to both breathing and not thinking about what a coliform is. In truth, the experience was mostly rather pleasant. Given that the three source wells probably emerge from the ground at around 10 degrees, the lake heats up fast due to the fact that it’s barely over two metres at its deepest point. I used to check it with a thermometer. It got as high as 23 degrees, but more typically it was around 18—chilly, at first, but the ideal temperature for the rare sort of invigoration you only get by building up a head of steam in cold water. Not that it’s easy to do so at Sikome, what with kids floating randomly all over the place. I eventually learned to pick my times, like days cool enough to deter the hordes but warm enough so that the facility would remain open. My best swims came when I timed my arrival for the first half-hour after a thunderstorm, knowing that crowds would have temporarily fled and that the sun was about to reappear. But there was one frustrating element that I just could not overcome: never being sure if the lake would be fully open. Sikome is bisected by a rope separating the shallower, child-friendly eastern half from the more swimmable side in the west. When usage is light, aquatic safety personnel will simply close the good half. Since I felt creepy enough as the only adult in relatively open water, I definitely lacked the will to attempt the crawl through the child soup of the main beach. Once, having driven across the city only to be stymied, I got into a heated discussion with the shift supervisor about why, in the Internet age, they could not somehow post their opening status before I struck out on the Deerfoot. That went about as well as the time when I naively asked if it would be okay to prepare for a surfing vacation by paddling my board, you know, way off to the side, out of everyone’s way. Yeah, right.The re-scheduled first MotoGP race of 2009 saw Casey Stoner take victory at the Commercialbank Grand Prix of Qatar.
As the action in the premier class of the 2009 FIM MotoGP World Championship finally got underway, at the spectacular Losail International Circuit on Monday night, it was Casey Stoner who took the headlines, completing a hat-trick of season-opening wins in Qatar.
Following the exceptional postponement of the opening MotoGP contest of the year due to rain |
has made game planning for Michigan State a difficult task. Langford said he has noticed defenses playing the Spartans more honest because of how balanced they’ve been.
“I’m glad we have a pass game and the run game,” Langford said. “We’re balanced. It makes it a lot easier for the receivers and the quarterbacks and us as well. It’s a good thing.”
Michigan State faces Purdue this weekend and Illinois next and with both of those games the Spartans will have a chance to continue to build on their balanced offense.
The Boilermakers rank 10th in rushing defense (194.5 yards per game) and fifth in pass defense (222.7 yards per game) in the Big Ten. And there may be plenty of opportunities to get into the end zone since Purdue has the worst scoring defense in the conference (37.8 points per game).
Illinois has held its opponents to 27.6 points per game. The Illini rank 11th in rushing defense (195.4 yards per game) and 10th in pass defense (254.4 yards per game) in the Big Ten.
“You can’t overlook these football teams,” Warner said. “Their backs are to the wall and they’re going to come out fighting, we really believe that. I think if we’re not ready to play, we can lose to anybody and we’ve put a couple games together back-to-back so I think we need to continue that consistency.”The waters off Mission Beach are closed for the second time in 24 hours, after a second shark sighting Friday morning.
The waters off Mission Beach are closed for the second time in 24 hours, after a second shark sighting Friday morning.
Visitors returned to Mission Beach Saturday, after possible shark sightings prompted two days of closures, lifeguards said.
Visitors returned to Mission Beach Saturday, after possible shark sightings prompted two days of closures, lifeguards said.
Was it a shark? That's the question a group of fishermen are asking after finding a dead baby seal off the Ocean Beach pier with apparent bite marks in it.
Was it a shark? That's the question a group of fishermen are asking after finding a dead baby seal off the Ocean Beach pier with apparent bite marks in it.
LA JOLLA (CBS 8/CNS) - A two-mile stretch of coastline near Casa Reef was closed Wednesday after several people spotted a dorsal fin, feared to belong to a shark.
Greg Nielsen told News 8 he and three other boogie boarders were riding the waves at Casa Reef, just south of the La Jolla Children's Pool, when they saw a dorsal fin, estimated to be about 12 inches.
In an exclusive interview with News 8, Nielsen said, "It was going straight, it wasn't going up and down like a dolphin and it was enough to motivate us to get out of the water pretty quick. It was coming toward us. We didn't see the actual body, just the fin." Lifeguards immediately evacuated the water.
The water one mile in each direction from Casa Reef will be off-limits for 24 hours, according to San Diego Fire-Rescue Department spokesman Maurice Luque. A police helicopter was used to search the area, but no shark was spotted.
Lifeguards closed a two-mile stretch of coastline off Mission Beach last Thursday after a lifeguard spotted an 18-inch dorsal fin, and again the next day after a surfer saw a 14-inch fin about 100 yards out, lifeguards said.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Welcome to another world, where Fox News hires an African American female, Glenda Beck, to spend an hour talking about her paranoid fantasies on the air. Lots of nut jobs go crazy and a few even kill people, claiming to have been inspired by Glenda, but Fox and indeed, the US law enforcement, stand by Glenda’s right to free speech. Naturally.
No one dares to say a thing to Glenda about her violent rhetoric, lest they step on her free speech toes. No one ever whispers about Glenda’s anger because her dark skin protects her from such assumptions and prejudices. No one ever says Glenda hates the first white President or white people in general because clever Glenda accused the white president of hating black people, and so now all of the whites in the country are on the defensive. They have to prove it’s not them. This, of course, is not racism just because the white people are always on the defensive against the black people.
Glenda whispers such things about the first white president and his administration:
“I can’t debunk the idea that our federal government, through FEMA, is operating concentration camps in Wyoming, ” she cries sadly, glycerin running down her cheeks. She tells the white people they’ve been tricked by the first white president. He is actually the devil, because one third of all white men is the devil, and he has the mark. The mark of the beast. “The beast is coming for your children,” Glenda cries on her special Friday shows.
When other African Americans band together in “We Hate White People” groups wearing the long black robes long associated with their historical lynching of white people and carrying armed rifles along with signs about how white people should die, our police and entire culture defend their right to free speech. No one says it makes them “nervous” when armed, angry black people gather. It is their right, after all. The police don’t arrest anyone. No one is questioned or harassed.
Even when a few “bad apples” go off and kill a few innocent people, spouting Glenda’s paranoia, no one ever thinks Glenda is at fault. To even suggest such a thing is akin to calling someone a Nazi, and only Glenda can do that. If you call her a Nazi, you are clearly a drama queen. How dare you.
No one ever calls her a FemiNazi or an angry black woman. No one ever makes slurs about the ghetto or the city or the hood, because Glenda is in the right. She is entitled to speak her mind. She is, after all, an American citizen! And her people have been running this country since it started. Hello.
Glena looks down her perfectly carved nose at the first white president, who seems to think he can do this job as if he were black. Glenda’s grandparents owned white people, and Glenda knows that white people aren’t capable of running the country. They look like they descended from a stupid jungle animal. Glenda often referred to white people as animals, and called the first white president’s wife a jungle animal. She didn’t have to say anything more, her followers knew that the wife and husband did not belong in the white house. They were usurpers who would ruin this country. She often ends her show with the question, “President White Monkey, why don’t you just throw gasoline on us all?” while shaking her head, the moral outrage clear. She is too good to physically attack the man, but obviously, some good patriot might need to.
And Fox stands by Glenda. After all, they are a network of African Americans who also hate white people and secretly fear that those white crackers will infiltrate their cities with their bland food and stupid music and after all, Fox feels resentful of the large amount of federal taxes they pay to those welfare states full of lazy white people who won’t get off their butts and go to work. Yes, sirree. Fox was using Glenda to tell those lazy trailer trashers to get to work. They weren’t going to suck this network dry.
And maybe if they cracked their bibles every once in a while or sang a gospel song the right way, none of this would have happened – but no. Fox couldn’t stand the way they pretended to be Christians when everyone knew white people were not really Christians. Just look at baby Jesus. Everyone knows he is black. The white people were doing some kind of pretend Christianity. Thank god Fox had Glenda to let the country know that those white people can’t not be trusted and should not be believed.
Glenda also let them know that their first white president wanted to take away their assault weapons, even though this wasn’t true. This of course made the angry black people riot in the street with their assault rifles and no one ever thought to suggest that it made others uncomfortable to see a bunch of angry black people with armed assault rifles and don’t tread on me t-shirts raging in the streets and accusing the president of being a Nazi hell bent on ruining the country while they screamed about watering the tree of liberty with blood. Everyone was fine with this. It was their right, after all.
Glenda screamed at her viewers with tears of liberty and justice running down her perfectly American face, “You need to become violent!” Glenda shouted to her angry, armed black followers that the first white president was “poking and prodding” the “crazy black people” (whom Glenda had conveniently accused him of hating). Who was that white upstart in the White House to call them crazy? Didn’t he know who ran this country? The largely illiterate crowd was pretty easy to rile up. It pleased Glenda. Plus, it paid. Lots.
And Fox stood behind Glenda. She had a right to speak, you know, Fox said with pursed lips.
And if any of the white people protested over the armed and robed revivals, Glenda would point her entitled finger and call out, “Witch!” at which point the entire culture would attack said white person. Questions could always be asked later.
As the white people and any black people who did not hate the white president (according to Glenda, if you didn’t hate the white president and know he was taking away your freedoms then you weren’t a real citizen and should be locked up in one of those internment camps) stirred nervously throughout the country over Glenda’s increasingly accusatory and inflammatory rhetoric, Glenda hid behind her gated community and her secret addiction to Xanax, also known as the black person’s crack.
Although the government sanctioned and way hipper version, of course. No one was going to jail for doing Xanax. It wouldn’t matter if the world found out. No one would ever call Glenda a drug addict even though she was one. She was the good kind of drug addict. The black kind. The city kind. Not one of those dirty white people in the streets selling illegal crack to kids in school. She would cry and say she had an addiction and they would rally around to give her a second and third chance. After all, she was “recovered” and a Christian. Who were they?
Nothing but angry white people. And who listened to them. One word out of them and Glenda would have them thrown in jail. You know how those white people are.
Yes, God spoke to Glenda and Fox listened. The white people bitched and moaned under their breath about things not being fair, but Glenda always silenced that with a smug accusation of reverse racism and a nod to the suspicious character of the first white president. The nation was scared for the first white president, so that usually shut them up. They thought things were a changin’, but Glenda knew better.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:As rights advocates and lawmakers called on the White House Friday to grant a special shield to thousands of Haitians living illegally in the US, House Rep. Steve King went in another direction.
In an email sent to ABC News, the Iowa Republican argued that deporting Haitians would be good for the island country because it needs their help in the wake of Tuesday’s earthquake.
Arguing against granting Haitians “Temporary Protected Status,” King wrote: “This sounds to me like open borders advocates exercising the Rahm Emanuel axiom: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’ … Illegal immigrants from Haiti have no reason to fear deportation, but if they are deported, Haiti is in great need of relief workers, and many of them could be a big help to their fellow Haitians.”
Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, would allow undocumented Haitians living in the United States to remain for a set period of time — usually 18 months. That would allow them to renew or obtain drivers licenses, and work legally.
Supporters of such a move argue that TPS would also help Haiti to rebuild, as immigrants send remittances to loved ones in the poorest country in the Americas, devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Tuesday.
That was the argument Andrea Nill made at ThinkProgress when reporting on King’s comments.
King blatantly ignores the fact that Haitian immigrants could probably do a lot more to rebuild Haiti by staying in the U.S. than by returning to the little that’s left of their decimated country. Allowing undocumented Haitians who are already living in the U.S. to legally work would help them earn the honest wages they need to send back money to their families and get their country back on its feet.
Nill also points out that several Republicans are among the lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are pushing for a temporary amnesty for Haitians, including Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, authorities are processing deportation orders for 30,000 Haitians now in the United States.
The non-profit Migration Policy Institute said 76,000 illegal immigrants from Haiti live in the United States, with a further 535,000 legally residing here, two thirds of them being adults of a working age.
Rights advocates have long depicted the current immigration laws as uneven, while even proponents of strict curbs on immigration said TPS was appropriate for Haiti now.
Some Central Americans enjoy the immigration shield, while Haitians do not.
“This is why TPS exists,” said Dustin Carnevale, a spokesman for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform referring to the quake’s aftermath. The protection is meant as relief for immigrants from countries reeling from natural disaster or political strife.
“If this isn’t a case for TPS, then what is?”
Carnevale said though that TPS had been “abused” in the past with continued extensions. Immigrants from Honduras and Nicaragua have enjoyed the shield since Hurricane Mitch, which occurred in 1997.
Democratic Congressman Kendrick Meek, who represents a Miami district where many Haitians live, reiterated his support for TPS, but said it was not the most urgent issue.
“Just to be clear: The US government halted the deportation of non-criminal Haitians living in the US nearly a year ago and is not currently deporting illegal Haitian immigrants in the aftermath of this week’s earthquake.
“I have always pushed for TPS for Haitians in the US, but right now my concern is for those whose lives hang in the balance.”
The temporary status “is in the range of considerations,” said Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler.
Haitian Consul General in Miami Ralph Latortue said Thursday he was aware of US federal government movement on the issue but was not aware of any decision having been made.
The Migration Policy Institute also estimated that one in every 20 Haitians lived in the United States, more than 70 percent of them in New York or Florida.
— With Agence France-PresseWell, you asked for it. You got it. Today we are proud to launch an entirely new HODINKEE original video series. We're calling it "Talking Watches," and these videos are just that: us, talking watches with our friends, new and old. Basically, we will use these monthly – yes, you'll get a new episode each month from here until eternity – videos to give you insight into the minds of watch collectors you might not come across in your daily life. Guys like John Mayer.
In this first video, I sit down with John to talk about how he got into watches, what his first great pieces were, and what's he's been wearing on his latest tour. Since John and I first connected a few years back, I've gotten to know him well via multi-day conversations about double-references, short-lived bezel colors, and what the ideal lume plot should look like. John is as serious a watch lover as anyone I've ever met. In fact, he's downright obsessive. And while Patek and Rolex might dominate his internal narrative these days, he loves all watches, from top to bottom. Here we'll give you a quick look at some of his favorites, as seen in the video above.When President Donald Trump issued his executive order on immigration last week, it was the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries that dominated headlines—leaving hundreds of people in limbo, provoking airport protests, and raising questions about whether the U.S. was targeting religion in the guise of a new security rule.
But immigration lawyers who have read the order carefully are now increasingly concerned that one of its provisions could have much wider repercussions, affecting literally every foreign visitor to America, from tourists to diplomats.
The little-noticed section, appearing immediately after the travel ban, calls for the government to develop a “uniform screening standard and procedure” for all individuals seeking to enter the United States. As written, it appears to require all visitors to go through the same vetting measures, regardless of where they come from or how long they intend to stay.
If interpreted as broadly as it’s written, “It would basically shut down tourism,” said Stephen Legomsky, the former chief counsel for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Obama administration.
Trump’s executive order, issued last Friday, has already been criticized as hastily drafted and confusing, and the White House has already loosened up one portion of it, allowing green card holders currently overseas to re-enter the U.S.
But little attention has focused on section four, which directs federal officials to implement a “uniform screening standard and procedure” as part of the “adjudication process for immigration benefits” for all individuals seeking to enter the United States. In immigration parlance, “immigration benefits” refers to any permission granted a foreign visitor, from full-scale refugee resettlement to a passport stamp for tourists visiting Disneyland. That wording is about as broad as it can get, lawyers said, and if taken literally would include every single foreigner coming to the United States. “[It] is basically everything,” said Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that supports reducing immigration levels.
“What they are talking about doing has scared the shit out of my members, about the lack of guidance and lack of clarity,” said Ben Johnson, the head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The implications of the order as written are so extreme that most lawyers are convinced that the Trump administration will not adhere to its literal meaning; as with other sections of the order, they expect the White House to stray from the drafted language. But such uncertainty has left lawyers baffled about what the interpretation will actually look like, and wondering whether Trump and his top advisors really do intend to upend the U.S. immigration system—and possibly disrupt global travel altogether.
Said Kathleen Campbell Walker, an immigration attorney in Texas and former head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, “Good Lord, I’ve been doing this for 31 years and I’m trying to figure out what this means.”
“Do they want to create, like we have for refugees now, a two-year process [for everyone looking to enter the U.S.] that involves multiple screenings and re-screenings and vetting by every single security agency?” said Donald Kerwin, the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies. “I don’t think so. I think that would shut down immigration to the United States.”
Former government officials from both parties pointed out that enforcing it would be virtually impossible with current resources, either forcing the administration to abandon the standard or dramatically reducing the number of foreigners who travel to the U.S.
“They just can’t physically do it. It really can’t happen,” said Legomsky, who also pointed out that if they did, it would cause blowback that would hurt American travelers as well. “Other countries would reciprocate some of our constraints on U.S. citizens seeking to travel,” he said.
“I don’t know what they mean by that,” said Robert Divine, the former chief counsel at U.S. Immigration and Custom Services during the George W. Bush administration. A uniform standard is so resource-intensive, he said, as to be completely unworkable. “They’ll find out that there aren’t enough resources to go around and the nation still needs the wheels to turn and people to come here. It’ll be a painful process of realization.”
More than 10 million people traveled to the U.S. on a visa in 2015—including immigrants and nonimmigrants—while tens of millions visited the United States without a visa. The section calls for the secretary of state, secretary of homeland security, director of national intelligence and FBI director to develop a “uniform screening standard and procedure” for all of them. That could slow travel to the U.S. to a crawl, upending the tourism industry and creating massive headaches for companies with foreign employees who frequently travel to the U.S. Foreign airline employees would have to go through significant vetting procedures every time they enter here.
So what does Trump really mean by a “uniform screening standard and procedure”? Immigration lawyers weren’t sure. Given Trump’s promise of “extreme vetting,” it could be very stringent, requiring an in-person interview, detailed documentation, medical histories and biometric testing such as fingerprints, among other information. The section suggests, but doesn’t mandate, in-person interviews, a database of identity documents and forms with questions to identify fraudulent answers and to confirm the applicant’s identity. That would be a huge break from the current system, which adopts a risk-based approach where people considered to pose a greater risk to the U.S. undergo a more thorough and lengthy vetting process, and in which people travelling from any of 38 specified countries—allies like Britain, France and Australia—don’t need a visa to visit at all. Requiring those travelers to undergo the same vetting procedures as a refugee would create an enormous strain on foreign consulates and U.S. immigration authorities, effectively imposing tight new limits on how many people can visit the U.S. each year.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a screening procedure that is rigorous enough for people who are coming here permanently that, with present resources, we could come even close to using for the 50 million tourists entering our territory,” said Legomsky. He added, “Either the language is hopelessly incompetent or they really do mean that there has to be one uniform screening standard that would be unworkable in practice.”
Unlike other sections of the order, section four doesn’t mention an exception for certain visa holders, including those with diplomatic visas, and it does not grant the secretary of homeland security, or any other official, the authority to waive the screening on a case-by-case basis. Based on the text, then, foreign heads of states, including those of allies like Britain’s Theresa May and Germany’s Angela Merkel, would have to go through the same vetting process as every other foreigner seeking to enter the U.S.
The pragmatic view of the order is that the final policy would naturally include plenty of exemptions; Stein, the head of FAIR, argued that the order should not be read to mean that every foreigner would undergo the same vetting process but instead that vetting would context-specific. “There are not unlimited resources,” he said. “So therefore, one would assume that they are going to use a rule of reason in what they mean by ‘uniform’.” He continued, “Spinning out scenarios of an impractical uniformity sounds kind of foolish, because that’s not the real world.”
Most immigration lawyers agreed with Stein that the Trump administration would ultimately interpret “uniform” to mean context-specific—that is, not really uniform.
“I don’t think this limits itself to one size has to fit all,” said Michael Neifach, a lawyer who held senior positions at DHS during the Bush administration. “But this is very broad language. You’ve seen with the other sections of the executive order, it’s subject to modification.”
The White House did not respond to multiple emails asking how to interpret the section. The office of the director of national intelligence said “it did not have anything to offer on this question” and the FBI directed requests to Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond to emails and calls asking for clarification. A State Department official said the new policy was underway, but without offering specifics: “Working closely with the Department of Homeland Security, we are implementing the Executive Order. We will announce any changes affecting travelers to the United States as soon as that information is available.”
Experts are also concerned with the potential criteria that the order suggests should be included in a uniform standard. It suggests a “process to evaluate the applicant’s likelihood of becoming a positively contributing member of society and the applicant’s ability to make contributions to the national interest,” wording that lawyers said was impossible to decipher. “What does that mean?” asked a Democratic aide. “Who is a positively contributing member of society?” The order also suggests that the standard include some mechanism to determine whether the applicant “has the intent to commit criminal or terrorist acts” in the U.S.
The order lays out no timetable for when the uniform standard should be implemented, but directs the secretary of homeland security to submit three reports—within 60 days, within 100 days and within 200 days—on the departments’ progress complying with the order.
Even with a less extreme interpretation, immigration experts expect that changes to the vetting process will still affect nearly everyone coming to the U.S. Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, two of the leading authors of the executive order, have shown interest in not just reducing the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. but reducing the flow of legal immigrants as well. The travel ban, controversial as it is, does not go far towards accomplishing that goal, since it is largely restricted to seven countries that send relatively few people to America. But a broader tightening of the vetting process could be far more effective, gumming up the entire system and slowing the flow of all arrivals.
To immigration restrictionist groups like FAIR, such a crackdown on immigration flows has long been needed for America’s national and economic security. Stricter vetting measures are necessary even for people coming from closely allied countries included in the Visa Waiver Program, they say, due to the fact that more than a million refugees have migrated to Europe, specifically Germany.
“If you are going to keep Schengen in place and keep the E.U. functioning,” said Stein, referring to the area of Europe with passport-free travel, “there is going to have to be a far more elaborate vetting process over the chaos that Merkel has been leading the last several years.”
Many immigration lawyers and former Obama administration officials are critical of that reasoning. Instead of making the country safer, they said, a uniform screening standard would waste limited resources on low-risk travelers, potentially allowing more high-risk ones to fall through the cracks. “That creates a bit more of a needle in a haystack problem,” said Betsy Cooper, a former attorney advisor at the Department of Homeland Security. “If you are treating every piece of hay like it could equally be a needle, it becomes a lot harder to find the needle.”Debunking 9/11 Mini-nuke Hypotheses Look at the Raw Data, and don't let others do your thinking for you! Here are the scientific studies themselves The USGS WTC Dust Study Here is the published results of the USGS WTC Dust Study: Evaluation of World Trade Center dusts and girder coatings using a simulated precipitation leaching procedure:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/leach1/index.html
Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1165/table_1.html USGS Environmental Studies of the World Trade Center Area after September 11, 2001
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0050-02/fs-050-02_508.pdf Some proponents of the Mini-nuke hypothesis have claimed that this study shows unually high concentrations of Uranium, Thorium, Tritium, and other signs of nuclear fission products... But if you read the captions in the paper carefully, it says these concentrations are normal compared to the mean concentrations of the same elements in soils from the eastern United States (other studies). It also says: "The mean concentrations of some heavy metals in the WTC dust samples (such as antimony, molybdenum, zinc, copper, lead, chromium, manganese, nickel, and barium) are relatively high compared to their mean concentrations in natural soils from the eastern United States." The plot (above) compares the concentration ranges and mean concentrations of chemical elements in the WTC dusts (this study) to the mean concentrations of the same elements in soils from the eastern United States (other studies). R J Lee Group WTC Dust Signature Study Here is a copy of the R J Lee Group Dust study:
http://www.ae911truth.org/documents/WTCDustSignature_ExpertReport.051304.1646.mp_.pdf Limited Metallurgical Examination of WTC 7 Steel Appendix C of the FEMA Report contains a metallurgical examination of Steel from WTC 7:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/metallurgy/WTC_apndxC.htm Seismic Studies: The following paper by Dr. Andre Rousseau is titled "Were Explosives the Source of the Seismic Signals Emitted from New York on September 11, 2001?"
http://www.journalof911studies.com/resources/RousseauVol34November2012.pdf The conclusion states: "Near the times of the planes' impacts into the Twin Towers and during their collapses, as well as during the collapse of WTC7, seismic waves were generated. To the degree that (1) seismic waves are created only by brief impulses and (2) low frequencies are associated with energy of a magnitude that is comparable to a seismic event, the waves recorded at Palisades and analyzed by LDEO undeniably have an explosive origin. Even if the planes' impacts and the fall of the debris from the Towers onto the ground could have generated seismic waves, their magnitude would have been insufficient to be recorded 34 km away and should have been very similar in the two cases to one another. As we have shown, they were not." Tritium Studies Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen in which the nucleus contains one proton and two neutrons. Nuclear fusion produces large amounts of tritium. Although tritium is formed naturally through the interaction of cosmic rays with the atmosphere, it does not accumulate because of its short half-life of 12.3 years. Because its decay products cause phosphors to glow, tritium is used in self-illuminating devices found in watches, exit signs, and gun sights. Proponents of the WTC nuclear weapons theory have cited the following passage, which reports the detection of tritiated water around the WTC, as evidence for their theory. Traces of tritiated water (HTO) were detected at the World Trade Center (WTC) ground zero after the 9/11/01 terrorist attack. A water sample from the WTC sewer, collected on 9/13/01, contained 0.164±0.074nCi/L of HTO. A split water sample, collected on 9/21/01 from the basement of WTC Building 6, contained 3.53±0.17 and 2.83±0.15 nCi/L, respectively. Source:https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/241096.pdf The quantities reported are extremely small, and, as the same report states, their likely source was tritium radioluminescent devices in the World Trade Center. Uranium Uranium is a naturally-occurring element (atomic number 92) used to fuel nuclear reactors and manufacture plutonium (atomic number 94) for nuclear weapons. Uranium has several different isotopes, which are radioactive to different extents. Proponents of the WTC nuclear weapons hypothesis have cited the following passage from a scientific study of dust and smoke emanating from Ground Zero as evidence for their theory. Radionuclides. We analyzed the gamma spectrum of the samples using an EG&G/Ortec high-purity Ge detector (50% relative efficiency) gamma counter (EG&G/Ortec Instruments, Inc., Oak Ridge, TN). We analyzed approximately 50 peaks based on statistical significance (counting/lack of interferences). These included thorium, uranium, actinium series, and primordial radionuclides. Liquid scintillation analyses were conducted for emissions on the total dust and smoke samples using a Packard Tri-Carb Model 2770 TR/SL (Packard Instrument, Meriden, CT). The MDA [mimimum detectable activity] for alpha radioactivity was 0.30 DPM (0.14 pCi) based on a NIST-traceable 226Ra standard (National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD). When placed in the liquid scintillation fluid, the WTC samples are somewhat darker than the backgrounds and calibration standard, which may cause slight underreporting of the beta activity due to quenching and standard-to-sample efficiency bias. 2 [NOTE: MDA means minimum detectable activity, and DPM means decays per minute.] The passage indicates that the radioactivity of the WTC samples was only slightly above background levels, which is not surprising, given that small quantities of radionuclides are used in applications likely present in the Towers. Steven Jones tested a solidified metal sample for radioactivity and found no radioactivity above background levels. Again, I'd like to remind people to take a look at the hard forensic scientific evidence, before you listen to any popular personality on the internet try to convince you what to believe. You should draw your conclusions based on hard evidence, not the beliefs or opinions of others. I understand, not everyone has the scientific background and technical training to understand all the hard data. In that case, you just have to look around at what other people are saying and decide what you want to believe. I only wish that more thorough scientific and forensic studies had been performed to learn more and probe deeper... Proponents and Critics of the Theory The idea that nuclear devices, and in particular,'mini-nukes', were used to destroy the Twin Towers has been promoted in a number of quarters, such as in the DVD 9/11 Eyewitness. Promoters of the mini-nuke idea have suggested that such weapons were needed to produce the thorough pulverization of concrete observed at Ground Zero, and other aspects of the destruction. Dr. Steven E. Jones has refuted this idea repeatedly, including in the following short essay. e x c e r p t title: Testing the Hypothesis that Mini-Nukes Were Used on the WTC Towers author: Steven E. Jones Empirical Facts: All nuclear weapons (especially FUSION/Hydrogen bombs) release copious high-energy neutrons which will activate steel and other materials. This is called neutron activation and cannot be avoided, and much of the induced radioactivity remains for decades.
I have studied fusion for decades, and have made frequent measurements of neutrons (as well as charged particles).
Several months ago, I tested WTC dust samples and a solidified metal sample for radioactivity using a Geiger counter: I found ZERO RADIOACTIVITY. This experimental evidence goes strongly against the mini-nukes hypothesis since neutron activation levels were zero.
I also tested some sand gathered from a nuclear-bomb test site decades ago for comparison? and the Geiger counter showed hundreds of counts per minute. This also shows the long life of the radioactive residues due to nuclear bombs? the sand still yields high Geiger-counter readings decades after the nuclear bomb blast.
Note that concrete pulverization is often achieved in controlled demolitions with chemical explosives, e.g., the Seattle Kingdome demolition.
Mini-nukes are not needed for pulverization nor for?top-down? demolition as observed for the WTC Towers. In September, 2006, James Fetzer posted a series of articles on ScholarsFor911Truth.org suggesting that'mini-nukes' were used to destroy the Twin Towers. Fetzer pitted Dr. Steven Jones' one article debunking the idea against six, implying that the idea had merit. Promoters of the mini-nukes idea have also supported their claim with news stories of nuclear contamination in landfills near New York City, ignoring the fact that the stories were about radium contamination from industrial equipment. A simple disproof of the idea that nuclear weapons were used to destroy the Towers is that all such weapons generate intense electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. Onlookers would have been blinded had any such devices been used. Despite the scientific refutation of the mini-nukes idea by Jones and others using simple scientific arguments, James Fetzer continued to promote the idea on the ScholarsFor911Truth.org website -- a site that purports to represent the group of scholars that includes co-founder Steven Jones. Another debunking of the nuclear attack "theory" is provided by a Finnish author: s u m m a r y
title: WTC hydrogen bomb theory refuted
This page provides a 9-point refutation of the ideal [sic] that nuclear devices were used to destroy the WTC buildings. It includes an e-mail exchange between the critique's author and Hannu Yli-Karjanmaa, who has posted the nukes "theory" among a collection of articles attributed to an anonymous Finnish "military expert" it. site: www.kolumbus.fi page: www.kolumbus.fi/totuus/doc/wtcatom.html How this disinformation functions The idea that a mini-nuke inside of a suitcase would be easier for the perpetrators to sneak past WTC Security Systems, is meant to DISTRACT you from looking deeper into the actual WTC Security Systems and WHO ran them in the years leading up to 9/11, as well as WTC Tenants who worked inside these buildings everyday and are suspected of Further Crimes and Cover-ups inside the towers that day! "A honey pot, in intelligence jargon, is a tempting source of information or 'dangle' that is set out to lure intended victims into a trap. Ultimately the honey pot is violently and maliciously discredited so as to destroy the credibility of anything stuck to it by association." -Michael Ruppert, "Crossing the Rubicon," p. 184 This is smoke and mirrors disinfo is designed primarily to take your attention off of the HARD EVIDENCE of nanothermite use at the WTC, and how it leads directly to people like L. Paul Bremer and organizations like SAIC and the Komatsu-Dresser / Battelle nanothermite demolition patents. Please watch my video on that detailed and often covered-up info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIkLOMZnkwM No serious 9/11 researchers actually believe this theory any more, and if they do they are probably government shills. WTC Security Firms included: KROLL Despite Kroll's leading role in providing the security plan for the |
that both will and shall can have besides simply expressing futurity).
Expressions of relative tense [ edit ]
It is sometimes possible to mark the time of an occurrence as being in the past or future not relative to the present moment (the moment of speaking), but relative to a time of reference, which can itself be in the past or future (or in some hypothetical reality) relative to the present moment. (See relative tense.) Thus an occurrence may be marked as taking place in the "past of the future", "future of the past", etc. (For the "past of the past", see pluperfect.)
The past of the future, marking an occurrence expected to take place before some future reference time, is typically marked by a future perfect form (in languages that have such a form), as in the English "I shall have finished by tomorrow afternoon."
The "future of the past" may be expressed in various ways in English. It is possible to use would in its capacity as the past tense of the future marker will (see English modal verbs and future-in-the-past); for example: "The match started at midday but would not end until the evening." It is also possible to use the past tense of other expressions that express future reference, as in "I was going to wait"; "I was to wait"; "I was about to wait." Such expressions can also be put into other tenses and moods (and non-finite forms), to achieve future reference in hypothetical and future situations, e.g., "I would be going to take part if..."; "I shall be about to leave." More examples can be found in the section Expressions of relative future in the article on the going-to future.
Germanic languages [ edit ]
In Germanic languages, including English, a common expression of the future is using the present tense, with the futurity expressed using words that imply future action (I go to Berlin tomorrow or I am going to Berlin tomorrow). There is no simple (morphological) future tense as such. However, the future can also be expressed by employing an auxiliary construction that combines certain present tense auxiliary verbs with the simple infinitive (stem) of the main verb. These auxiliary forms vary between the languages. Other, generally more informal, expressions of futurity use an auxiliary with the compound infinitive of the main verb (as with the English is going to...).
English [ edit ]
English grammar provides a number of ways to indicate the future nature of an occurrence. Some argue that English does not have a future tense—that is, a grammatical form that always indicates futurity—nor does it have a mandatory form for the expression of futurity. However, there are several generally accepted ways to indicate futurity in English, and some of them particularly those that use will or shall—are frequently described as future tense.
The will/shall future consists of the modal verb will or shall together with the bare infinitive of the main verb, as in "He will win easily" or "I shall do it when time permits". (Prescriptive grammarians prefer will in the second and third persons and shall in the first person, reversing the forms to express obligation or determination, but in practice shall and will are generally used interchangeably,[3] with will being more common. For details see shall and will.) The meaning of this construction is close to that expressed by the future tense in other languages. However the same construction with will or shall can have other meanings that do not indicate futurity, or else indicate some modality in addition to futurity (as in "He will make rude remarks", meaning he has a habit of doing so, or, "You shall act on my behalf", giving an order). For details of these meanings, see the sections on will and shall in the article on English modal verbs.
The form of the will/shall future described above is frequently called the simple future (or future simple). Other constructions provide additional auxiliaries that express particular aspects: the future progressive (or future continuous) as in "He will be working"; the future perfect as in "They will have finished"; and the future perfect progressive as in "You will have been practising." For detail on these, see the relevant sections of Uses of English verb forms. (For more on expressions of relative tense, such as the future perfect, see also the section above.)
Several other English constructions commonly refer to the future:
Questions and negatives are formed from all of the above constructions in the regular manner: see Questions and Negation in the English grammar article. The auxiliaries will and shall form the contracted negations won't and shan't (they can also sometimes be contracted when not negated, to 'll).
The various ways of expressing the future carry different meanings, implying not just futurity but also aspect (the way an action or state takes place in time) and/or modality (the attitude of the speaker toward the action or state).[2][4] The precise interpretation must be based on the context. In particular there is sometimes a distinction in usage between the will/shall future and the going-to future (although in some contexts they are interchangeable). For more information see the going-to future article.
German [ edit ]
The use of the present tense in future meaning is much more common in German than it is in English. Especially in colloquial German, but also in the written standard language, future tenses are quite rarely used if the future meaning is already evident through context or a temporal adverb or clause. For example:
In zehn Jahren bin ich Millionär.
"In ten years, I shall be a millionaire." Literally: "In ten years am I millionaire."
German uses an auxiliary for the future: werden (which can also mean "to become.") The main verb after werden is a simple infinitive. The infinitive main verb is placed at the end of the sentence or clause. For example:
Ich werde dich morgen nach der Arbeit anrufen.
"I shall call you tomorrow after work." Literally: "I become you tomorrow after the work call."
A future perfect (in German referred to as Futur II) can be formed by means of replacing the simple infinitive with a past infinitive (past participle + infititive of the relevant auxiliary):
Ich werde dich angerufen haben
"I shall have called you."
Some grammarians (e.g. J. Kromeyer, J. C. Gottsched, J. B. v. Antesperg) also labeled or label other future forms, like:
imperative future: du sollst loben (you shall praise)
(you shall praise) indicative uncertain future (German: ungewiß zukünftige Zeit, Latin: tempus futurum incertum ): ich will loben (I want to praise)
, Latin: ): (I want to praise) indicative certain future (German: gewiß künftige Zeit, Latin: tempus futurum certum ), or indicative future I: ich werde loben (I shall praise)
, Latin: ), or indicative future I: (I shall praise) indicative conditional future (German: bedingt zukünftige Zeit, Latin: tempus futurum conditionatum), or conjunctive II future: ich würde loben (I would praise)
All these wordings do still exists, but nowadays (usually) only ich werde loben (future I) and sometimes ich würde loben (conjunctive II future) are labeled future forms.
Dutch [ edit ]
Dutch can express the future in three ways:[5]
gaan + infinitive: Ik ga het boek lezen (I'm going to read the book). " Gaan " is a cognate of "to go".
+ infinitive: Ik ga het boek lezen (I'm going to read the book). " " is a cognate of "to go". zullen + infinitive: Ik zal het boek lezen (I will/shall read the book). " Zullen " is a cognate of "shall".
+ infinitive: Ik zal het boek lezen (I will/shall read the book). " " is a cognate of "shall". present tense + context or a temporal adverb or clause: Hoe lang blijft hij in Nederland? (How long is he staying in the Netherlands?) Its English-language equivalent uses the continuous or imperfective aspect.
Zullen + infinitive is more similar to shall than to will. It is used to:[6]
express a promise or a proposal
emphasize that something will certainly happen
express that an event is likely going to take place (by explicitly mentioning the probability)
English will and Dutch wil, although cognates, have over the centuries shifted in meaning, such that will is almost identical to shall, whereas Dutch wil means want, as in Ik wil het doen (I want to do it).
Gaan + infinitive can be compared with the English "going to". It is used:
to express an intended action (but not a promise, proposal, or solemn plan)
to say that an event is going to take place (without emphasizing the certainty or mentioning the probability)
Icelandic and Old Norse [ edit ]
Icelandic descends from Old Norse and is scarcely changed from it in the written form. Icelandic uses the auxiliaries:
munu expressing a probable future
expressing a probable future skulu (shall) implying obligation or determination.
It is believed that in Old Norse munu expressed the pure future, skulu (shall) expressed obligation or determination as it still does, and a third auxiliary, vilja ("will"), expressed will or intent.
A common auxiliary expression of the future, which takes the compound infinitive, is:
ætla expressing intention.
(So Ég ætla að koma; I will come)
The verb verða (become) is also very commonly used in the meaning "will be", making the lesser used mun vera (will be) have a bit stronger emphasis on the future than the English translation has.
Like many other Germanic languages, the future can also be expressed by simply using the present tense and having in the sentence words that imply future action (e.g. "tomorrow"). Because of this, if it is already evident from the sentence that one is talking about the future, then the verb is almost always in the present tense.
Norwegian [ edit ]
Current standard Norwegian auxiliaries are:
vil (cognate with "will"; used to indicate desire)
(cognate with "will"; used to indicate desire) skal (cognate with "shall"; used to indicate intent)
(cognate with "shall"; used to indicate intent) kan (cognate with "can"; used to indicate ability)
(cognate with "can"; used to indicate ability) kommer til å (future regardless of intention)
An occasional usage is:
mon (or in Nynorsk mun.).
Danish [ edit ]
In Danish the future is usually unmarked, using the present tense form. Sometimes the modals vil ("want") and skal ("must") are used instead to indicate futurity, and sometimes blive "become" can have the meaning "will be". The following distinctions illustrate some of their uses:
Det vil aldrig ske "That will never happen" (a prediction) but Det skal ej ske "That shall not happen" (a promise).
Hvad skal du i aften? "What will you (do) tonight?"; Jeg skal besøge mine forældre i weekenden "I shall visit my parents this weekend"; Skal du hjem nu? "Will you go (are you going) home now?".
Han vil hentes "He wants to_be_picked_up"; Han skal hentes "He must be_picked_up". Han vil blive hentet "He will become (get) picked_up (it's already arranged)", but Han skal blive hentet "He will become (be) picked_up (I promise)".
Jeg skal til fødselsdag i morgen "I shall (go) to (a) birthday_party tomorrow". Det bliver sjov "That becomes (will be) fun". Vi bliver 15 "We become (shall be) 15 (there will be fifteen of us)". Han bliver 40 "He becomes (will be) 40".
Swedish [ edit ]
Swedish[1]:pp.107–108 skall strongly implies intention, but with an adverb such as nog "probably" it can avoid the implication of intentionality: Det här skall nog gå bra "This will probably go well". However, the past tense of skall, skulle, can be used without such an adverb to express predictions in the past : Pelle sa, att det skulle bli varmt på eftermiddagen "Pelle said that it would be warm in the afternoon."
Pure future, regardless of intention, is usually expressed with kommer att (literally: "comes to"): Det här kommer att gå bra "This will go well", Du kommer att överleva det här "You will survive this".
Latin and Romance [ edit ]
The future tense forms in Latin varied by conjugation. Here is a sample of the future tense for the first conjugation verb amare, "to love".
amabo I will (shall) love amabis you (singular) will love amabit he, she, it will love amabimus we will (shall) love amabitis you (plural) will love amabunt they will love
See Latin conjugation for further details. Sound changes in Vulgar Latin made future forms difficult to distinguish from other verb forms (e.g., amabit "he will love" vs. amavit "he loved"), and the Latin simple future forms were gradually replaced by periphrastic structures involving the infinitive and an auxiliary verb, such as debere, venire, velle, or especially habere. All of the modern Romance languages have grammaticalized one of these periphrastic constructions for expressing the future tense; none of them has preserved the original Latin future.
Future tense with habere [ edit ]
While Classical Latin used a set of suffixes to the main verb for the future tense, later Vulgar Latin adopted the use of habere ("to have") with the infinitive, as for example:
petant aut non petant venire habet[7] ("whether they ask or do not ask, it will come")
From this construction, the major Western Romance languages have simple future tense forms that derive from the infinitive followed by a conjugated form of the verb "to have" (Latin habere). As the auxiliary verb lost its modal force (from a verb expressing obligation, desire, or intention, to a simple marker of tense), it also lost syntactic autonomy (becoming an enclitic) and phonological substance (e.g., Latin first singular habeo > ayyo > Old French ai, Modern French [e]).
Thus the sequence of Latin verbs amare habeo ("I have to love") gave rise to French aimerai, Spanish amaré, etc. "I will love".[8][9]
French Personal pronoun Root verb Conjugation of avoir Future tense je aimer ai aimerai tu as aimeras il/elle/on a aimera nous avons aimerons vous avez aimerez ils/elles ont aimeront
Portuguese Personal pronoun Root verb Conjugation of haver Future tense eu comer hei comerei tu hás comerás ele/ela/você há comerá nós hemos comeremos vós heis comereis eles/elas/vocês hão comerão
Spanish Personal pronoun Root verb Conjugation of haber Future tense yo comprar he compraré tú has comprarás él/ella/usted ha comprará nosotros hemos compraremos vosotros habéis compraréis ellos/ellas/ustedes han comprarán
Phonetic changes also affected the infinitive in the evolution of this form, so that in the modern languages the future stem is not always identical to the infinitive. Consider the following Spanish examples:
"go out": infinitive salir → 3rd sing. future saldrá (not * salirá )
→ 3rd sing. future (not * ) "do": infinitive hacer → 3rd sing. future hará (not *hacerá)
Romanian [ edit ]
Romanian, although a Romance language, patterns like Balkan languages such as Greek and Serbo-Croatian (cf. Balkan sprachbund) in that it uses reflexes of the verb vrea (to want):
"love": infinitive a iubi → 3rd sing. future va iubi
Romanian also forms a future tense from the subjunctive, with a preceding particle, o, also derived from vrea:
"love": infinitive a iubi → 3rd sing. future o să iubească (lit. (want) that he love)
Portuguese [ edit ]
In Portuguese, the simple future, called "futuro do indicativo", is quite similar to Spanish. However, the future may also be formed with the auxiliary verb ir ("to go") in the simple present and with the main verb in the infinitive (vou cantar, vou bater, etc.), but it cannot be done for the verb ir, as something like vou ir would sound very strange.
cantar bater partir pôr eu cantarei baterei partirei porei tu cantarás baterás partirás porás ele/você cantará baterá partirá porá nós cantaremos bateremos partiremos poremos vós cantareis batereis partireis poreis eles/vocês cantarão baterão partirão porão
In Portuguese a pronoun may be placed between the root verb and the future tense ending, as in dar-lhe-ei ("I will give it to you"), where the pronoun lhe ("to you") is inserted into the future verb darei ("(I) will give"), between the root (dar) and the future tense ending (ei). This phenomenon is called mesoclisis.
Sardinian [ edit ]
Sardinian, due to its early breaking off from Proto-Romance, displays different traits in its morphology. Notably, in the future tense, the verb habeo (aere in Sardinian) is instead proclitic, and does not have an individual conjugation on the verb. Instead, aere is conjugated into present tense, and the other verb's infinitive form is used. Thusly, app'aere, app'appidu and app'aere appidu are aere's future, perfect, and future perfect.
Slavic languages [ edit ]
Slovak [ edit ]
In the Slovak language, the future tense is formed only with verbs with imperfective grammatical aspect, with the auxiliary verb byť (to be) in future tense:
byť person singular plural 1. budem budeme 2. budeš budete 3. bude budú
To this auxiliary verb, the infinitive of the verb to be put into future tense is simply appended:
robiť (to do, to work): budem robiť (I will work, I will be working)
(to do, to work): (I will work, I will be working) hovoriť (to speak, to talk): budeme hovoriť (we will speak/talk, we will be speaking/talking)
Polish [ edit ]
Polish language uses both suffixes and auxiliary verbs to express the sense of futurity. The only verb which has its own future conjugation is być (to be):
być person singular plural 1. będę będziemy 2. będziesz będziecie 3. będzie będą
The future tense can be formed in two different ways depending on the aspect of the verb. For imperfective verbs, Polish uses the future tense of być plus the past tense of the verb at the third person or the infinitive. For instance:
mówić (to say/speak/talk/tell):
-będę mówił (m)/mówiła (f)/ mówiło (n)/mówić (I will say, I will be saying).
-będziesz mówił (m) / mówiła (f) / mówiło (n)/mówić (You will say, you will be saying).
-będzie mówił (m) / mówiła (f) / mówiło (n)/mówić (He/she/it will say, he/she/it will be saying).
-będziemy mówili (mp) / mówiły (nmp) / mówić (We will say, we will be saying).
-będziecie mówili (mp) / mówiły (nmp) / mówić (You will say, you will be saying).
-będą mówili (mp) / mówiły (nmp) / mówić (They will say, they will be saying).
(m) refers to a male, (f) to a female and (n) is neuter, used with inanimate objects. In Plural, (mp) refers to the masculine-personal gender and (nmp) to non-masculine-personal. The form with the infinitive is less common.
Perfective verbs have only the past and future tenses. As they have no present tense, the rules used to form the present tense in imperfective verbs are used to give the sense of futurity to perfective verbs. For instance, the perfective form of mówić is conjugated as follows:
powiedzieć (to say/speak/talk/tell)
-powiem (I will say, I will be saying)
-powiesz (You will say, you will be saying)
-powie (He/she/it will say, he/she/it will be saying)
-powiemy (We will say, we will be saying)
-powiecie (You will say, you will be saying)
-powiedzą (They will say, they will be saying)
This example follows the rules of the verbs which conjugate according to the model -em, esz. The other models are -am, asz, -ę, esz, -ę, isz and -ę, ysz. Irregular verbs may change their root, but never their desinence (like in the example above where the root powi changes to powiedz in the third person plural).
Celtic languages [ edit ]
Scottish Gaelic [ edit ]
In Scottish Gaelic, the future tense is formed in regular verbs by adding aidh or idh to the end of the root form of the verb (idh is used if the final vowel in the root is i).
Danns. (dance.) -> Dannsaidh mi. (I will dance.)
Cuir. (put.) -> Cuiridh i. (She will put.)
Inserting cha before the root forms the negative. The initial consonant of the root is lenited where possible, except for d, t or s, which in certain cases is not lenited. Chan is substituted if the root begins with a vowel or an f followed by a vowel, which is also lenited.
Cha téid mi... (I will not go...)
Chan fheuch am peasan sin idir. (That brat will not try at all.)
In the interrogative, an is placed before the root of the verb. If the root begins with b, f, m, or p, am is used instead.
An ith thu sin? (Will you eat that?)
Am pòg thu i? (Will you kiss her?)
As in English, some forms are irregular - mostly common verbs. For example, the root for the word "to see" is faic, but the positive future tense form "will see" is chì.
The copula is bidh (will be), cha bhi (will not be), am bi (interrogative), and nach bi (negative interrogative).
Bidh mi a' tighinn! (I shall be coming!)
Cha bhi e an seo a-màireach. (He will not be here tomorrow.)
Am bi thu air falbh as t-samhradh? (Will you be away this summer?)
Nach bi sibh a' fuireach airson a' bhìdh? (Will not you be staying for the food, sir?)
The linking verb (that will be) is gum bi (positive) or nach bi (negative).
Tha ise ag ràdh gum bi esan a' dol. (She said that he will be going.)
Tha mi an dòchas nach bi iad sgìth. (I hope that they will not be tired.)
Irish [ edit ]
In Irish, the future tense is formed two ways in regular verbs, depending on verb class. Class I verbs add faidh or fidh to the end of the root form of the verb (fidh is used if the final vowel in the root is e or i).
Glan. (clean.) -> Glanfaidh mé. (I will clean.)
Cuir. (put.) -> Cuirfidh sí. (She will put.)
Class II verbs add óidh or eoidh to the end of the root form of the verb (eoidh is used if the final vowel in the root is e, i, or í).
Eistigh. (listen.) -> Eisteoidh mé. (I will listen.)
Imir. (play.) -> Imreoidh sí. (She will play.)
Both class I and class II verbs have a special form for the 1st person plural:
Glan. (clean.) -> Glanfaimid. (We will clean.)
Cuir. (put.) -> Cuirfimid. (We will put.)
Eistigh. (listen.) -> Eisteoimid. (We will listen.)
Imir. (put.) -> Imreoimid. (We will play.)
The negative is formed by adding ní. The initial consonant of the root is lenited.
Ní fhreastalóidh mé... (I will not serve...)
In the interrogative, an is placed before the root of the verb, which causes eclipsis.
An iosfaith tú sin? (Will you eat that?)
An bpogfaigh tú í? (Will you kiss her?)
Of the ten listed irregular verbs in Irish, six show irregular future forms:
Abair. (say.) -> Déarfaidh sí. (She will say.) ( present deireann )
) Beir. (catch/bring.) -> Béarfaidh sí. (She will bring.) ( present beireann )
) Faigh. (get.) -> Gheobhaidh sí. (She will get.) ( present faigheann )
) Ith. (eat.) -> Iosfaidh sí. (She will eat.) ( present itheann )
) Tar. (come.) -> Tiocfaidh sí. (She will come.) ( present tagann )
) Teigh. (go.) -> Rachaidh sí. (She will go.) (present téann)
One additional irregular verb has an alternate future form:
Feic. (see.) -> Chífidh sí. (She will see.) (regular future feicfidh)
The future of verb tá (be) is beidh (1pl. beimid). The copula is ("is") is is (will be), ní (will not be), an (interrogative), and nach (negative interrogative).
The linking verb (that will be) is go mbí (positive) or nach bí (negative).
Duirt sí go mbeidh sé ag dul. (She said that he will be going.)
Tá súil agam nach mbeidh tuirse acu. (I hope that they will not be tired.)
Welsh [ edit ]
In Welsh, most verbal functions are expressed using constructions with bod (to be). The future may be expressed in the same way using the future tense of bod.
Fe fydda i yn... (I will...)
Fe fyddi di yn... (thou wilt...)
Fe fydd e yn... (he will...) etc.
(The affirmative marker "fe" has no real translation in English and can easily be left out or replaced with'mi' in North Wales. Neither word should be confused with subject pronouns which follow the verb in Welsh).
More commonly Welsh uses a construction with "Mynd" (to go)
"Rwy'n mynd i weld y ffilm yfory" (I'm going to see the film tomorrow)
Futurity can also be expressed by using words that imply future action
Dwi'n mynd yna heddiw: I am going there today.
The simple future, which uses verb suffixes conjugated with the verb, is used to express determination of action or to emphasise confidence in outcome. As in the future of bod, the affirmative marker is fe.
Semitic languages [ edit ]
Hebrew [ edit ]
Biblical Hebrew has a distinction between past and future tenses which is similar in form to those used in other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Aramaic. Gesenius refers to the past and future verb forms as Perfect and Imperfect[10], respectively, separating completed action from uncompleted action. However, the usage of verbs in these forms does not always have the same temporal meaning as in Indo-European languages, mainly due to the common use of a construct of inverting the time reference with a prefix "Waw consecutive" (ו' ההיפוך). With this construct, the Perfect-consecutive refers to the future[11] and the Imperfect-consecutive refers to the past.
Usage of the imperfect to discuss future events is somewhat uncommon in Biblical Hebrew, as the Bible mainly discusses past events. It can be found in quoted speech, such as in the words of Moses (imperfect verbs stressed):
” 1 וַיַּעַן מֹשֶׁה, וַיֹּאמֶר, וְהֵן לֹא-יַאֲמִינוּ לִי, וְלֹא יִשְׁמְעוּ בְּקֹלִי: כִּי יֹאמְרוּ, לֹא-נִרְאָה אֵלֶיךָ יְהֹוָה “
“ 1 And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The LORD hath not appeared unto thee. ” — Exodus 4:1 [12]
The Perfect-consecutive is commonly found in prophetic text, describing an unspecified future, as in the Book of Isaiah:
” 2 וְהָיָה בְּאַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים, נָכוֹן יִהְיֶה הַר בֵּית-יְהוָה בְּרֹאשׁ הֶהָרִים, וְנִשָּׂא, מִגְּבָעוֹת; וְנָהֲרוּ אֵלָיו, כָּל-הַגּוֹיִם. “
“ 2 In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. ” — Isaiah 2:2 [13]
Modern Hebrew always employs the imperfect as the future tense (and the perfect as the past tense). The usage of "Waw consecutive" has practically disappeared, except for quotes from the Bible and Poetic language.
Arabic [ edit ]
To form future tense in Arabic the prefix (سـ) "sa" is added to the present tense verb, or (سوف) "sawfa".[14]
For example, consider the sentence: I eat apples > "آكلُ تفاحاً" "Akulu tuffahan"
To express the future we have two ways: I will eat apples > "سـآكلُ تفاحاً" "Saakulu tuffahan" or: I will eat apples > "سوف آكلُ تفاحاً" "Sawfa akulu tuffahan"
The first is written as part of the verb, whereas the latter is written as a Clitic to indicate the future but preceding the verb.
In Classical Arabic the latter indicates an individual future action that usually takes place further in the future than the first mentioned form, which is usually used with verbs that relate to other actions, and mostly referring to rather near future actions. However, in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the distinction is minimal.
Moreover, the indication of the future tense in dialectal Arabic is quite varied from one dialect to the next. Generally speaking, the words meaning "want to" (بدي / أريد أن), "go to" (أروح), "intend to"(ناوي /نويت), and many others are used daily to indicate future actions.[15] In Moroccan Arabic, the word "Ghad" (غاد) is used to indicate future, which literally means "there" (or there is to happen), that is in some way similar to the English formation "there I go.."
Mandarin Chinese [ edit ]
Mandarin Chinese has no grammatical tense, instead indicating time of action from the context or using adverbs. However, the auxiliary verb 會 / 会 - huì / ㄏㄨㄟˋ, a modal meaning "can", "know how", can alternatively indicate futurity.[16]:p.265;[17]:p.183 For lexical futurity, the word 要 yào, which can serve as a verb meaning "to want", can also serve as an adverb meaning "immediately":[17]:p. 175 For example, 我要洗澡 wǒ yào xǐzǎo can mean either "I want to bathe" or "I am about to bathe". 即 jí、將 jiāng serve a similar function as tense-marking adverbs.[how?]
Creoles [ edit ]
Creoles are languages with a vocabulary heavily based on a superstrate language but a grammar based on substrate languages and/or universal language tendencies. Some Creoles model a future tense/irrealis mood marker on "go" from the superstrate (analogous to English "am going to").[18]:p. 188 In many creoles the future can be indicated with the progressive aspect, analogous to the English "I'm seeing him tomorrow."[18]:p. 190 In general creoles tend to put less emphasis on marking tense than on marking aspect. When any of tense, aspect, and modality are specified, they are typically indicated with invariant pre-verbal markers in the sequence anterior relative tense (prior to the time focused on), irrealis mode (conditional or future), imperfective aspect.[18]:pp. 176–9, p. 191
Jamaican English Creole [ edit ]
The future marker in Jamaican Creole is /de go/[18]:pp. 93–95 or /a go/: /de go hapm/ "is going to happen", /mi a go ɹon/ "I am going to run".
Belizean Creole English [ edit ]
In Belizean Creole, the future tense is indicated by a mandatory invariant pre-verbal particle /(w)a(n)/, /gwein/, or /gouɲ/.
Gullah [ edit ]
In Gullah the future is indicated by the pre-verbal marker gwine: Uh gwine he'p dem "I'm going to help them".
Hawaiian Creole English [ edit ]
In Hawaiian Creole, the pre-verbal future marker is gon:[19] Ai gon bai wan pikap "I'm going to buy a pickup".
Haitian Creole [ edit ]
Haitian Creole, based on a French superstrate, interchangeably uses pral or va (from French 3rd person singular va "goes") pre-verbally to indicate the future:[20] Mwen va fini lit. "I go finish"; Li pral vini jodi a "He will come today".This article is from the archive of our partner.
A 60 Minutes report on Sunday examined the ways that members of Congress trade on inside, privileged information to make themselves rich — without breaking any laws. Even though many positions in the federal government are bound by conflict of interest laws, Congresspeople are exempt from insider trading rules and are perfectly free to make business deals based on information they learn through their jobs.
The story is based on the work of Peter Schweizer, a researcher at the Hoover Institution. (Others have been studying the issue. As Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary and others have pointed out, The Wall Street Journal has reported on this issue quite recently and Megan McArdle dedicated her column in The Atlantic's November issue to the phenomenon of "congressional insider trading.") Schweizer and his team have looked at financial transactions made by Representatives and Senators and found that many, including the past three House Speakers, have made deals that appear to be based on non-public information that they had access to thanks to their position in Washington. Schweizer calls it "honest graft," since many people would consider it unethical, even though it's not illegal.Volkswagen deleted documents and obstructed justice after the US Environmental Protection Agency accused the company of cheating on emissions tests, a former employee alleged in a lawsuit.
Daniel Donovan says in a whistleblower case that he was wrongfully fired on 6 December 2015 after refusing to participate in the deletions and reporting them to a supervisor. The lawsuit says the evidence deletion continued for three days after the 18 September allegations from the EPA and despite a hold order from the Justice Department.
VW investors file multi-billion dollar suit in Germany Read more
The accusations came to light on Monday as European investors in Volkswagen filed a multibillion-euro suit against the carmaker for what they see as breaches of its capital markets duty in the emissions scandal.
VW has admitted that it programmed about 600,000 diesel-powered cars in the US to turn on pollution controls during EPA treadmill tests and turn them off when the cars |
, ‘What are they doing over there? Are they getting better?’ I’d run out to get the paper every day wondering, ‘Did they make any transactions?’
“I always wanted the hope that they have a chance. instead of like, ‘Ah, we’re going to be 8-8 again or 6-10 or whatever.’”
A different era
Schneider decided in college that he wanted to run an NFL team someday. He famously called then-Green Bay general manager Ron Wolf one day while a junior in college to ask for any job, saying he was willing to work for free.
Schneider made the call while on a Memorial Day camping trip that was forced indoors due to rain. A friend — having heard all about Schneider’s aspirations — told him to just go ahead and call Wolf, back in the days when someone could do that.
“He picked up the phone,” Schneider says. “He was in his office watching film, and he started talking to me, and that’s how it started.”
The job, though, is much different now than it was then due to free agency and the salary cap.
As Corry says, “The (Pittsburgh) Steel Curtain would never have stayed together now. You couldn’t afford to keep all those guys. The 49ers (of the ’80s) had Steve Young as their backup quarterback (to Joe Montana) for all those years. That could never happen today.”
Schneider, who knows no other way than operating in the salary-cap era (it was introduced in 1994) allows only that “it’s very different.” But Schneider notes that teams of the past had challenges of their own — namely, owners who weren’t required to open their pocketbooks like they are now with salary-cap mandates.
Back on track?
In any era, it comes down to identifying the best players available, and acquiring and keeping them, a simple mantra that is never simple to execute.
But with the core intact, reinforcements apparently in place (such as Thomas Rawls) to take over for some who have left (such as Lynch) and a relatively drama-free offseason, the Seahawks say they are poised to make another run for a title and a further march into NFL history.
“I feel like everybody is coming in focused, ready to go, no outside distractions and we’re not coming off of a Super Bowl loss and things of that nature,” Wagner said recently. “So I think our focus and especially the way the season ended last year, I don’t think nobody was happy about that. So when we were away we watched — I watched everybody work out and work hard and kind of have that, you know, have that hunger, that wanting to get back on the field and prove what we can do.”
And if they do what they think they can, then maybe this will be remembered as the season the dynasty got back on track. It might seem a heady goal, but it’s one the team isn’t shying away from.
“I think we’re going to look back at this team 10, 15 years from now and go, ‘Dude, we had a freaking dynasty,’ ” receivers coach Dave Canales said. “As a coach, I can’t get caught up in that now. I’ve got to coach them to this standard. But I know looking back we’re going to recognize how many special players with that special drive we had.”"The State Department has completed two environmental impact statements on the pipeline with the help of Cardno Entrix, a private environmental consulting firm that has said its biggest clients include TransCanada Corp., the owner of the Keystone pipeline system, whose current routes extend from Hardisty, Alberta, to Oklahoma and Illinois.
Cardno Entrix gained national attention last year as the environmental consultant for BP after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Environmental Protection Agency has criticized the resulting assessments as fundamentally flawed.
"What we've seen from the State Department recently are sloppy reports, inadequate investigations and a total disregard for the dozen accidents that occurred" in the existing Keystone I pipeline, said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. "If the president doesn't stand up, all signs point to an agency that is simply going through the motions before giving its approval."Hi everyone! For today, I’m going to talk about one of the most controversial draft archtypes, Lifeforce! I know that the popular consensus seems to be the following:
However, I strongly disagree. I think lifeforce is a viable draft archtype (albeit on the weaker side), and most people do poorly with lifeforce because they tend to force it after a p1p1 katra. That being said, I do think lifeforce is hard to draft and often cut because other drafters like to force it. As such, I would recommend avoiding it unless you get a clear signal that it is open (e.g. p1p10 Bloodcall Invoker).
Types of Lifeforce Deck
There are two distinct ways of building lifeforce deck, either as a normal Xenan deck with a splash of Lifeforce, or a deck heavy on the Lifeforce theme.
A touch of Lifeforce
In this type of deck, you want a strong Xenan core, with the solid units from Time and good interaction from Shadow. Lifeforce is more of a supplementary theme, giving your deck a potentially unbeatable nut draw while still being able to function without drawing your combo. This is also the usual type of deck that you would want to build in Xenan, rather than the all-in variant.
The following is an example (a recent deck that went 7-1):
There are a few key points to note. While this deck had a Katra, the Devoted, I did not go nuts and pick up every life gain I was passed. Instead, I focused on solid units and interaction, only picking up Sanctuary Priest when the rest of the pack was empty. In this way, the deck is not reliant on drawing Katra. I did win a few games off the back of Katra, but most games were won off the solid removal package combined with the powerful units. Remember, the golden rule of drafting: Don’t pick a weaker synergy card over a stronger vanilla card (e.g. Xenan Cupbearer vs Striped Araktodon).
All-aboard the Lifeforce Train
For these decks, you want to draft a critical mass of lifeforce payoff cards and life gain such that you are almost always able to pull off your combo. Drafting these decks is often a big gamble as the draft can easily fall flat if you fail to pick up enough synergy elements. In such cases, it might make sense to pass up slightly better cards to maximize your synergy.
The following is an example (a recent deck that went 7-2):
This is one of the rare decks that I am happy to play Water of Life in. With 4 payoff cards, 3 of which turns my Water of Life into 2 power 6/6s, I think the payoff was worth the risk of a potentially dead draw. While Bloodcall Invoker benefits most from bulk life gain, repeatable life gain effects such as Sanctuary Priest and Skeeter are still fine as it provides a near endless stream of 1/1s for chump blocking or other purposes. While Disciplined Amanera is a pretty bad lifeforce card, I was fine playing it in this deck as I was slightly light on 2s and 3s and I had enough life gain cards to consistently trigger it.
Evaluating Lifeforce Cards
The key to drafting good lifeforce decks, be it all-in lifeforce or otherwise, is only picking the good lifeforce cards. Firstly, you should ignore the lifeforce text and decide whether the card is acceptable on pure stats alone. Next, you should look at the text and decide how impactful the text would be if activated. I’ve classified all the lifeforce cards into the following 5 categories:
Best Lifeforce Cards
(Katra, Bloodcall Invoker, Beckoning Lumen)
Both Bloodcall Invoker and Beckoning Lumen nearly pass the vanilla test, having bodies just below the curve for their stats. Katra is slightly weaker than the other two, but compensates for it by having an extremely powerful lifeforce text. All 3 cards have great text as well, easily pushing them to bomb status if you are able to trigger them multiple times. Also, remember that you can drop Beckoning Lumen or Bloodcall Invoker end of turn to tigger their lifeforce without giving your opponent a response window.
Decent Lifeforce Cards
(Voyaging Lumen, Umbren Thirster)
Voyaging Lumen has a decent body which can do for a topend if you deck lacks it. The text merely acts a cherry on top of the cake. Umbren Thirster is the exact opposite. The body is very medicore for a 5 drop, but a single lifeforce trigger turns it into a 3/4 flier, able to contest the skies against all the common fliers.
Potentially Playable Lifeforce Cards
(Cult Aspirant, Disciplined Amanera, Bloodcall Invocation)
In most decks, these cards would range from poor to utter garbage. However, if you are able to draft an all-in lifeforce decks, these cards actually become decent. Multiple lifeforce activation, through cards like Sanctuary Priest, can easily snowball Cult Aspirant and Disciplined Amanera to must-answer threats. Bloodcall Invocation provides an alternative payoff if you were able to draft multiple bulk life gain cards. In general though, I would want at least 6 life gain sources before I’m happy to play any of these cards.
Bad Lifeforce Cards
(Cabal Slasher, Hatecleaver)
Cabal Slasher is bad because regardless of the number and amount of life gain, it is always going to be a 3 health unit with no evasion. As such, it rarely trades for anything better than 2 Strangers or a random 3/3. Only in decks with a decent amount of life gain AND a decent amount of cards that grant evasion/pseudo-evasion (e.g. Cobalt Acolyte, Blackguard Sidearm) would I be happy to run Cabal Slasher. It’s hard to get multiple lifeforce triggers for Hatecleaver, so the card often ends up simply being a more expensive, warcry-less Sword of Icaria.
Unplayable Lifeforce Cards
(Sentinel’s Might, Means to an End, Xenan Fanatic, Mask of Torment)
Unless you are Mann_Und_Mouse and have a whole chat team drafting for you, I would strongly avoid picking and playing any of these cards.
Evaluating Life Gain Cards
Similar to lifeforce cards, you rarely want to pick subpar life gain cards just to force synergy. Ideally, you want life gain cards that are able to stand on their own. Unfortunately, the list of life gain cards is way too long so I’ll just highlight the best and the worst.
The Best (Repeatable, Reliable Life Gain)
One half of the best life gain cards are so called because they are able to consistently and reliably generate life gain triggers, allowing you to get multiple activations off your life force cards. Cards in this category either does not require an attack to gain life (Sanctuary Priest, Amaran Camel) or are evasive lifesteal units (Skeeter, Karmic Guardian).
The Best (Cards that are good independent of lifeforce synergies)
There is some overlap between the two categories, but the key identity of cards in this category are cards that often make the cut, regardless of whether the deck has any lifeforce triggers. Examples include Healer’s Cloak, Lumen Defender, Extract, Lethrai Falchion and Combrei Healer.
The Worst
Lifesteal and Life gain cards that are extremely understated (Xenan Cupbearer, Camp Physician, Sorrow’s Shroud) or have a bad keyword tagged on (Xenan Destroyer) makes for bad activators because you often have trouble swinging with them or simply lose the board if you don’t draw your combo. Extremely situational cards (Water of Life, Decay) are also often bad unless you are all in on the Xenan lifeforce plan.
Conclusion
I hope this article has given you some insight into the art of drafting lifeforce and manage to convince you that lifeforce is a viable archtype. I do agree that lifeforce is tricky to draft properly, as you often need to weigh the synergy benefits against raw card strength, so don’t worry if you find yourself struggling! As always, feel free to hit me up on the Eternal discord or in the reddit thread for further discussion!
May the lifeforce be with you,
Flash2351
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FacebookMMOs aren't dead, they're just in dire need of a restorative kick in the shins. And Ashes of Creation looks like it might be trying to do just that: it's an ambitious project which got Tyler a bit excited recently, thanks to its reactive storytelling which can see sidequests, for example, dramatically effect the entire game world.
Clearly he's not the only one excited: the game hit Kickstarter yesterday for some supplementary funding, and smashed its $750,000 target in a day. At the time of writing it's sitting on a pretty $948,921. But the game's development doesn't hinge on this crowdfunding campaign.
"We’ve got private backing that will allow us to produce a core viable product," Intrepid Studios writes. " Without you though, that’s what it will remain, minimally viable. What Kickstarter will allow us to do is expand our scope and give our team flexibility and room to breathe. To really give us the opportunity to create *exactly* what we want.
"Crowdfunding also allows us to connect directly with the players most invested in our success. We need your voices to help grow this community, and to keep us accountable to those who matter most, the players."
Later on, the studio promises that if Ashes of Creation doesn't launch for whatever reason, all Kickstarter backers will be refunded in full. It's not too late to contribute either, in fact, you've got roughly 30 days to do so if you desire, and there's a bunch of stretch goals to anticipate.Huddersfield Town set a new Football League record of 43 games unbeaten with victory over Notts County.
After a cagey first half of few chances, the hosts took the lead straight from the restart when Jordan Rhodes headed in Jack Hunt's cross.
The Terriers were soon reduced to 10 men when Alan Lee was sent off for elbowing Magpies defender Sam Sodje.
But Rhodes smashed home a second from 30 yards before Neal Bishop fired home a consolation deep in stoppage time.
The Terriers had matched Nottingham Forest's Football League record of 42 games unbeaten when they a fortnight ago.
HUDDERSFIELD'S UNBEATEN RUN Games - 43
Won - 25
Drawn - 18
Goals for - 82
Goals against - 37
This latest result leaves them just six short of matching Arsenal's English record of 49 league games unbeaten, which included going the whole of the 2003-04 Premier League season without defeat.
Huddersfield have not been beaten in a league game in the whole of 2011, their last defeat having come in a 4-1 reverse at Southampton on 28 December 2010, although in that time they have lost the and ties in the Carling Cup, FA Cup and Johnstone's Paint Trophy.
It is a run that has comprised 25 wins and 18 draws.
For the whole of the first half it appeared that, if Lee Clark's side were to set a new mark they would have to do it with a draw after being frustrated by the Magpies, who arguably had the best chance when Karl Hawley's shot on the turn flew narrowly wide.
But Rhodes lit up the Galpharm Stadium at the start of the second half when he nodded Hunt's pinpoint cross into the roof of the net from close range.
Clark had to reshuffle when Lee was shown a straight red card for elbowing Sodje, but Rhodes soon settled any nerves when he pounced on Krystian Pearce's slip to beat Stuart Nelson with a superb finish from outside the box.
Despite their numerical advantage, Notts struggled to create openings, although they did pull a goal back with virtually the last kick when Bishop beat Ian Bennett with a deflected drive.
Huddersfield's next game is away to league leaders Charlton a week on Monday in a top-of-the-table clash.
VIEWS FROM THE DRESSING ROOM
Notts County manager Martin Allen told BBC Radio Nottingham:
Notts players were magnificent - Allen
"I thought we played very well. Obviously it was a big occasion. We kept a clean sheet in the first half and played very well.
"The last thing we said before we went out for the second half...get ready mentally. You have to say that it was a fantastic header from the young lad, but our players were magnificent.
"They stood their ground, they battled and stood up to it, and the players are unhappy that we haven't got something out of it."
Live text commentaryProduct Notes
Man on the Moon: The End of Day is the debut studio album by American hip hop recording artist Kid Cudi, released on September 14, 2009, by Dream On, GOOD Music, and Universal Motown. A concept album, narrated by fellow American rapper Common, it follows the release of his first mixtape A Kid Named Cudi (2008). Production for the album took place during 2007 to 2009 and was handled by several record producers, including Cudi, Kanye West, Emile Haynie, Plain Pat, No I.D., Dot da Genius and Jeff Bhasker, among others. The album debuted at number four on both the US Billboard 200 and Billboard Top Rap Albums chart, selling 104, 000 copies in it's first week of release in the United States. It later became certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), for shipments exceeding 500, 000 copies in the US. Outside of the US, the album was less commercially successful, generally peaking outside of the top fifty positions of album charts.Now that my parts are ready for the all-new all-different Gatlings, I need to disassemble the kit a bit to repaint some parts I messed up. There are three on the top of my head : the elbows (I messed up the chrome), the knees (same problem) and the shoulders (I really want to add some red lining to the side vents).
Now, I don’t know if you guys have already tried, but taking apart a painted kit is a nightmare. I don’t know, maybe I’m not spraying enough clear coat when I’m done painting, but my kits scratch very easily. I’m not really keen on having to repaint a part (primer – (base) – main color – clear – decal – clear) so I’ll be reaaaaaally careful. I still managed to scratch a part, mind you, but it was easily fixed.
Anyway, here’s the new look of the elbows :
I ditched the Alclad chrome for some Tamiya flat aluminium. Dunno why, I felt it would work better here. I don’t know if it’s “better” but it’s definitely “good enough” for me!
Now, I should have done the knees in the same session, but the truth is I’m afraid to take apart the legs. The elbows were fairly easy to get to (only needed to remove 5 parts on the way), but the knees look like a hell of a lot of work for a barely noticeable result. For the time being, I’m leaving it at that.
The red on the elbows is on standby too, for another reason. The vents are very easy to get to (only one part is covering it, though I would need to remove the arm to get the shoulder piece out), but the actual masking is very hard to make. At least, I’m having troubles and I know for a fact that the red paint will bleed over the chrome. So, while I’m waiting for the issue to fix itself, I’m going to paint the Buster rifle, Gatlings and knife.
Here’s the painted Buster Rifle :
Only a clear gloss coat and some decals left. That part was pretty uneventful. The same can be said for the gatlings, since I’m spraying Tamiya’s Dark Iron on everything 🙂
For the gatling visors I used some stickers I’ve had for a while and boy do they look good!
Here’s the stuff I’m using :
I’ve already used it for the eyes of my 00Qan[T]. I think you can use some aurora film instead, but I don’t know if I’d be able to cut it right. So I’m settling for a (much) more expensive solution instead…
Now, onto the combat knife a.k.a the masking of death :
So I thought “Wouldn’t it be cool to get a combat knife in dark metal but chrome the knife’s edge? It would be cool, but probably hard to pull off. Nah, it can’t be that hard, right?”.
Right.
You already know I suck at masking, so I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Anyway, it took several tries with the masking tape but I got a somewhat decent shape. So I crossed my fingers and sprayed away.
Success! Yeah, the red is messed up, I touched it up later with a paint brush. But the main event, the chromed edge doesn’t look half bad! The pic doesn’t give it justice, this is bona fide Alclad 2 Chrome on a gloss black base here, so it’s really as shiny as a metal part, I’m quite happy with it.
AdvertisementsWith the launch of Microsoft’s latest Windows 10 Mobile flagship handsets, the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, came a flurry of controversy surrounding the availability of both devices. We learned in October that both new flagship devices would be exclusive to AT&T, which caused people to assume that Verizon and T-Mobile weren’t interested in carrying Microsoft’s latest Windows 10 Mobile smartphones.
One brave soul filed an FCC complaint about Verizon “blocking” the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL from their network, and she received a response from Verizon’s Consumer Inquiries & Complaints Division. Turns out, Verizon was never approached by Microsoft to have the Lumia 950 or Lumia 950 XL on the Verizon network.
“Because there has been little consumer demand for Windows 10 Smartphones, Verizon has chosen to not carry the Nokia Lumia 10 in its retail channels. However, if Nokia still wanted to make the device available to Verizon customers, it could have the device certified for use on the Verizon network through Verizon’s Open Development program. To date, Nokia has not chosen to do so,” the remark states. In this case, Verizon is referring to Microsoft when they say Nokia in the response letter.
Funny thing is, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said nearly the exact same thing back in October when people blew him up on social media claiming T-Mobile was “not interested” in selling the Lumia 950. In fact, Legere disagreed to that statement claiming Microsoft was the one making that decision.
“To be clear: We did not turn down the new Windows devices. MSFT gave to AT&T. If Microsoft wakes up, we’ll talk about T-Mobile carrying,” Legere stated.
Verizon is making it seem like it’s as easy as submitting a request via Verizon’s Open Development program to get the phones on the carrier’s network. But what’s stopping Microsoft? The Redmond giant hasn’t specifically stated that AT&T has exclusive dibs on the phones, so what’s the problem? There’s definitely more to the story behind the scenes.
At the moment, you can only purchase the no-contract AT&T Lumia 950 for $598.99, and the unlocked Lumia 950 for $549.00 via the online Microsoft Store. The unlocked Lumia 950 XL can be purchased for $649.00 too.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on the matter. We’ll update this story as soon as we receive it.
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Further reading: Lumia 950U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced that a member of the U.S. armed forces died by "enemy fire" in northern Iraq on May 3, 2016. This is the third U.S. combat death in the country during the campaign against the Islamic State. (Reuters)
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced that a member of the U.S. armed forces died by "enemy fire" in northern Iraq on May 3, 2016. This is the third U.S. combat death in the country during the campaign against the Islamic State. (Reuters)
An elite U.S. Navy SEAL was killed Tuesday in an attack by Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq, highlighting the evolving nature of the Pentagon’s mission in Iraq and how American troops are serving closer than ever to the front lines.
The SEAL was killed by enemy fire about 9:30 a.m., U.S. military officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information publicly.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) identified the slain SEAL as Charlie Keating IV. He was the grandson of Arizona financier Charles Keating, who was convicted in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.
[U.S. troops are getting closer to the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq]
The death occurred after Islamic State fighters north of Mosul penetrated a front line of Kurdish peshmerga forces by about three miles, a U.S. military official said.
In this 2002 photo, Charlie Keating IV, 16, poses for in Phoenix for an upcoming series on the Discovery channel that he took part in. Keating was identified as the Navy SEAL killed on May 3 in Iraq. (Sherrie Buzby/The Arizona Republic via AP)
The SEAL was the third U.S. service member killed in combat since the U.S. military campaign against the Islamic State began in June 2014.
The first, Army Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, 39, was a member of the elite Delta Force who was killed in a raid on an Islamic State prison compound Oct. 22. But the latest two deaths show the kind of threats faced by the bulk of U.S. troops advising Iraqi soldiers near the front lines with the Islamic State.
The death occurred after Islamic State fighters began attacking peshmerga lines at dawn near the town of Teleskof, about 20 miles north of Mosul, the Islamic State’s main stronghold in Iraq, Kurdish officers said.
The attack involved “truck bombs supported by infantry,” the U.S. military official added, an indication that conventional Islamic State tactics were used..
An established front line — what U.S. service members call a forward line of troops, or FLOT — has separated the Islamic State and Iraqi soldiers for months, and the Islamic State often tries to breach it using vehicles carrying explosives, with infantry-type fighters following.
[Shiite pilgrims in Islamic State crosshairs]
Mortar rounds and artillery began hitting front lines near Teleskof, a largely Christian town, about 4 a.m., according to Kurdish officers and members of the Assyrian Christian militia that hold the ground there.
Its inhabitants, speakers of ancient Aramaic, fled in August 2014 when the town was overrun by Islamic State forces, who burned and desecrated its churches. It was retaken by Kurdish forces the same month, and some residents had since returned.
But after bombarding the area Tuesday, the militants launched a multi-pronged attack on Teleskof about 5:30 a.m. from several directions, using hundreds of fighters, commanders said.
Maj. Gen. Azad Jalil, a peshmerga officer, said Islamic State forces breached Kurdish front lines with more than 10 car bombs, also using bulldozers to push through.
The peshmerga then made a “tactical retreat” to reorganize their forces, he said. Islamic State militants overran the town.
Brig. Gen. Bahnam Aboush, a fighter with the largely Christian militia based in the town and known as the Nineveh Plain Protection Units, said his men tried to hold their ground but were overwhelmed.
“We tried to fight them, but we couldn’t due [to] our limited capabilities,” he said. “We have only some old rifles we bought from our own money.”
He said he was near the attack that mortally wounded the Navy SEAL, when a U.S. military contingent came to assist the struggling militia forces.
“American Special Forces came to rescue us in four vehicles,” he said. “They opened the way for us to retreat, then one of their vehicles was hit.”
The general added that when he entered Teleskof after the assault, he saw the U.S. military vehicle abandoned with one of the doors destroyed by an explosion. He was not certain how the SEAL died.
“I think an RPG shot the car,” he said. “Then maybe a sniper shot the person inside.”
Matthew VanDyke, an American fighting alongside the Nineveh Plains Protection Units, who also was nearby, said the SEAL was hit by a sniper shot. A U.S. military official confirmed that the death was caused by small-arms fire. VanDyke said that about 20 Navy SEALS arrived not long after the town was lost about 6 a.m., traveling a few vehicles behind peshmerga forces in a convoy.
“They went straight into the fight,” he said. “They lined up on the edge of the town, and they were unloading on ISIS.”
The SEALs were “a few vehicles behind” the peshmerga forces as they tried to retake the town, when a car bomb struck the front of the convoy, VanDyke said.
“Every time we’d try to advance, they’d send car bombs,” he said. It was during that encounter that the SEAL was killed, he said.
The SEALs kept fighting but ran low on ammunition and pulled out as hundreds of peshmerga reinforcements arrived, VanDyke said. “The SEALS were involved in direct action. That’s for sure.”
In Washington, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said: “Today’s incident is a vivid reminder of the risk our service members are taking, and three of them now have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.” He stressed that the U.S. mission in Iraq “is to support Iraqi forces on the ground that are taking the fight” to the Islamic State and that “Iraqi forces must fight for their own country.”
Earnest said that U.S. troops cannot act “as a substitute” for Iraqi forces.
A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly, said U.S. military leaders were still assessing what happened. F-15 fighter jets hit about 20 Islamic State targets in an effort to repel the attack, the official said.
The defense official said U.S. operational reporting suggests the SEALs already were at the scene of the attack when it began and got “caught up in this,” but he added that that was not yet clear. The SEALs have been working with the peshmerga for months in northern Iraq, he added.
A counteroffensive had retaken the town by late afternoon Tuesday.
“The coalition had the key role in retaking the village,” Jalil said. The Islamic State launched the attack, he said, because it is under pressure south of Mosul near Makhmour, where Iraqi forces, with the help of U.S. artillery and air power, have managed to make inching gains.
“It’s showing how desperate and how broken they are,” he said. “There are now more than 100 dead bodies of them in the village, plus they lost many vehicles,” he said.
Jabbar Yawar, a spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga, said that a number of Kurdish fighters died in the attack but that he could not disclose how many.
“This sad news is a reminder of the dangers our men and women in uniform face every day in the ongoing fight to destroy ISIL and end the threat the group poses to the United States and the rest of the world,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
[Expanded U.S. force approved for Iraq]
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter first announced the death while traveling in Stuttgart, Germany. He said the service member was killed by enemy fire but offered few additional details.
U.S. Special Operations troops operate across peshmerga front lines, often spending hours at outposts gathering information about Islamic State activity.
The small detachments, however, are usually stationed a few miles from the front to help coordinate airstrikes between peshmerga fighters and the joint command centers in Baghdad and Irbil, the administrative center of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
Some 200 U.S. Marines also are stationed less than 10 miles from the front line, near the northern town of Makhmour, where Iraqi troops are building up for a future Mosul offensive. Marine Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin was killed there in a March 19 rocket attack.
Prior to Tuesday, 15 American service members had been wounded in the campaign, according to Pentagon statistics.
Lamothe reported from Washington. Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Stuttgart, Germany, and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
NATO considering thousands of troops near Russia’s border
Protesters leave Baghdad’s Green Zone a day after ransacking parliament
Fighting erupts in Iraq, and the Islamic State isn’t part of it
Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the worldPalace Theatre Raising the Roof — And Everything Else — 29 Feet for Commercial Space
BY JACKSON CHEN | A century-old Broadway theater will likely be lifted up 29 feet to make room for four floors of commercial space, having won conditional approval, subject to a peer review, from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The project involves the vertical move of the Palace Theatre at 1564 Broadway at West 47th Street, which was built in 1913. According to Elise Quasebarth, a preservation consultant hired by the development team, the theater was created as a vaudeville venue and later converted to a legitimate theater in 1965 after the Nederlander Organization bought it. The interior of the theater was later designated a landmark in 1987.
The owners say they are using a unique jacking technique that will allow the property to be adapted to the changing economics of the city. Many preservationists, however, charge that the theater is being treated as though it stands in the way of development.
To pull off the project, Tony Mazzo, president of Urban Foundation/ Engineering, explained that the key to the jacking is to “to go so slowly so the theater doesn’t know it’s moving.”
Mazzo, who previously worked on relocating the Empire Theater a few doors down on West 42nd Street, said the theater would be boosted one inch at a time, followed by a round of checks by construction workers posted at each of the jacks. While the building is jacked up, existing structural columns supporting the theater will be removed and replaced by new columns, according to the plans.
In order to keep the building aligned, Mazzo said the theater will be wrapped in a protective crate encasing it throughout the jacking process.
He said that after the first inch is completed, the rest of the process is just repetitive. The developer added that the lifting should amount to two weeks time and be minimally intrusive on the theater’s interior.
Once the theater lifting is complete, the team would work on excavating the ground below, Mazzo said, creating four floors of retail space — one at ground level and three below ground.
As for theater improvements, the plans call for a 10,000 square-foot increase of space available for theater use — allowing patrons a proper waiting area that currently does not exist — and a number of cosmetic renovations inside the existing space.
“Even when the Palace was built, the one thing it didn’t have was lobbies and amenities space that matched the grandeur of the auditorium and the theater itself,” said Nick Scandalios, the executive vice president of the Nederlander Organization. “The Palace is actually really missing something without the amenities of a lobby space.”
However, to get inside the theater, patrons will have to enter through a new entrance on West 47th Street underneath a 75-foot long marquee, as opposed to through the current Seventh Avenue entrance.
Despite the plan’s improvements, opponents expressed wariness of the jacking process and possible damage to the historic structure.
“We appreciate the ingenuity and technical expertise of the engineering team,” said Alex Herrera, director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Technical Services Center. “But there’s so many moving parts for this project to succeed and must be executed perfectly without exception.”
One of the biggest worries revolved around the impact on the theater’s fragile composition of plaster and glass, said Historic Districts Council executive director Simeon Bankoff.
“I pray their engineers are good enough to do this, but the fact is they shouldn’t,” Bankoff said. “Theaters are not really the most robust thing structurally.”
Bankoff argued that the project was completely unreasonable and a serious alternative to be considered was not moving it at all.
As for Mazzo, there would be enough measures in place to prevent any construction mishaps. The developer explained that even if one of the jacks — whose capacities are twice the amount needed — failed, there will be a mechanism in place that evenly distributes the load and allows the work crew enough time to replace the jack and resume the process.
Ultimately, members of the LPC shared concerns about the jacking process but approved the plans. However, the commission included a clause that said the applicant was required to get an independent peer review done of the proposal. Peer review would continue throughout the lifting process.
If the peer review raises concerns, the owners and their team will be due back in front of the LPC for additional consideration.League of Legends Weekly News Update
5th September
This Week’s Hottest League of Legends and eSports News
Competitive Gaming Keeps Growing
According to a new market report by Newzoo, 2016 is going to be the most profitable year for eSports until now. Esports-related revenues are on pace to generate $493 million in 2016. Most of revenue comes from gaming publishers investing in the space as well as media rights selling off to broadcasters faster than previously expected. The rest of that revenue comes from event sponsorships, video advertising, and ticket sales.
Another NBA Star Invests in eSports
You can count to ESPN to get all the latest esports-regular sports related news. After Shaq and Rick Fox, it’s now the turn of Boston Celtics’ Jonas Jerebko to buy his own eSports organization. He is now the owner of Aussie Renegades. Renegades are a growing name |
review, carriers must respond within certain timeframes, or else the request for services will be deemed approved. Generally, carriers must respond within 15 days after the date the request was made. When a covered person is receiving inpatient hospital services, the carrier must respond within 24 hours. In all cases, a carrier must respond consistent with the medical exigencies of the case. If a carrier needs additional information to make a determination, the carrier must ask for it in writing. The health care provider must respond to the request for additional information within 72 hours, or the health care provider’s request for prior authorization is deemed withdrawn. After a carrier receives the requested additional information, the carrier has another 15 days (or 24 hours if the person is an inpatient in a hospital) to respond, but in any event, the carrier must respond in a timeframe consistent with the medical exigencies of the case.
May a carrier require that communication be by telephone only? No. The Health Claims Authorization, Processing and Payment Act or “HCAPPA” (P.L. 2005, c. 352 ), requires that carriers and health care providers have a means of written communication agreed to by the carrier and the health care provider.
How does a health care provider prove that it met the 72 hour standard for providing additional information? Carriers and health care providers should be communicating by fax and/or email, in addition to any telephone conversations. Accordingly, the health care provider should maintain copies of emails and faxes.
Are there standards about the measures carriers use to determine whether a service is medically necessary? A carrier’s treatment policies, protocols, quality assurance program and UM decisions are required to be based on generally accepted standards of health care practice. When a carrier has a network-based plan, the health care providers must have a process whereby they may comment on the carrier’s UM protocols (by specialty). In addition, the HCAPPA defines the term “medically necessary.”
Are health care providers entitled to know what UM standards carriers are using for UM determinations? Yes. Carriers are required to make information available on the Internet. A carrier must identify the commercial company that produced clinical guidelines that the carrier has purchased for use in determining medical necessity. Also, a carrier must post a copy of all internally-produced clinical criteria that it uses to determine medical necessity. All information is required to be posted in a clear and conspicuous manner, and changes in any of the information must be posted on the Internet site at least 30 days prior to the change becoming effective. In addition, when carriers issue adverse UM determinations, the written determinations must set forth the specific reason(s) the carrier does not consider the services to be medically necessary, identifying the criteria on which the decisions are based.
What does “medically necessary” mean? The term “medically necessary” has been defined differently by different groups. However, the term is now defined in the HCAPPA, so as of July 11, 2006, the HCAPPA’s definition applies to health benefits plans subject to the HCAPPA. The HCAPPA defines “medically necessary” to mean “…a health care service that a health care provider, exercising his prudent clinical judgement, (sic) would provide to a covered person for the purpose of evaluating, diagnosing or treating an illness, injury, disease or its symptoms and that is: in accordance with the generally accepted standards of medical practice; clinically appropriate, in terms of type, frequency, extent site (sic) and duration, and considered effective for the covered person’s illness, injury or disease; not primarily for the convenience of the covered person or the health care provider; and not more costly than an alternative service or sequence of services at least as likely to produce equivalent therapeutic or diagnostic results as to the diagnosis or treatment of that covered person’s illness, injury or disease.”
Is prior authorization, preauthorization and precertification the same thing? The terms “prior authorization” and “preauthorization” usually mean the same thing. The term “precertification” is often used interchangeably with prior authorization or preauthorization, but not always. Some carriers use the term to refer to an administrative process primarily for purposes of establishing an internal “tracking” account for a specific covered person for more complex health care experiences, such as an inpatient hospital admission which usually results in multiple services being delivered for an episode of care over the course of one or more days, with bills for both medical and hospital services being generated, a discharge plan, possible case management needs, etc. The carrier can verify what it means when it uses the term “precertification.”
If a carrier gives prior authorization for a service, does that mean that the carrier will pay for or provide benefits towards the services? Not necessarily. The prior authorization may or may not address other questions related to eligibility of the covered person and the health care provider. Even if it does, the information on which eligibility is based may change between the date of the authorization and the date of service. For example, if the policy terminates prior to the date that the services are actually rendered, then the carrier may not have an obligation to pay for the service. In addition, if a carrier believes that information it received involved a fraud, the carrier may reverse a medical necessity determination and may not pay for the previously-authorized services.
Must a carrier provide prior authorization of a service if a health care provider requests prior authorization? Whether prior authorization is required is a matter of the terms of the language of the policy covering the covered person, and/or contract language between the carrier and the health care provider, if the health care provider participates in the carrier’s provider network. Of course, a carrier may elect to accommodate requests for prior authorization of services even when not otherwise required.
If a carrier denies services on the basis of a UM determination, can the denial be appealed, and if so, who has the right to present the appeal? A carrier’s UM determination that is adverse to the interests of the covered person may be appealed. The covered person has the right to appeal the adverse UM determination. However, a covered person also has the right to allow a health care provider to make UM appeals on behalf of the covered person, and pursuant to federal law, a physician may make an appeal on behalf of a covered person without consent, if necessary, in emergency and urgent care situations (but note that carriers are not permitted to require prior authorization for emergency services under New Jersey law). If an appeal is to be made to the Independent Health Care Appeals Program, the covered person’s consent must be in writing, and accompanied by an authorization for release of the covered person’s relevant medical information.
When may a health care provider get consent from a patient to make a UM appeal on the patient’s behalf? As of July 11, 2006, a health care provider may obtain consent from a patient to appeal an adverse UM determination on the patient’s behalf before or after services are rendered, or before or after an adverse UM determination is made. Of course, consent must be obtained prior to the expiration of the timeframe for filing the appeal.New Curated Workshops
Introducing Revenue Tools For Workshop Authors
When we launched the Workshop late in 2011, we expected that it would grow, but not that it would grow this much, this quickly. So far, the total payments made to individuals for the creation of in-game items sold in Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have passed $57 million. This money was earned by over 1,500 contributors spread out across 75 countries.The limitation of paid, revenue-generating Workshops to Valve content has been an unfortunate consequence of the sheer number of challenges required in order to scale to a global audience of creators and players. Today we're happy to announce that after a ton of work, the first curated Workshops for non-Valve games have opened: Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare This is really exciting news and means that more high quality content will be available for the game you love playing. Plus, purchases of this great new content directly enables those community members to continue practicing their craft and making more awesome content.We expect more curated Workshops to become available for creators and players in various games over the coming weeks and months.The Workshop has continued to grow and a larger number of contributors are now earning revenue from more pieces of content in a wider variety of games. To help answer questions about where revenue is coming from, we're also launching a set of new tools that enable contributors to view real-time sales data for their items as well as view detailed per-item revenue breakdowns and historical statements.Once you have content accepted into a paid, curated Workshop, you'll see a link to "View Your Revenue" from your " My Workshop Files " page. If you don't have any content accepted yet, now's a great time to get involved!An iconic restaurant with deep Dallas roots is closing. Herrera's Tex-Mex restaurant on Denton Drive will close Saturday after more than 35 years at the same location. (Published Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016)
Iconic Dallas Tex-Mex restaurant Herrera's on Denton Drive will close Saturday after more than 35 years at the location.
The owners of the property on Denton Drive plan to redevelop the area, forcing the closure of the restaurant.
"My heart sank because this is a second home for us," longtime customer Steven Plaugher said. "The enchiladas are over the top."
The restaurant was started by Amelia Herrera back in 1971 on Maple Drive and eventually expanded to the Denton Drive location. Her photo hangs at the entrance, while her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren continue serving the same recipes she created more than 40 years ago.
Iconic Dallas Tex-Mex Restaurant to Close
Herrera's Tex-Mex restaurant on Denton Drive will close Saturday after more than 35 years at the location. (Published Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016)
"I feel proud that they've enjoyed my mother's cooking," said Rebecca Herrera Marquez, who still helps customers daily at the Denton Drive location. "It's been wonderful. I've enjoyed every minute of it."
The restaurant is now operated by great-grandson, Gil Bonifaz.
"We've had people come in with babies and now their babies have babies," he said. "You can see the cycle of life throughout the restaurant."
Other family members have started their own restaurants over the year, including Herrera's Café on Sylvan Avenue, but generations of loyalists to the Denton Drive location waited more than 2 hours for dinner last weekend. The restaurant expects another big crowd on their final weekend.
"We have people coming from California this weekend, Austin and Houston," Bonifaz said. "It's bittersweet, but nothing lasts forever and it's time to close this chapter in our lives."
While the iconic restaurant will close, Herrera's is planning on opening a new version at the Omni Hotel which plans to include old favorites, plus new additions like a fajita bar. Herrera's will join Coal Vines pizza, Biergarten and Little Katana sushi as part of a new development to bring authentic Dallas flavors to the convention center and downtown crowd.
The Omni Herrera's hopes to be open by mid-February.Vulnerability Coordination and Concurrency Modeling
Posted on December 15, 2014 by in Vulnerability Analysis
Hi, it's Allen. In addition to building fuzzers to find vulnerabilities (and thinking about adding some concurrency features to BFF in the process), I've been doing some work in the area of cybersecurity information sharing and the ways it can succeed or fail. In both my vulnerability discovery and cybersecurity information sharing work, I've found that I often learn the most by examining the failures -- in part because the successes are often just cases that could have failed, but didn't.
In this blog post I focus on an area of cybersecurity information sharing that's considerably less well understood than incident reporting, malware analysis, or indicator sharing. I'm talking about coordinated vulnerability disclosure and why it's hard.
One of the first things you notice when you start thinking about vulnerability coordination is that there are more ways for it to go wrong than there are for it to go right. But we'll get to that. It all starts with a vulnerability (vul). Let's leave aside how that vul got there. We don't really care. It's simply a given for our model.
Oh, right, we haven't talked about models yet. Well, in this post I'm using Petri nets to demonstrate the coordination process. Petri nets are a way of modeling systems that operate with concurrency, and concurrency is often mentioned as one of the most challenging aspects of modern system engineering.
If you've never seen a Petri net before, here is a quick introduction:
Petri nets model distributed processes as a network of nodes and arcs.
Nodes can be either places (circles), or transitions (boxes).
Arcs (arrows) connect places to transitions and vice versa. Places can't connect to places, and transitions can't connect to transitions.
Places can hold tokens, which mark the state of a process.
Transitions represent events that change the state of the process. A transition can fire when all the places immediately upstream of it are occupied by tokens (i.e., when it is enabled). When a transition fires, it consumes tokens from its inputs and places tokens in its outputs.
So back to our modeling. We can start with a place that represents the existence of a vul. We'll also add a few transitions to show how this Petri net stuff works. Let's start with a simple model, in which a vul exists and the public finds out about it. The public might also find out about a fix at the same time.
First, notice that there is a token in vul exists. That token represents our vul. From there, two transitions are enabled (ready to fire). If stuff happens, then the public will become aware of the vul and the fix at the same time -- desirable outcome.
However, if other stuff happens, we might wind up in a state where the public is aware of the vul but there is no available fix. This state also serves as a simple definition of a Zero Day Vulnerability. Sometimes that's what happens though, and it's still better than if neither transition fires and we never find out about the vul, right? But what about this "stuff" that happens? That's what we're going to cover next.
Start With a Vendor
In the next scenario, a vendor finds a vul, studies it, fixes it, and publishes both the fix and a document describing it. Here's what our updated Petri net looks like:
Notice that we start with a token in vul exists. That represents our vul, but the vendor doesn't know about it until the V discovers vul transition fires. Watching the simulation run ahead a bit, we see that we get concurrency when it comes to writing up the report and fixing the vul. Since it's usually easier to write about a vul than actually fix it, we show V writes doc firing first. (Although there's nothing that requires it to happen that way.)
And now we find ourselves waiting for the fix. The vendor usually won't publish until both conditions are satisfied: the document is ready to go AND the fix is ready. Let's assume that happens, and the vendor publishes. Now the public becomes aware of both the vul and the fix at the same time. Yay!
For simplicity I've left out the option for the vendor to publish either the doc or the fix independently of each other. I also omitted the possibility that the vendor just stops work on the vul fix entirely. A more robust model would need to accommodate those possibilities.
Add a Researcher
But that's not the end of our story. The vendor isn't the only game in town. There are other ways for vuls to be discovered and come to a vendor's attention. What if a researcher finds it first? Well, we need to update our model.
The researcher's basic flow is: Discover vul, write report, publish report. But there's a problem: if the researcher were to publish independent of the vendor, the public would find out about the vul at the same time as the vendor, which means there's no fix and possibly a long wait for it. This flow is basically the full disclosure scenario. But since we're modeling concurrency here, we can add something to gain some time back for the vendor.
In the diagram above, we've added an R notifies V transition earlier in the process. This transition allows for the vendor to start working through its processes while the researcher is preparing the public report. Also, we add a responsible disclosure (aka coordinated disclosure) transition that waits not only for the researcher to be ready, but for the vendor to be ready as well. When the responsible disclosure transition fires, the public will become aware of the vul and the fix at the same time.
Aside: Usage of the term "responsible disclosure" has been mostly supplanted by "coordinated disclosure" in the past few years. While that's a good thing because it removes the implied value judgement embodied in the word "responsible," I've chosen to use the term "responsible disclosure" here because (1) it is still in common use, and (2) it helps to avoid confusion with the coordination section below. However, rest assured that wherever I've used "responsible disclosure" in this post, you can substitute "coordinated disclosure" without loss of generality.
This diagram also highlights some of the possible failure modes of the disclosure process. Notice that the full disc transition is also highlighted. It can happen as soon as R is ready to publish, regardless of the vendor's readiness. If it fires before the vendor is ready, the public will become aware of the vul but not the fix (this is the Zero Day Vulnerability scenario mentioned earlier).
But there's also the possibility that the vendor publishes the doc and/or the fix independent of the researcher. This is certainly the vendor's prerogative. In practice, this is sometimes necessitated when the vendor becomes aware of active exploitation, or if the researcher abandons the disclosure process at any time prior to publishing. Researchers might abandon a vulnerability in coordination for a variety of reasons including higher priority tasks, frustration with the amount of time and effort required, or threatened litigation.
Mix In a Coordinator
So already we have a process in which there are three ways for the public to receive partial information and two ways for them to get the report and the fix simultaneously: (1) vendor publishes independently, or (2) all parties follow responsible disclosure. Because of the concurrency, there are many scenarios in which the researcher is ready to publish long before the vendor. The longer this situation persists, the greater the pressure for the researcher to either go it alone and publish or abandon the vul.
Sometimes researchers or vendors need additional assistance to bring a vul and its fix to the public's attention. This need might arise because the researcher is too overloaded with other tasks to shepherd the vul through a coordinated disclosure process, or perhaps the vendor is having a difficult time understanding the vul and wants an outside opinion. This situation is where a vulnerability coordinator might come into the story.
In the diagram above, we've inserted a vul coordinator (C) to the process demonstrate the optimal path where everyone publishes at once. Along the way, the researcher notifies the coordinator, the coordinator notifies the vendor, and all three parties continue with their respective processes. All the paths from our previous models still apply, but now we add four new paths:
The coordinator publishes at the same time as the vendor and the researcher (coordinated disclosure). The public learns about the vul and the fix at the same time. The coordinator publishes with the vendor but does not wait for the researcher. The public learns about the vul and the fix at the same time. The coordinator publishes with the researcher but does not wait for vendor. The public learns about the vul, but has to wait for the vendor to publish a fix. This is increasingly rare for established vendors, but still happens often enough that it's not surprising to see a coordinated vulnerability report published without a vendor-supplied fix. Most often it occurs when a vendor has been non-responsive to either the initial report or status requests from either the coordinator or the researcher. Frequently the publication of the vulnerability report is sufficient to motivate the vendor to provide a fix soon thereafter. The coordinator publishes alone. This can happen when both the researcher and vendor appear to have abandoned the process prior to publication, but it's fairly rare.
Complicating Factors
The discussion above highlights just a few of the ways the vulnerability disclosure process can fail to deliver its most desirable outcome of simultaneous vul reports and fixes. In general those failures can arise from:
The researcher publishes before the vendor is ready The coordinator publishes before the vendor is ready The vendor publishes before the fix is ready The vendor publishes the fix without an acccompanying report The vendor or coordinator publishes before the researcher is ready
In the first three of these scenarios, information about the vul becomes public before an official fix is available. This is usually undesirable, but sometimes appropriate if users (individuals, organizations, and service providers) can deploy viable workarounds to reduce their exposure to the vul while they await the fix.
In scenario #4, we have the opposite problem of silent fixes. A vulnerability that is fixed without notice may not be deployed as readily as a fix whose existence is known.
Scenario #5 can discourage a researcher from working with the vendor or coordinator, resulting in reduced cooperation on future vulnerabilities.
In all five scenarios, there are many circumstances in which a scenario may be the most appropriate result of the disclosure process, even if it is sub-optimal to the ideal of simultaneous fix and report. Knowledge of active exploitation is a common reason for one party to release their information early. Discovery of a leak in a multi-party coordinated disclosure process can also prompt the other participants to release early.
Furthermore, because of the potentially complex interactions involved in even a two-party coordinated disclosure optimal outcomes can be difficult to achieve. This complexity can arise since at least one (and often both) of the parties involved are organizations with many individuals involved in dealing with product vulnerabilities, including researchers, developers, product security teams, incident response, public relations, and legal counsel.
Finally, as complex as the three-party diagram is, it still deals with only a single researcher, a single vendor, and a single coordinator. Here on the Vulnerability Analysis team, we often encounter vul reports that require the coordination of multiple vendors, sometimes involving multiple coordinator organizations as well. Such scenarios typically happen with infrastructure software and services like DNS, SSL, or SNMP, or with third-party libraries that find their way into many vendors' products.
But I think that's better left for a different post.
Conclusion
The CERT/CC Vulnerability Analysis team has participated in and observed all of these scenarios play out over the years with various researchers, vendors, coordinators and vulnerable products. It can be a messy process. We find it works best to start with a presumption of benificence on the part of all involved parties until they demonstrate otherwise. It's also important to keep in mind that, as 20,000+ Google results told me while working on this post: concurrency is hard.
Acknowledgements
The diagrams in this post were created using the Workflow Petri Net Designer (WoPeD) from http://www.woped.org/The Fundamentals
Poker players have a really bad habit of getting seduced by what appear to be fancy tactics like over-the-top bluffs, laying down big hands and making huge calls with weak hands. In an effort to emulate the professionals who they see making these big plays, a lot of players will try to pull these plays off in bad situations because they don’t understand what’s making them work. We’re going to get back to the fundamentals this week and take a hard look at the true essence of poker.
Two Situations
The majority of poker boils down to really, truly understanding two situations. The first situation to understand is when you’re facing a bet with a hand you could reasonably either fold or call. The second situation to understand is when you have the option to value bet or bluff and have to set your bluffing frequency.
If you study these scenarios a lot in general, and if you study hands where these situations come up, then you can gain a fairly strong understanding of poker as a whole in a fairly short amount of time.
Our goal here is to put you in a position where you can accomplish this by giving you the information that you need to start off in the right direction.
Related Reading: Making Our Strategies More Robust and Avoiding Auto-Pilot
Facing a Bet
When you’re facing a bet, and you have the option to either call or fold, you have to make a very specific type of evaluation of the situation. This evaluation comes down to a comparison between two figures:
Your chances of winning if you call. The relationship between the size of your call and the existing pot.
In short, it’s a simple estimation of risk and reward, and it requires that you care about your opponent’s range. This type of situation is the easiest to study of the two, and it’s exceptionally important that you understand this scenario on a very high level if you plan on making any money in poker.
How to Study This
Sort through your database for every single hand where you faced a bet or raise and a call would end the action. This could mean that you were facing the bet or raise on the river or that the bet or raise you’re facing would put you or your opponent all-in.
What you want to do is go through each hand and put your opponent on a range at each point that he or she made a decision in the hand. Once you get to the final calling decision, check your equity against that range with the hand you have and see how that matches up to the risk and reward aspect of the size of the call and the current size of the pot. To round out the exercise, figure out what the worst hands are that you could call with in those scenarios.
If you make a lot of profitable calls along these lines, then it’s a very strong adjustment that can bring you a lot of money over the long run.
Read Next: The Anatomy of an Adjustment
Setting a Bluffing Frequency
Bluffing frequencies are a little more difficult to learn about because there are more moving parts. It’s not enough to know when a bluff is going to be profitable. Instead, we want to figure out just how often we should be bluffing in the first place so that we can learn to form our ranges in a way that will approximate that percentage.
It’s very difficult to learn to do this because it takes time, study, practice and effort. However, it will also make you an obscene amount of money.
Four pieces of information are needed to make an evaluation of your bluffing frequency:
The number of hand combinations that you’re value betting. The number of hand combinations that you’re bluffing.* The size of your bet relative to the size of the pot. How frequently your opponent will be calling.
* Note : #2 and #3 here are things that are under your control. For the most part, #1 and #4 are not. We’re going to focus primarily on #2 here with the assumption that we’ll keep a reasonable bet size while trying to determine the right number of hand combinations to bluff with and which combinations those are.
Fold Percentages
The perfectly-balanced call percentage for our opponent is typically close to the size of the call divided by what size the pot will be after the call. For example, if we bet $6 into a pot of $8, our opponent will need to call $6, and the pot will be $20 after the call. This means his perfectly-balanced call percentage will be about 30 percent.
Knowing this percentage is important because it tells us how to exploit our opponent.
So here’s how this works. If he’s folding a lot more than 30 percent, then we have a lot of room to exploit him by increasing the number of bluffs in our range. Along similar lines, if he’s folding a lot less than 30 percent, then we have room to exploit him by decreasing the number of bluffs in our range. The only time we can’t exploit him so easily is when his fold percentage is right around 30 percent in which case we should just play with some reasonable proportion of bluffs and value bets.
More on This Idea: An Easy Guide to Exploiting Your Opponents
Also Read: How to Make Actual Adjustments While Playing
How to Study Bluffing Frequencies
When you study hands that have to do with bluffing frequencies, you have to look at both your own range and the range of your opponent. You need to know your own range so that you can figure out just how often you’re value betting AND how often you’re bluffing so that you can tell what percentage of your bets are bluffs. Bluffing 20 combinations means one thing when you’re value betting 10 combinations and something entirely different when you’re value betting 30 of them.Photos by the author
The funeral was held last Friday on the sidewalk in front of the LA Weekly offices in Culver City. Black-clad mourners gathered around a shiny white casket to read eulogies through a megaphone, the smell of smoke from nearby fires hanging in the air. The crowd of about two dozen, many of them former freelancers or staffers for the LA Weekly—myself included—had gathered to pay our respects not to a person, but to a newspaper we once loved.
“LA Weekly is a place that gave people a chance,” Jeff Weiss, a former music columnist who contributed to the paper for a decade, told the crowd. “It gave artists a chance that might not have been heard. It gave a voice to the voiceless, not a voice to power.”
Like Weiss, I also got my start at the LA Weekly, where I was hired as an editorial assistant in January 2013. Reporting was not in my job description, but I eventually bugged my editors enough that they gave me a chance to write. Maybe it was because I wanted to do the kinds of assignments nobody else would: Waking up at 5 AM to go to a sober rave, biking 17 miles to the Emmys, getting drunk and then sticking an IV in my arm the next morning to cure a hangover. I was happy to be a guinea pig in the name of journalism if it meant landing a byline. By the end of 2014, I had my first cover story. For me and countless others, writing for the LA Weekly wasn’t just a dream job or a professional launching pad, but a civic duty that gave us unparalleled access to just about anything and anyone we could think to write about.
Weiss was one of the organizers of the mock funeral, which was held in response to the sale of the LA Weekly to a mysterious shell company called Semanal Media, which two weeks ago laid off nine of the paper’s 13 editorial employees. (I was no longer with the company, but the layoffs did include my former editors.) The new company did not fully disclose its investors’ identities or lay out a plan for the future of the newspaper, which led to speculation that it was either highly incompetent, part of a larger plot to use the historically left-leaning paper as a conservative mouthpiece—several of the new owners have donated money to the Republican Party—or some combination of both.
“The LA Weekly as we know it is dead,” Katie Bain, a former senior music writer who I’d met years ago while working at the paper, told me. “I think it died last Wednesday with the layoffs. Not only because nine people lost their jobs, but because 40 years of direction and ideas and reputation were suddenly shifted, and that, to me, means the paper is over as we knew it.”
To Bain and Weiss, LA Weekly’s death isn’t just speculative or metaphorical. Rather, they and the other writers who organized the funeral want to make certain of it. It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to save the publication that helped launch their careers, they believe they’ve first got to kill it. They’re aiming to do that through an aggressive boycott campaign that seeks to tank the paper before it has a chance to survive under its new ownership. The vengeance plot has them targeting individual advertisers and pressuring them to withdraw their business from the newspaper. So far, the tactic seems to be working: Last week, the paper canceled its annual Sips & Sweets event, just days after vendors including Amoeba Music and Angel City Brewery and restaurants such as Otium, the Pikey, and the Roger Room pulled out.
“The goal is to make it so toxic for them here that they have no choice but to sell it back. We want to basically take their legs out from under them,” said Bain. “Obviously we’re dealing with businessmen. The swiftest way to hit them is with money, and that's the language they understand.”
Of course, the organizers of the boycott can’t take all of the credit for alienating readers, advertisers, and freelancers—the new owners of LA Weekly have done plenty of that on their own. Statements they made to the LA Times, in which they disparaged LA’s cultural scene and a tweet in which they suggested they planned to use unpaid contributors, drew outrage on social media. It wasn't just that they botched interviews with other media outlets, but apparently also didn’t know how to manage their own website and Facebook page, both of which have been hijacked by former staffers: The funeral was livestreamed on LA Weekly’s Facebook page and a blog post pointing fingers at the new owners is still featured on the site today. (Semanal Media’s operations manager Brian Calle did not respond to my request for comment.)
“It’s really hard to tell how evil they are,” former food editor Katherine Spiers, who was laid off last month and supports the boycott, told me at the funeral. “How evil can you be when you’re fumbling at every turn?”
Watch:
Adding to the massive clusterfuck, Hillel Aron, the only staff writer who was spared from the layoffs, was promoted to interim editor-in-chief on Friday—and then abruptly suspended from his post on Tuesday, when Spin dug up and published some of his offensive tweets. When I talked to him on the phone on Sunday morning, before he was suspended, he was the first to admit that his new bosses badly botched the transition, creating a PR nightmare in which he’s become a primary target. “I think they've made numerous mistakes and were very naïve in doing what they did and thinking that we could actually function with that few employees,” he said. To him, like many outsiders looking in, the mass layoffs “didn't make any sense. There’s no excuse for it.” (The backlash from the sale of the paper has been so messy—complete with a frantic, typo-laden email that was widely mocked after being leaked to a reporter—that I can’t help but imagine it’s the kind of story Aron would go after, were he not personally living it.)
“Honestly, I’m impressed at how effective the boycott has been. I think they’ve done a really great job,” said Aron. He added that he believes the outrage of former writers and laid-off staffers would be better spent on a more outwardly political cause. “I wonder if they could maybe put this energy into getting rid of [Orange County Republican representative] Darrell Issa or organizing voters.”
But to many of the organizers and supporters of the boycott, fighting to save—by way of killing—an alternative weekly is inherently political, particularly at a time when the media is under attack. While President Trump leads a national crusade against so-called fake news, conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers—who last month invested in Meredith Corp., which owns TIME—have been quietly taking stake in media properties and consolidating them. Last month, Gothamist owner Joe Ricketts—a conservative Trump donor—abruptly shuttered the entire chain of local blogs in a move that was largely viewed as retaliation for unionizing. (I’d been working for LAist at the time.)
“It’s this concerning aspect of what we’re seeing with a few other media companies right now is that we don't actually know where the money’s coming from. There’s not much transparency,” April Wolfe, the former film critic for the LA Weekly who was laid off last month, told me on the phone. “The boycott campaign for me specifically, and this might be different for Jeff [Weiss], is to get people to pay attention to their local media and what is happening to it and to be their own media watchdogs,” Wolfe said. “Because journalists have been sounding the alarms for a very long time, and it’s hard to get people to care about things.” Wolfe hopes the #BoycottLAWeekly hashtag, which has already been retweeted by the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Ava Duvernay, whom Wolfe profiled in an LA Weekly cover story last year, will help mobilize people for an admittedly unsexy cause.
But not every former LA Weekly contributor is down with the boycott, and particularly not those who have watched layoffs, cutbacks, and ownership changes at the newspaper for decades. Jonny Whiteside, a former calendar editor who was laid off in 2009 and has been contributing to the paper’s music and calendar sections for longer than I’ve been alive, says the paper is no worse now than it was under previous owners. He sees the boycott as a grossly naïve and hypocritical form of overreaction.
“In journalism, you know how it works: They clean house—it’s routine,” he told me on the phone, identifying himself as “a freaking anarchist” without a political bent. “You can’t rail against the ownership. It’s just stupid because, yeah, they’re all bastards. This is America. Your corporate parent is a bastard,” he said. “You can either exist and, you know, try to further your career or spin your wheels and make a jerk of yourself.” Whiteside, like several other veteran LA Weekly Writers including Lina Lecaro, has no plans to stop writing for the paper under its new ownership—which is a key demand of the boycott.
I get why Whiteside is jaded. I survived a round of LA Weekly layoffs during what couldn't have been more than my second week on the job. There’s something about watching people who are twice your age, have double the experience, and kids at home to feed get canned that feels like a punch to the gut. The blow came even harder when, not even a year after that, the writer whose work I most admired was let go. The position, one I had wondered if I might someday get to fill, was eliminated.
But what happened at LA Weekly two weeks ago—wiping out nearly every editorial staffer with no transition team in place—feels entirely different and wholly unprecedented. Based on what we know (and still don’t) about the new owners, including that head honcho Calle formerly led a right-wing think tank and once appeared in what may have been a Russian propaganda film, I think we have every right to question their motives—not just as former contributors or laid-off staffers, but as people who care about what happens to our city, who reports on it, and why.
While the boycott appears to be picking up steam on social media, it remains to be seen what its organizers will do if they actually succeed at convincing the new owners to sell the paper back to them. At that point, will their boycott efforts have sabotaged their own master plan to revive the paper under new ownership? “I actually had this |
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